Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl

I’m a fan of Ruth Reichl – from her restaurant reviews, to her time as editor of Gourmet magazine, to her memoirs and cookbooks – I’ve read most everything she’s done.  So I was highly excited to read her latest memoir mostly because it gives more insight into the great, late lamented magazine  — Gourmet  (I subscribed for many, many years and miss to this day).

Save Me the Plums opens as an 8-year-old Ruth finds an old Gourmet Magazine in a used bookstore while accompanying her father on errands. She is transported by its descriptions of foreign lands, exotic foods and ingredients. She begins to collect the magazines and starts cooking.  Her cooking skills expand as her mother brings home strange new foods and her father takes her through different ethnic neighborhoods to  search for ingredients.

Forty years later and Ms. Reichl, now the restaurant critic for the NY Times, gets an unexpected offer from Condé Nast to run Gourmet Magazine. There are many adjustments in this new career, one of which is her delight to once again cook and eat at home rather than reviewing  restaurants most every night.   She is excited but also intimidated and overwhelmed during her first few weeks as editor of Gourmet Magazine. 

She’s suddenly thrust into the role of highly paid executive, flying and traveling first class, having a limousine and driver, and most astonishingly, having a clothing allowance.  Ms. Reichl is surprised how quickly she adapts to the monied, glitzy world of Condé Nast –her portrayals of the lavish Gourmet parties are some of her best food writing.  She also gleefully sprinkles in snide and sometimes snarky gossips about the staff . 

There’s a chapter on a business trip to Paris that made me clench my teeth with unseemly envy.  Ms. Reichl travels in Condé Nast style, with lunch at at the famed Pierre Gagnaire , a suite at Le Meurice hotel and a shopping trip to the original kitchenware emporium E.Dehillerin where the staff loads up on copper pans. This wild trip results in one the best selling Gourmet issues on Paris (an issue I saved and still have).

In one of my favorite parts — she opens the door to reveal the famous Gourmet test kitchen(s) – and from her description they are (whoops were) everything I imagined.  She writes of 9/11 and how in those same test kitchens the staff at Gourmet cooked for the first responders and firefighters.

Save Me the Plums presents a different Ruth Reichl, once a Berkeley hippie who palled around with Alice Waters seeing the beginnings of the slow food movement — this Ruth Reichl is now a sophisticated publishing executive who, for ten years thrived on everything Gourmet both gave her and demanded of her.

At a small Paris restaurant Ms. Reichl re-encounters a well-known-in-French-society widower, and when she expresses her surprise to see him ‘slumming’, he responds:

When you attain my age you will understand one of life’s great secrets: Luxury is best appreciated in small portions. When it becomes routine it loses its allure.

In Save Me the Plums Ms. Reichl gives us a rich portion — a glimpse into the luxurious world of magazine publishing, and shares her decade at the helm of Gourmet with warmth, candor, and humor. 

And for dessert, she even includes a few of her favorite recipes.

 

 

 

An Advanced Readers Copy was kindly provided by Random House

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Also recommended:   My Kitchen Year and any of Ms. Reichl’s memoirs.