On her first day in the Gourmet kitchens, Reichl is presented with a cake currently in recipe testing and asked for her thoughts. In fiction, the ability plays as a bizarre bit of wish fulfillment, but it seems to be a fantasy rooted in a real moment from Reichl’s life. One of the harder-to-swallow aspects of Reichl’s 2014 novel Delicious! is that the heroine is a food prodigy, able to identify all the flavor notes and secret spices of a dish just by tasting it. I reached for another bowl, and we took them into the living room, sat down on the sofa, and slurped noodles together. As I ladled noodles into Nick’s bowl, I inhaled the scent, thinking how much better this was than anything the restaurant had served us. I boiled the pasta and tossed it into the wok, swirling it with a flourish. He hoisted himself onto the counter and, as the scent of ginger, scallions, and black beans rose around us, regaled me with tales of his day. Nick nodded, happily following me into the kitchen, bare feet slapping against the floor. This is food as home and all its comforts, food as the thing that knits a family together: Her son Nick is delighted by the idea, especially when Reichl cements the new world order by cooking some spicy noodles. Instead, she could have the occasional dinner at home with her family. One of the big selling points for Reichl when she was offered the role of Gourmet’s editor-in-chief in 1999 was that she would no longer have to go out for every meal, which she did as the New York Times’s restaurant critic. Here are eight of the best food descriptions in Save Me the Plums - and the role that food plays in each passage. Instead, food in a Ruth Reichl book is a cultural tool, alternately a signifier of power or luxury or social cachet. It’s never there just to sound delicious. And part of what makes them so distinctive is that Reichl always gives you a context for the food she’s writing about. Her food descriptions are intensely evocative you can feel the butter in your mouth and smell the garlic. Reichl is one of the best food writers of our era. But the food is the real reason to be there. The glimpses behind the scenes of the media world might be compelling. In a Ruth Reichl book, the stories might fun. But really, Save Me the Plums (titled after the William Carlos Williams poem) is like all of Reichl’s books, including her 2005 memoir Garlic and Sapphires, about her time as the New York Times restaurant critic, and her 2014 novel Delicious! It’s about food. Ruth Reichl’s new memoir, Save Me the Plums, is ostensibly about Reichl’s 10-year tenure as the editor-in-chief of Gourmet, the beloved Condé Nast food magazine that shuttered in 2009.

Gourmet today by ruth reichl