Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the list of great recipe-plus books-memoir/novel-plus-recipes recipes-plus-personal essays-is long and rich. Devour! A lush, needful expression that has words built right into one definition: Devour, verb. But while it’s true that we use verbs for eating to describe our engagement with other artforms and entertainments-we mindlessly consume social media and binge-watch television (an uncomfortable expression that calls to mind disordered eating and remorse)-we devour books. What’s at once more mundane, more universal, more sensual and intimate than the food we eat? It’s obviously a concept that’s captivated other artists, too: painters from Wayne Thiebault to Pieter Bruegel have centered paintings on food, and there are glorious film scenes that depict cooking and eating so vividly one can almost taste the spaghetti sauce- Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott’s piquant Big Night Peter Greenaway’s somewhat more scatalogical The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.
But scattered throughout-in fitting and charming fashion-are simple recipes that correspond with major moments in Reichl’s life.įood is a writer’s friend, an ample canvas onto which one might project philosophy and humor in equal measure. It’s a succulent, insider gambol through cloak-and-dagger meetings with various corporate members of Gourmet’s (and V.F.’s) parent company, Condé Nast, leading up to her appointment wild years of alternately wooing and battling art directors and managing editors lavish trips to Paris and, finally, the iconic magazine’s sad and harried final days. So begins Reichl’s eighth book, which details the decade she spent as Gourmet’s final editor in chief. “I had always been an avid reader, but this was different: This was not a made-up story it was about real life.” The fine spicy fragrance of lobster was so real to me that I reached for one, imagined tossing it from hand to hand until the shell was cool enough to crack,” she writes in her new memoir, Save Me The Plums, out this month from Random House. “I could hear the hiss of a giant kettle and feel the bonfire burning as the flames leapt into the night.
It was “Night of the Lobster,” an article set in Maine, that did it. When Ruth Reichl was eight years old, she curled up on the floor of a used bookstore with a pile of vintage Gourmet magazines and fell in love.
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