Betty Harper Fussell is an American author whose expansive body of work encompasses essays, biographies, cookbooks, food history, and memoirs. Her writings, often infused with personal experience and a deep fascination with food and travel culture, are known for their keen observation and elegant prose. Fussell offers readers a unique perspective on subjects ranging from the arts to the essence of American beef, exploring how our diets shape our identity and society. Her ability to weave together personal narrative with broader cultural themes makes her books engaging and thought-provoking reads.
Ever since American soldiers returned home after World War II with a passion for pate and escargots instead of pork and beans, our preferences have moved from cooked to raw, from canned to fresh, from bland to savory, from water to wine. This title includes more than two hundred recipes with chapters on appetizers, soups, salads, sauces, and more.
Exploring the complex relationship between meat and American identity, the book delves into the historical tensions between British and Spanish influences, as well as the clash between wilderness and progress. It highlights the transformation of cattle ranching from buffalo to industrial practices, revealing how rugged individualism intersects with corporate technology. Through interviews with various stakeholders in the meat industry, the narrative unveils the mythology surrounding cowboys, technocrats, and the cultural significance of meat consumption in the United States.
Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She's not just the award–winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award who was inducted into their "Who's Who of American Food and Beverage" in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years' worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue. This is a woman who at eighty–two years old (and despite being half–blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine.) She got her deer. This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty–one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn't enough." Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.