Save Me the Plums

I enjoy reading food memoirs; don’t you? And Ruth Reichl is a good writer, so I had to read her new book Save Me the Plums, about her time as editor of Gourmet magazine.

Reichl was the editor who sent David Foster Wallace off to the Maine Lobster Festival, where he wrote “Consider the Lobster” (evidently the first title proposed was “To Die For” and the first drafts referenced Mengele and PETA). I’m familiar with that essay, since it got famous after appearing in Gourmet, but I didn’t know that Reichl had persuaded “Pat Conroy, Calvin Trillin, Diane Johnson, Michael Lewis, Richard Ford, Julian Barnes, Jane Smiley, and…Ann Patchett” to write essays for the magazine and that after 2004, when the DFW piece appeared, she had published essays like “Some Pig,” David Rakoff’s “extremely controversial piece on the tortured relationship between Jews and bacon” and “The Taste of Home,” Junot Diaz’s essay about “how his love for Asian food is inextricably linked with his yearning for his absent father.”

Reichl credits old issues of Gourmet for getting her interested in cooking, and The Gourmet Cookbook as the way she taught herself how to do it. “Food became my own private way of looking at the world,” she says. Although I like to eat, thinking about this book and the dinner reservations I made for my recent trip to New York made me realize (this won’t be a surprise to you, readers) that my way of looking at the world is through stories, and so I’d rather eat in a place that I’ve read about than a place that has the best food.

When Ruth Reichl is telling the story, though, food is the focus, and she includes recipes, like one for spicy noodles and another for cheddar scallion biscuits. I never realized how much testing went on behind the scenes before a magazine published a recipe for home cooks to try.

The other wonderful part of this memoir is the stories. Reichl relates that when Ann Patchett was in the Amazon (a trip funded by Gourmet, although she seems to have been mainly doing research for what became her novel State of Wonder), she “found a turtle at some jungle marketplace and couldn’t bear to have it become somebody’s dinner. She wanted to know if she could expense it.” Reichl says that her new editor William Sertl replied that he “informed her of Gourmet’s policy…the one that permits writers to expense any animal that rhymes with the name of their editor.”

And she’s a woman of my era, which means I have stories like hers: “working women everywhere accepted casual misogyny. We were so accustomed to taking what men dished out that we thought it was up to us to find ways to deflect the advances of bosses and co-workers without hurting their feelings.” My attitude towards the internet is different from hers, however: “If you need inspiration when you’re planning a party, chances are you’ll leaf through cookbooks and magazines, dreaming up dinner. But if you come home from the farmers market with a bushel of ripe peaches or a fine cheese pumpkin, you’ll probably head to the Internet.” Actually, I head for the internet in either situation.

But I did learn things from reading this book. Did you know that mozzarella shouldn’t be refrigerated? “Refrigerate mozzarella and you kill it. When it gets cold the milk solids tighten, going from liquid to solid, and the cheese never recovers. It changes the taste and the texture.”

And I learned a little about how the other half lives. The part where Ruth writes about “slumming it” in Paris is hilarious. She discovers food that she would never have experienced otherwise: “the more stars in your itinerary, the less likely you are to find the real life of another country. I’d forgotten how money becomes a barrier insulating you from ordinary life.” She includes details like that the editor she’s with lies about it being their anniversary for no particular reason, like lying is just part of the fun, part of her big discovery that “luxury is best appreciated in small portions.”

Aside from the reminders that rich New Yorkers are really not like you and me, however, it’s a delightful book. Reichl is such a good writer that she sweeps you along with her wherever she goes, for a little while.

And now I wonder: do you own cookbooks? How many? And do you ever read food magazines (are there any left)?

I counted up our cookbooks and found that we have nineteen of them in the kitchen. A sample: The Joy of Cooking (inscribed by my mother with “happy 27th birthday”), Be Present at Our Table, Lord (recipes from members of the First Methodist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas), The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, Boston Tea Parties (Recipes from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—this one has the best tea sandwich recipes), Simply Scones, The Surreal Gourmet (with surrealist illustrations), The Narnia Cookbook (from which we make The Beavers’ dinner), and Winnie-the-Pooh’s Teatime Cookbook.