Save Me the Plums Read online

  Save Me the Plums is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed.

  Copyright © 2019 by Ruth Reichl

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to reprint the poem “This Is Just to Say” from THE COLLECTED POEMS: VOLUME I, 1909–1939 by William Carlos Williams, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

  Photograph on this page by Ernst Reichl.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Reichl, Ruth, author.

  Title: Save me the plums : my Gourmet memoir / Ruth Reichl.

  Description: New York : Random House, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018025584| ISBN 9781400069996 | ISBN 9780679605232 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Reichl, Ruth. | Food writers—United States—Biography. | Gourmet.

  Classification: LCC TX649.R45 A3 2019 | DDC 641.5092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018025584

  Ebook ISBN 9780679605232

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich

  Cover image: mashuk/Getty Images (watercolor plum)

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1: Magic Door

  Chapter 2: Tea Party

  Chapter 3: Garlic

  Chapter 4: Washington Square

  Chapter 5: Attire Allowance

  Chapter 6: Plan Check

  Chapter 7: Adjacencies

  Chapter 8: The Yaffy

  Chapter 9: Bitter Salad

  Chapter 10: Human Resources

  Chapter 11: The Downside

  Chapter 12: The Florio Potato

  Chapter 13: Big Fish

  Chapter 14: Birthday

  Chapter 15: Severine

  Chapter 16: Why We Cook

  Chapter 17: Food People

  Chapter 18: Enormous Changes

  Chapter 19: Just Say It

  Chapter 20: Hello, Cupcake

  Chapter 21: Setting the Record Straight

  Chapter 22: DFW

  Chapter 23: Mene, Mene

  Chapter 24: Pull Up a Chair

  Chapter 25: Dot Com

  Chapter 26: Editor of the Year

  Chapter 27: Being Brand Ruth

  Chapter 28: Midnight in Paris

  Chapter 29: This One’s on Me

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Ruth Reichl

  About the Author

  I have eaten

  the plums

  that were in

  the icebox

  and which

  you were probably

  saving

  for breakfast

  Forgive me

  they were delicious

  so sweet

  and so cold

  —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, “This Is Just to Say”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  For almost seventy years Gourmet magazine chronicled American food, and it has an important place in our shared history. I can’t know what the magazine meant to you, but if you’re reading this, I assume Gourmet touched your life. This is the story of how it shaped mine.

  I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD when I first found the magazine, sitting on the dusty wooden floor of a used-book store. My father was a book designer who enjoyed the company of ancient volumes, and he often took me on book-hunting expeditions around New York, leaving me with a pile of vintage magazines while he went off to prowl among the dark and crowded shelves. That day I picked up a tattered old issue of Gourmet, enchanted by the cover drawing of a majestic swordfish leaping joyfully from the water. This looked nothing like the ladies’ magazines my mother favored, with their recipes for turkey divan made with cans of mushroom soup, or pot roast topped with ketchup, and I opened it to find the pages filled with tales of food in faraway places. A story called “Night of Lobster” caught my eye, and as I began to read, the walls faded, the shop around me vanishing until I was sprawled on the sands of a small island off the coast of Maine. The tide was coming in, water tickling my feet as it crept across the beach. It was deep night, the sky like velvet, spangled with stars.

  Much later I understood how lucky I was to have stumbled on that story. The author, Robert P. Tristram Coffin, was the poet laureate of Maine and a Pulitzer Prize winner with such an extraordinary gift for words that I could hear the hiss of a giant kettle and feel the bonfire burning as the flames leapt into the night. 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. The meat was tender, briny, rich. Somewhere off in the distance a fish splashed, then swam silently away.

  I closed the magazine, and the real world came into focus. I was a little girl leafing through the pages of a magazine printed long before I was born. But I kept turning the pages, enchanted by the writing, devouring tales of long-lost banquets in Tibet, life in Paris, and golden fruit growing on strange tropical trees. I had always been an avid reader, but this was different: This was not a made-up story; it was about real life.

  I loved the ads for exotic ingredients you could send away for: oysters by the bushel, freshly picked watercress, alligator pears (avocados), and “frogs’ legs from the frogland of America.” Once I actually persuaded my parents to order a clambake in a pot from Saltwater Farm in Damariscotta, Maine. Eight live lobsters and a half peck of clams came swathed in seaweed and packed in ice. It cost $14.95, and all you had to do was poke holes in the top of the container and set it on the stove.

  I couldn’t get enough of those old issues, and now when Dad went off exploring bookstores I had a quest of my own. The day I discovered a battered copy of The Gourmet Cookbook among the ancient issues, I begged Dad to buy it for me. “It’s only fifty cents,” I pleaded.

  It came in handy the morning I opened the refrigerator in our small kitchen and found myself staring at a suckling pig. I jumped back, startled, and then did what any sensible person would do: reached for the cookbook. I was only ten, and I hoped it would have some advice on how to deal with the thing.

  Sure enough, there it was, on page 391: “Roast Suckling Pig Parisienne.” There was even a handy photograph demonstrating how to truss the tiny animal.

  I remember that moment, and not just because the recipe insisted on a lot of yucky stuff like putting a block of wood into the pig’s mouth (“to brace it for the apple that will be inserted later”) and boiling the heart for gravy. I remember it mostly because that was the day Mom finally admitted she was glad I’d found a hobby.

  My mother’s interest in food was strictly academic. Asked what had possessed her to purchase the pig, she replied, “I’d never seen one before,” as if that was an adequate answer. The same logic had compelled h
er to bring home a can of fried grasshoppers, a large sea urchin with dangerously sharp spines, and a flashy magenta cactus flower. She had little interest in eating these items, but if I was going to insist on reading what she called “that ridiculous magazine,” she thought it should be put to use.

  The fried grasshoppers were not a hit; I suspect the can had been sitting on a shelf for years, awaiting some gullible customer. And while the editors were eager to instruct me in the preparation of eels, bears, woodchucks, and snipe, they were strangely silent on the subject of sea urchins. When I finally managed to pry the creature open, I found the gooey black inside so appalling that nothing would have tempted me to taste it. As for the cactus flower, its great good looks camouflaged a total lack of flavor.

  But the suckling pig was a different story. I did everything the cookbook suggested and then hovered anxiously near the oven, hoping it hadn’t led me astray. When the pig emerged all crackling skin and sweet soft meat, Mom was happy. “I’ve never tasted anything so delicious,” she grudgingly admitted. “That magazine might be useful after all.”

  Dad took one bite and said, “Do you think you could figure out how to make Kassler rippchen?” There was a wistful note in his voice. “It was my favorite food when I was a boy.”

  “What is it?” I’d never heard of such a dish.

  “Smoked pork chops. I imagine we could get them up in Yorkville.”

  I’d never been to Yorkville, but I knew Dad had lived there when he first arrived from Berlin in 1926. (He was twenty-six.) “You can’t imagine how different it was from the rest of the city,” he said as we rode the bus to the Upper East Side. “Every shop, every bakery, every restaurant was German, and in those first months I found it comforting to be surrounded by all those familiar sights and sounds.”

  I stared at my tall, rather formal father, fascinated by this glimpse into his past. Dad wasn’t like American fathers—he didn’t have pals, didn’t go out drinking with the guys, had absolutely no interest in sports. I was his only child; he was almost fifty when I was born and was slightly baffled by this newfound fatherhood. Quiet, kind, and intellectual, he rarely talked about himself, and I was afraid if I uttered a single sound he would stop speaking.

  “You know my grandmother was American,” he said. I shook my head; I hadn’t known that. “My grandfather came here in the middle of the last century, made a fortune, married an American, and carried her back to Germany. When I arrived in New York, all my grandmother’s relatives came down to the boat to meet me. They wanted me to stay with them, but I felt more comfortable here. Oh, look!”

  He’d spotted a butcher shop, its windows crammed with sausages in an astonishing array of shapes and sizes. We climbed off the bus, and as Dad opened the door we walked into a delicious aroma, all spice and smoke with a vague animal funk. I looked up; huge loops of sausage dangled from the ceiling, more kinds than I had ever imagined. There was another scent, something clean and briny that prickled my nose, and I followed the smell to a huge barrel of sauerkraut in the corner.

  “Guten tag.” I was shocked; I’d never heard Dad speak German before. But the unfamiliar language rolled off his tongue as he said, “Leberkäse, landjaeger, bauernwurst,” as if each word had a different flavor and he was savoring every one.

  The butcher said something, pointing at me, and Dad shook his head. “Schande.” The man tsked a bit as he handed a rosy slice of bologna across the counter. I put it on my tongue, tasting pork, celery seed, and something elusive and slightly sweet. Nutmeg?

  “Zo kleine Madchen,” the butcher said. “The father tells me you cook.” He picked up a haunch of pork and sliced off a few thick chops. “Kassler rippchen is not difficult. They are smoked, so you have only to heat them up. Und”—he walked down the counter and filled a container with bright magenta strands—“a little red cabbage and just like that…a good German dinner.”

  Dad looked so happy as he pulled out his billfold and collected the parcels. “Would you like,” he said almost shyly, “to explore another neighborhood next Saturday?”

  That was how I came to love my native city. Dad and I began wandering the city’s ethnic neighborhoods, discovering them through food. I loved La Marqueta, a tropical swirl of color that smelled of bananas, pineapples, and coconuts up in Spanish Harlem. Tito Puente’s music was always playing as we moved through the crowded stalls, munching on fried plantains from a cuchifritos stand and ordering mofongo for the pure pleasure of saying the word.

  Dad became almost garrulous on these walks, and I slowly began to know him; once he took me to the Lower East Side, to Russ & Daughters, where I discovered that he had a passion for herring. “When your mother and I were dating,” he said, “that’s how she seduced me.”

  “But we never have herring!” I said.

  “I know.” He said it ruefully. “After we were married she confessed that she hates pickled fish. And she never bought it again.” Another man would have been angry; Dad found it amusing, just one of life’s little quirks.

  What I was learning, on those weekend walks, is how much you can find out about a person merely by watching what he eats. Food became my own private way of looking at the world. But although it was my passion, I never thought of food as more than a hobby, and it never crossed my mind that it might be a way to earn my living. Even after college, when jobs proved elusive in the depressed New York of the early seventies and I began baking pastries for a restaurant called Food (run by a group of artists in the scruffy neighborhood that would come to be called SoHo), I considered it a stopgap measure, just something to do until my real life could begin.

  Then a friend said, “You’re such a good cook, you ought to write a cookbook,” and everything changed. From the moment I picked up my pen, I knew that I had found my calling; I was twenty-two years old. Mmmmm: A Feastiary was not a big bestseller, but it made me a food writer. I moved to Berkeley, California, and although I continued to work in restaurants to pay the bills, I began contributing articles to magazines, working my way up from a small throwaway newspaper called The East Bay Review of the Performing Arts to New West, Apartment Life, and Ms. magazine. I dreamed of writing for the magazine that had set me on this path, but I lacked the courage to approach Gourmet. I was waiting for the perfect story.

  It came to me in a spoonful of soup. Sitting in a small Thai restaurant, I ordered tom yum goong, which turned out to be the shocking pink of a Technicolor sunset. I took a tentative sip and suddenly there were fireworks in my mouth. Chilies, lemongrass, ginger, and cilantro exploded in waves of heat, cold, and sweetness. It was the most exciting food I’d ever tasted and I inhaled one spoonful after another, hoping the bowl would never end. I knew I had to go to Thailand and find out what real Thai food was like. This, I thought, is my Gourmet story. The next time I went to New York to see my parents, I made an appointment at the magazine.

  The offices were just off Park Avenue, overlooking the Waldorf Astoria hotel. As a proud Berkeley person I found the formality intimidating, and all I remember about the editor who agreed to see me is that she was wearing white gloves and seemed terribly ancient. She took one look at my clothes—I was wearing my favorite hand-crocheted green chenille suit—shuddered slightly, and offered a limp handshake.

  But she listened politely as I made my pitch. Brimming with energy, enthusiasm, and all the naïve earnestness of a young writer, I cried, “Thai food is going to be the next big thing.”

  “But our readers”—her voice was cool and distant—“have no interest in the next big thing. Other publications attempt to be timely; here at Gourmet we like to think of ourselves as timeless.”

  “That can’t be true!” I replied. “I’ve learned everything I know about the food of other countries from the pages of your magazine. Gourmet has taken me to Mexico, China, India….Now you need to take your readers to Thailand.”

  She regarded me with what I
can only call pity. “We ran a story about food in Thailand a few years ago,” she said.

  “But you only wrote about Bangkok!” I protested. I did not point out that the article had been written by an expat surrounded by servants and living in regal splendor. Instead, I temporized. “It’s a big country, and the food varies enormously from region to region.”

  The editor remained unmoved. “Thank you for taking the time to visit,” she said.

  I had been dismissed. Utterly crushed, I left the office.

  Other magazines proved more enthusiastic, and I sold enough stories to be able to spend a month in Thailand pursuing unfamiliar flavors in the far corners of the country. I wished the articles were for Gourmet, but now when I picked up the magazine I saw that the adventurous spirit that had thrilled me as a child was gone. We had grown apart. I belonged to the rock-and-roll generation, thrilled by the changes in the American way of eating. Gourmet was a stately grande dame, looking admiringly across the ocean and wistfully back to the past.

  The recipes were still reliable, but the tone had changed. Instead of stories about men rowing out for midnight lobster raids, there were prissy pieces about pricey restaurants and fancy resorts. I moved on to younger magazines, and although I continued to follow a few favorite writers (Laurie Colwin, Madhur Jaffrey, Joseph Wechsberg), for the next twenty-five years I rarely gave the magazine a thought.

  THE PHONE WAS RINGING AS I fumbled for my keys, arms filled with mistletoe and fir. I dropped the branches on the floor, pushed the door open, dashed into the apartment, and sprinted down the hall.