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| Ruth Reichl falls in love while eating Dacquoise of almond meringues and mocha buttercream in Paris, processes her father’s death by making gallons of mushroom soup in New York and says goodbye to a failing marriage with shrimp curry in a communal Berkeley kitchen. Food is coping, it is celebration, it is the lens through which Reichl sees the world. In Comfort Me with Apples, Reichl picks up at the end of her best-selling memoir Tender at the Bone, and the two books are hard to separate. The first is about growing up and finding joy and meaning in food, while the second follows her from a the scraping-by moments of her early career to glamorous forays into the world of high-end restaurants. Both books are distinctive for Reichl’s unending enthusiasm for food and her sometimes alarming honesty in recounting the tales of her life, from marital infidelity to her mother’s mental illness. Both books are intimate, accessible and wry, but the second falters a little at the hand of the very thing that made the first one so wonderful. Tender at the Bone was straightforward and real — a refreshing gift from a writer who, as the editor-in-chief at Gourmet Magazine, lives and works in an industry that has a tendency to fall in love with itself. Comfort Me with Apples slips occasionally into name-dropping — which is incongruous with Reichl’s unpretentious voice. But when that direct voice is talking, Reichl gets to right to the heart of magic at the table. — Reviewed by Jessica MacMurray |
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