Betty Fussell - Eat Live Love Die

ebook ISBN 9781619028616

Copyright 2016 by Betty Fussell

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fussell, Betty Harper, author.

Title: Eat, live, love, die: selected essays / Betty Fussell.

Description: Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2016

Identifiers: LCCN 2016020225

Subjects: LCSH: Gastronomy. | Food. | Food writing.

Classification: LCC TX633 .F87 2016 | DDC 641.01/3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020225

Cover design by Kelly Winton

Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Eve in the Garden,

who dared take The First Bite

CONTENTS

Table of Contents

by Alice Waters

THE THING IVE always loved and appreciated about Betty Fussells writing is her curiosity about where things come from. Shes like an anthropologist who is interested in the roots and sources of things, and their evolution. Her perspective is down-to-earth and straightforward, and she knows intuitively that, at the foundation of all inquiry, there are basic human qualities that need to be acknowledged and celebrated. No matter what shes focusing on, her palpable desire to make sense of the world and explain it to us makes her a pleasure to read.

Part of this pleasure, Im sure, is due to her candid and unfussy style. Her direct language illuminates, without pretension. Reading one of her essays, on any subject, is like listening to a well-spoken and wise old friend at a dinner table, a raconteur who makes you feel comfortable and then draws you in and enlightens you about things you had not even realized you had an interest in. Like all good teachers, Betty seduces intriguingly, then explains clearly, and, finally, inspires.

I remember the first time she visited Chez Panisse many years ago. Betty was one of the first journalists who came to write about us when things were starting to really take off. I knew she was a friend of some of my great mentors, friends and heroesJames Beard, Julia Child, Elizabeth David, Marion Cunningham, and Edna Lewis, to name a fewso I had an idea of her standards, and I was more than a little intimidated. But Betty got it right away. She saw pretty clearly what we were doing at the restaurant; and she understood that the story wasnt just about the food on the plate, but the bigger picture of how we were looking for the roots of taste and trying to figure out how to honor those roots while also making them relevant to the times we were living in.

Only a certain kind of writer has the sensitivity and ability to describe what she sees in such an appealing, grounded, and serious way. As a body of work, these essays are an astonishment, ranging from her first brisk food and travel pieces to measured and intimate reflections on time and loss. The essays are provocative, forthright, and far-seeing. Here is the record of a writer who has never lost her nose for history and her ear for honesty, and one who has never, ever stopped looking for connections.

WHAT HAPPENED? Never had a good sense of time, but jesus-christ! Yesterday Im wiping applesauce off my babys cheeks and today Im wondering when shell retire. For years I didnt wear a watch because I wanted to stop time. Now time stops me dead. Tic-Toc.

Always lived from moment to moment, but always wanted more. Like keys on a piano. Black/White. But what mode? Major/Minor? What beat? 3/44/4? What scale? 7-tone/12 tone? Find the piano, then the keys.

But who sets the metronome? Composer, performer, director? Who sets the limits of the composition, performance, event? The limits of day/night, summer/winter, bright star/black hole, life/death? Tic-Toc.

The terror of In/Out. And so we eat. Not just to survive, but to chitter-chatter, twitter-tweet. About food, sex, danger, safety, flight, the wind and the rain. Like geese, chimps, dolphins. We honk, hoot, whistle. We play dead, wrestle, chase. We bump our uglies together, whether feathered, furred, or finned. We feed our kids and teach them to fly, swing, swim. And then what? And what for?

Are we the only critters who ask? The only ones who scratch stones or mark caves or shape clay to tell someone, anyone, that Kilroy was here? For a moment... beyond this moment? Make mud pies, fly a kite? Are we the only ones to give Time the finger?

In my forties I wanted for my epitaph She did it the hard way. Nearing my nineties, Id be happy with She was.

Good lord, what a time it took to put my Tic-Toc terror into words. Explanation was never my strength. I grew up on movies, not books. Images, song and dance.

Sunday-school Jesus in pastels. Long beard, skinny body, hands hammered into wood. For what? For us sinners. How come? Satan seduced, Eve and Adam fell. Praise be to God. Jesus saves. Here We Gather at the River. Tell Me the Stories of Jesus. I Come to the Garden Alone.

But never ever dance. Satans work. Shirley Temple a Devil? Movies dont count. Movies are not real. Gods Word is real. Movies are not Words. Movies are fairy tales for children.

As a child my stories were all from the Bible, the movies, church pageants, and high school plays. How I loved plays. They snatched me from my cradle like Moses in the bulrushes and made me a changeling child.

Id hit 40 by the time I began to write real words. By then Id married a professional writer/teacher, typed and edited his manuscripts, raised two children, entertained like crazy, finished a doctorate in English Lit, taught Shakespeare, performed in community theaters, traveled as family all over Europe, lived in Princeton, London, and Provence.

And along the way I found Julia Child and the pleasures of making at home in Princeton what we were eating in Cimiez. Like Julia, I wanted to tell other people about it. Not through how-to technique but how food checks time. The way travel does. The way play-acting does.

Through my writer husband, I learned how tricky it is to put life into words. He was born with a Remington typewriter in his mouth. I was born with a 35 millimeter reel unspooling in my head. To him, I was wasting my (his) time by my silly attempts to write since I had no talent for it.

But I was too excited to shut up. Traveling, Id put boots on the ground of the Swiss alps of Shirley Temples Heidi. Id walked through the Tower of London head high as Hepburns Mary Queen of Scots. Id sped through the birch forests of Russia faster than Dietrichs Catherine the Great.

And everywhere we went, we ate. Foods Id never seen, smelled, or chewed before. Hot runny cheese dripping from toast on a fork, pudding of sheeps innards and oatmeal boiled in the skin of a sheeps stomach, thick blood-red soup of beets and cabbage with a white blob of sour cream.

I was thrilled that food was the only native language I needed anywhere. Anyone would talk to me by sign and face language if I pointed to a grilled fish in some Italian bistro. Or raised a glass of beer in Munich or of ouzo in Athens.