~ Tender at the Bone, by Ruth Reichl ~
I first came across Ruth Reichl in the early 1990s. We had a small baby and perforce spent much of our time at home, and the New York Times dining section was one of my great Wednesday pleasures. Reichl was the restaurant critic. I couldn’t imagine ever going to the restaurants she reviewed — besides the fact that they were in New York and we were in Washington, they were very expensive places, and we were more good-cheap-ethnic-food sort of people.
But her reviews were wonderful. Each one was a little gem that let you imagine the elegant surroundings, see the (sometimes snotty) waiters, and all but taste the food yourself. I loved reading them, even if beef cooked in wine and butter-drenched leeks sounded rather unappealing to my Indian palate.
A few years later, Reichl came out with a memoir, Tender at the Bone, which I was promptly given as a present. It was just as delightful as her reviews, but thoroughly surprising. I had imagined Reichl a product of the Upper East Side, brought up in luxury and taken to fancy restaurants from early childhood. I was pretty sure that good-cheap-ethnic food had never crossed her lips.
Reichl grew up in New York, indeed, but in Greenwich Village. Her father was a book designer, and her mother was a manic-depressive with a relaxed attitude to food safety. Mold was often scraped off raw materials before they were thrown into dishes. Ruth grew up watching anxiously to make sure the guests were not poisoned by her mother’s cooking. At her brother’s engagement party, 25 of the guests ended up in hospital having their stomachs pumped, but her mother, always blasé, assured them that the food had not been to blame because “we ate everything. And we all feel fine.”
Her parents were also relaxed with respect to child-rearing. If there is an opposite to helicopter parents, this was it. Ruth was often shuffled off to the elderly mother of her father’s first wife, who revelled in the only opportunity she had to be a grandparent. Aunt Birdie, as she was called, enjoyed telling stories of the food from her past, and with her housekeeper Alice, the three would cook together on each visit. This household was the source of the first of the recipes in the book: fried oysters.
I picked one up, but it was so hot it burned my fingers and I dropped it. Alice looked impatient, so I picked it up again. It was crisp on the outside, with a faint sweetness. Inside, the oyster was like a briny pudding. I took one bite and then another. Alice and Aunt Birdie looked at my face and laughed.
Reichl sees recipes as akin to old photographs: the food we eat and love, she says, describes us.
A few years later, she was abruptly dumped into a boarding school in Montreal ‘to learn French’, said her mother. Miserable at first, not speaking a word of the language… you might expect a sad tale of being bullied by the Francophones. Actually:
“I realize”, I wrote in my diary, “that I am like the Puerto Ricans who come into our classes in New York. Except we are not nearly as nice. These kids are really sweet, they all help me in my work and don’t mind when I goof up on my French, which is almost always.
A new friend, Beatrice, started taking her home to Ottawa for the weekend, to an enormous house with maids and a French chef, where she was introduced to foods she had never eaten before.
I had never tasted anything like this sauce, a mixture of red wine, marrow, butter, herbs and mushrooms. It was like autumn distilled in a spoon. A shiver went down my back. “This sauce!”, I exclaimed involuntarily. The sound echoed through the polite conversation at the table and I put my hand to my mouth.
By the time she was in high school in the 60s, Reichl’s parents often spent weekends in New York City, leaving her alone in a large Connecticut house. All her friends, and their friends, came over to party each weekend. She describes herself as plump and unattractive, but she had a party house and she cooked, so the boys she yearned for were generally around, even if not focused on her. Ruth would make brownies from scratch, and breakfasts after nights of drunken revelry.
On a budget trip to North Africa in her college days, Reichl and her friend Serafina eat tagines and merguez sausages. The recipes start to become more diverse around this point of the book.
By this time her mother’s manic depression was beginning to take its toll on the whole family. Ruth started having panic attacks, constantly tense over the unending phone calls. So she and her artist husband moved to Berkeley, to a commune where they lived with a bickering, rotating cast of residents, scavenging from dumpsters.
It was extraordinary what was being thrown out! Flats of perfectly good eggs had been discarded merely because a couple had cracked. We found ripped bags of flour and crumbled cartons of cookies. The bananas might be a little brown, but they made wonderful banana bread and the apples were jsut fine for applesauce.
Eventually, to earn money, she started cooking at a coop and writing restaurant reviews for a local paper… the first step to a storied career as a food writer.
Ruth’s adventures and the people she meets are great fun to read about, and she has unvarnished stories about herself. But there is always food as well, not just alongside, but an integral part of the story.
Her hair was jet black, but her face was deeply lined, with little ravines running right across it. She said something in harsh, guttural Greek, and Milton pulled a liter of golden olive oil out of his knapsack. Hugging it to her as if it were a precious child, she led us to a small lean-to on the side of the cottage. The sea was just below us.
This is the first of Reichl’s memoirs, and the subsequent books about her life as the restaurant reviewer of the LA and then the NY Times are also wonderful. A lovely read for anyone who likes cooking or food. And who doesn’t like at least one of those?
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