Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

My mother introduced me to Gourmet magazine when I was a young teen. She was an excellent cook and clipped many recipes over the years, which I have kept in a binder as a testament to her great taste. I remember reading those issues of Gourmet to learn more about the places behind the recipes. Ms. Reichl captured so much of what Gourmet meant to this young girl back in the late 60s and early 70s. Her subsequent work years later at the helm of this wonderful periodical helped push it to a better place. (And those Gourmet cookbooks are part of my extensive collection.) Sadly, I no longer have the issues my mother collected, but I do have the recipes she'd cut out from its pages. I thoroughly enjoyed this read.

There is a refreshing honesty about Reichl's writing. Initially, she didn't quite have the machinations to succeed, and you felt her angst in the writing. After all, she was a hippie from Berkeley thrown into the intense New York publishing world, a world that pulled hard at the soul of the west coast transplant. While Reichl took advantage of the perks offered with her new position, she didn't completely embrace that lifestyle or what it provided. Her husband and son were pivotal in keeping her as grounded as she could be and still maintain the magazine as she had been directed. Reichl was able to delineate that discomfited push/pull throughout the book, as she is, foremost, a writer. Reichl is a superb storyteller and knows how to spin a yarn. She plays with the senses, delivering mouth-watering terms to ordinary foods and lovely descriptions to places and people. The 9-11 piece brought me to tears. In the end, when the magazine closed, she seemed relieved to have slipped free from the invisible bonds that constrained her. She could finally take a deep breath. The middle could have used additional editing, but all in all, a great read.

Ruth Reichl knows about good food, and she knows good food writing. After years as the food critic for The New York Times, and then for years before at the Los Angeles Times, she decided to accept the job as Editor-in-Chief at Gourmet magazine. Reichl had a long relationship with Gourmet, from when she first found the magazine in a dusty used bookstore on an outing with her book designer father, through the years it lost its unique voice, through to her reign as editor. She was able to bring back the spark that Gourmet had, to let her creative team run wild with imagination and panache. She inspired the best young writers to its pages. She brought life to its covers. She helped unite the chefs of New York in celebrations and in charity work. Save Me the Plums is her memoir of her decade at Gourmet, from her early days where she felt she was out of her depth, through the years where the magazine recaptured its spirit and its voice, to the final days, where nothing was able to save the magazine from the depths of the nation’s financial devastation. Reichl’s stories are beautifully told, filled with textures and flavors, nuance and surprise, and just like the best gourmet meal, a dash of magic. I love reading her stories. She has a way of explaining how things change as they stay the same and how you can move forward by staying in place. And that story of Paris and the black dress? Absolutely breathtaking! If you’ve read Ruth Reichl before, then you know how special her writing is. You should buy this and devour it immediately. If you’ve not read her before, then my advice is the same. Start with this one, or a different memoir, or her novel Delicious!, or one of her cookbooks (I adore her 2015 cookbook My Kitchen Year on audio—yes, I do know how that sounds, and believe me, you do want to listen to a cookbook on audio!). But give yourself the gift of Reichl’s writing. After you read one, be prepared. You’ll be left hungry for more. Galleys for Save Me the Plums were provided by Random House through NetGalley, with many thanks.

I loved this book, but I’m a fan of Ruth Reichl. She writes in a chatty, casual style, as though she were sitting with a glass of wine, telling you a story. Here she chronicles her anxiety-lade entry into the corporate world of Conde Nast, her eventual triumphs with Gourmet magazine, the frustrations of the corporate world, the people she met and loved, the food she ate, and the eventual demise of the magazine. She’s a food writer with flair—flavors reverberate, carousel around her mouth. Bread makes her think of a sunny day in a forest. She writes of a cloud of Chantilly, a wedge of Brie. As in other books, her mother, a troubled woman who suffered from grandiose desires and frequent depression. As Reichl enters the Four Seasons restaurant, she remembers how her mother loved going there for a martini and wished they could afford to go for dinner. It made me realize I under-appreciated the one time in my life that I dined in that hallowed spot. Reichl’s father is also part of the story—a quiet, gentle man, a book designer with a marvelous understanding of typography and the importance of the interior of a book (or magazine) but also a clear recognition that cover art was not his forté. Her husband and son are actors in the story too, and she displays a bit of Jewish guilt over her mothering of what sounds like a terrific kid. I’m fairly open about food but Reichl eats things I never would and delicacies I’ll never be offered—squid guts and cod sperm, tongue tacos, a tiny onion tart decorated with a single nasturtium, caviar paired with foie gras, lacquered duck skin. Yet the few recipes she includes—jeweled chocolate cake, spicy noodles, a German pancake—are all accessible to the home cook with some skill. That was something she insisted on at the magazines—that the recipes be something people could and would cook. Read this, and then read My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life, an account of the year after she so abruptly got kicked out of the corporate world. And throw in her novel—Delicious. You’ll like it all.

I adore Ruth Reichl’s writing and this was a welcome addition to her memoirs. The recipes are an added bonus. Her insight into Condé Nast is fascinating and I found her chapter on 9/11 particularly moving. More please.

I want to be a more creative, descriptive writer. This book has helped me incorporate experiences, food, and people into my own memoir writing.

Una delicia de libro. Literalmente me lo comí.

Amo todos os livros de Ruth e esse não decepcionou. Ela sabe como ninguém descrever pratos e pessoas. Você se sente à mesa ao lado dela.

Quite enjoyed this book.