Tender at the Bone/ Comfort Me with Apples/ Garlic and Sapphires:
Tender at the Bone tells the story of Reichl’s childhood. Ruth started cooking to rescue her mother’s dinner guests from the awful food, propelling Ruth into the kitchen at a young age and laying the foundation for her future. Comfort Me With Apples outlines the demise of her first marriage and her first ventures into restaurant criticism, ending with her time as the restaurant critic and food editor at the Los Angeles Times. Seeing an opportunity, Reichl takes the available restaurant critic job at the New York Times, a job she describes in Garlic and Sapphires.
I read all three of these memoirs in quick succession for a Readers’ Advisory Workshop I will be facilitating soon. I adore these books. I had never read Reichl’s reviews in the New York Times or her other work, so I was pleasantly surprised at how down to earth and relatable she is. I would have thought that a celebrated restaurant critic would be pretentious and haughty. She’s quite the opposite. A bohemian who grew up in New York, then fled to first Michigan and then to Berkeley, Reichl really creates an impression that anything is possible. Her love of food comes through so strongly. And her use of food as a healing agent is something that I can completely understand.
