Betty Harper Fussell is een Amerikaanse auteur wier uitgebreide werk essays, biografieën, kookboeken, voedselgeschiedenis en memoires omvat. Haar geschriften, vaak doordrenkt van persoonlijke ervaringen en een diepe fascinatie voor de cultuur van eten en reizen, staan bekend om hun scherpe observatie en elegante proza. Fussell biedt lezers een uniek perspectief op onderwerpen variërend van de kunsten tot de essentie van Amerikaans rundvlees, en onderzoekt hoe onze diëten onze identiteit en samenleving vormgeven. Haar vermogen om persoonlijke verhalen te verweven met bredere culturele thema's maakt haar boeken tot boeiende en tot nadenken stemmende lectuur.
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.