Ruth Reichl: Food Lover Turned Gourmet Revolutionary

Ruth Reichl, iconic Jewish American food critic and bestselling author has captivated readers with her frank, down-to-earth approach to cooking, and her insatiable love and enthusiasm for cuisine.

She is the author of four best-selling memoirs: “Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table”; “Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table”; “Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise”; and “For You Mom, Finally.”

Reichl has also edited, contributed to or been featured in numerous food related publications, including her most recent cookbook, “Gourmet Today”, and has critiqued restaurants for both the New York Times as well as the Los Angeles Times. She hosted “Eating Out Loud” on The Food Network; is executive producer and host of PBS's “Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth” and “Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie”; and appears frequently on radio shows.

In 2009, Reichl lost her ten-year job as editor in chief at Gourmet Magazine when the magazine abruptly ceased publication. Despite this setback, she has recently taken a position as editor-at-large at Random House and is also in the process of finishing the script for a romantic comedy, based on “Garlic and Sapphires” and starring Anne Hathaway. Reichl has also become the editorial adviser for Gilt Taste, and next month will be busy shooting the next season of Top Chef Masters.

Reichl is arguably a gourmet revolutionary, becoming a veritable force that has shaped the way Americans think about—and experience—food.

What do you think draws people not just to food but to food writing?

It's like Proust. That's probably the only answer you need. Everybody has some food memory that they can access and instantly be someplace else.

But it's more than nostalgia; I really think it's very necessary to us as human beings to see people cooking. Children love the Food Network, they love to watch cooking. It's like the Cookbook Revolution: at the point when people cooked, there weren't that many cookbooks. Now, when nobody is cooking, there are thousands of cookbooks published every year in America, and they all sell really well.

How do you explain that?

People read cookbooks. They don't cook from them. They take them to bed.

Why is that?

They want that connection to food—because they're getting up, they're not eating breakfast, they're grabbing fast-food for lunch and for dinner they come home and stick something in the microwave. Everybody eats on their own. I think people take cookbooks to bed to pretend. I always thought that those spreads we did in Gourmet were so important to people because they were like virtual dinners and people wanted to put themselves at that table. Statistics show that people use two recipes from an average cookbook. They buy hundreds of them, and use two recipes from each of them. Why are cookbooks still selling when it's so much easier to get recipes on the Internet? I think people actually have cookbooks stacked up next their bed because they want that connection, they want to dream food.

What drew you to food writing?

It never occurred to me that I could be a writer, or that food writing was a possible career. What happened was after I got out of graduate school we were living in this loft in New York, and I was looking for a job. All these friends stayed with us and I was cooking these meals, because I’ve always loved to cook, and it was great. … 1970s New York, Lower East Side, the old Jews were still there, the old Italian mothers were still there, Little Italy, Chinatown—it was a place with all this great food, and I just started wandering around collecting recipes from people. I went to this little Italian butcher shop; the guy loved to talk, and he’d give me recipes while he was talking. And then I’d go to Chinatown where people would give me recipes, and there was the market on Mulberry Street and these old Italian ladies were still there. … I’d bring home the recipes and try them. I was cooking for all my friends and one friend said to me, “You're such a good cook. You ought to write a cookbook.” So I wrote this cookbook ["Mmmm..A Feastiary", 1972].

What makes a review fun to read? What did you do to make it fun to read?

Well, I’ve told this story so often but we were living essentially in a commune in Berkeley and had no money or credit cards. I told my roommates that we were going out for a free meal at a fancy restaurant, that the magazine was going to pay for. Everybody was so excited. We didn't have clothes so we went to Value Village thrift store, to get decent clothes to go to the restaurant.

Everybody really wanted me to get the job so they were all trying to be very helpful. I later learned that too much help for a restaurant review isn’t helpful, you just need to say to people, “Look, I'm working. You're not working. Just have a nice time and don't talk about the food.” But I didn't know that then. Sherry, one of my roommates, who's a wonderful cook and now the restaurant critic for the LA Times, sat there tasting very carefully, going, “…There's rosemary in here,” completely deconstructing every dish. My husband Doug, who’s an artist, was paying close attention to the typography on the menu and the colors on the wall. One other roommate, who had been a bartender for years, was parsing the wine list and talking about how the drinks were being served. And somebody else had been a waiter. …

So we had this group of people, everyone was just throwing information in, and I had this moment, like a shift in vision where I imagined that we were a group that had been sent by a rival restaurant to find fault with this place. I went home, and in the middle of the night went to my little tree house kind of studio in the back of the house and wrote this story. It just came to me, like a gift. How can you explain where these things come from? I didn't even realize what I was doing, but I wrote a little film noir script. The story started: “The names have all been changed to protect the innocent.” It was done like a Dashiell Hammett story with the food woven through it. It didn't occur to me that I was creating a new form.

Who are your favorite contemporary food writers?

This young woman Gabrielle Hamilton is just coming out. She's the owner and chef at Prune and she's written a book called “Blood, Bones and Butter.” It's stunningly good.
She's a really good writer. Almost everything we've heard from a chef has been testosterone-laced, male stuff, and she's a woman writing in a very different voice: she's tough, not sentimental, but she doesn't swagger the way guys do. I feel like it's a whole new voice, a new generation, so fresh.

She's a woman who pretty much raised herself. Her relationship to food and to cooking is quite different than any of the men chefs: you feel that cooking has really saved her life but she isn't in it for the success. She loves restaurant life and you get a sense, through the descriptions, of her being on the line, like she's in a fight; the boxer coming back at her and she's exhausted. I know exactly how she feels. I know that sense, but I've never read a guy writing about it.

What can you tell us about what you're writing now?

I'm writing a novel that is very much about food. It's set in two times: today and in World War II. WWII is a particularly interesting time for food because the food was rationed and it was like a huge social experiment in this country.

I'm also working on a cookbook, which is also a kind of memoir about the year of losing my job at Gourmet and coming to terms with being home. I’m using that year of my Twitter feed, where I've been tweeting about what I'm eating every day. So it's three things: there's the tweet at the top of the page and then the back story—what was going on that day—and then the recipe for what I tweeted about. I think it's going to be very nice. We're very happy about it. I haven't started yet, but I also have a contract to write the memoir of the Gourmet years, which I sometimes think of as “Ruthie in Wonderland,” because working at Condé Nast was like a whole new world to me. It was this world of luxury and possibility I just didn't know existed, kind of the world of “Sex and the City” and “Gossip Girl.” I literally didn't know that world existed, and also there was the great joy of having someone give you a magazine and say, “Do anything you want with it,” and having so many possibilities. It was an amazing experience, so I don't need to make anything up for that—it’s so real, it was unreal.

Here is a recipe Reichl posted on her website earlier this month:

Strawberry Ice Cream (adapted from a Victorian cookbook)

2 pints of strawberry juice
3 pints of cream
4 ounces of sugar to every pint of the composition

Instructions:

Swoosh 2 pints of strawberries in a blender and then put them through a sieve - it makes about a cup of strawberry juice.

(Ruth's note: In place of ordinary granulated sugar, I used confectioner’s sugar, which dissolves more easily. It also throws the weight off; you won’t need more than a quarter cup or so for the cup of strawberry juice.)

Stir the sugar in, and then swirl in a pint of good cream. Now taste it to make sure it's sweet enough for you.

Cut up up another handful of strawberries and add them to the mixture before starting to churn the ice cream. It should not take very long to freeze; about 15 minutes.

Leave it on the slightly soft side.

The flavor is so pure and lovely – just strawberries and cream - the essence of pink and there is nothing nicer on a hot summer day!

Michelle Shabtai holds an MA in Language Education from Tel-Aviv University and taught English at The Open University. She volunteers as editor for the non-profit organization The Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews (IAEJ) and is currently writing her first book.