Comfort Me With Apples

More Adventures at the Table

By Ruth Reichl (Random House)

"When are you going to do something worthwhile with your life?" Ruth Reichl's mother asked her with contempt in the last chapter of Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, food critic Reichl's first edition of best-selling memoirs.

"I had a respectable job," Reichl wrote. "I was making real money. Every month my name appeared in print. I was even starting to write food articles for magazines in New York. Did this impress my parents? Not in the least. 'Food!' said my mother disdainfully, 'all you do is write about food.'" But that, of course, has made all the difference. Reichl went on to become a longtime, celebrated restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times before being wooed away to her current position as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine.

Even as her culinary critiquing star continually rose, her mother never came around, Reichl recalled when interviewed. Fortunately, though, millions of others did. They hungrily hung on every syllable of her reviews in The New York Times and turned Tender at the Bone (published in 1998) into a surprise smash. It also became one of the first books that ignited the current trend of culinary tomes short on recipes but long on literary tales which make for much more than memorable dinner conversation.

Tender at the Bone covered Reichl's New York City, 1950s childhood through when she just sprouted her wings post-college in Berkeley, California. Fans of that book will find the same kind of humor, candor, superlative novelistic writing and delicious behind-the-scenes culinary tales in Comfort Me With Apples, which, after a best-selling turn last year as a hardcover, has been released in paperback. The title is from the "Song of Solomon" (the full line is "Comfort me with apples, for I am lovesick"), which—Reichl notes—has beautiful writing about love and food.

So does Comfort Me With Apples. Reichl writes movingly about her love affairs, marriages and struggle to get pregnant; and, of course, about food. Sometimes, it's a melange.

"When Michael asked if I would bake a cake for his 40th birthday party, I could not say no," Reichl writes of the friend who, partially through the strength of that cake, became the love of her life and her second husband. "It was what I would have done for any friend. But as I watched myself cream ten pounds of sugar into seven pounds of butter I began to understand what I was really up to. My unconscious had taken over; I had made a decision. The cake took rivers of chocolate and dozens of eggs, and by the time it was finished I needed four men to help me lift it into the car. Michael blanched when he saw my creation coming toward him. This was more than a cake; it was a declaration of love in front of three hundred people, and we both knew it."

That weekend, she wrote, "we lived on chocolate cake and wine—when we ate at all, which wasn't often. We could not get enough of each other." The weekend ended as "we drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and I fed him the last piece of cake, crumb by crumb." She's been feeding him ever since and includes the recipe for the aphrodisiacal cake along with the anecdote.

That perfect sprinkling of recipes is a trademark from the first book that's recreated with panache here. Sometimes it's more poignancy than panache, as when Reichl struggles in deciding between Michael and first husband Doug. She thinks she might stay with Doug, who exclaims, "You're my home," and bakes him his favorite apricot pie (which we all learn to bake, too) just three pages before her fateful chocolate cake fling with Michael.

Those who like their plate full with Reichl's remembrances (and Comfort Me With Apples can delectably be read as a stand-alone volume without ever reading the first book) should be grateful this edition even exists at all; she wasn't originally planning to follow-up on her childhood tales.

"I didn't have any grand plan for a series of books about my life," Reichl said with a laugh. "The first book was initially stories of people in my childhood who impacted my culinary development. But my editor told me the one common link between these people was me so I should insert myself as the connector. The way Comfort Me With Apples came about is that I was doing an audio version of Tender at the Bone. The session lasts a few days and your producer and a few others are outside of your audio booth listening the whole time. When I was done, they all said, 'What happened next? You can't end it there! We've got to know more.'"

For those unquenchable souls who will undoubtedly feel the same way this time around, Reichl is already planning a third volume—although she says it probably will be a number of years before she digs in again.

RECIPES
—Big Chocolate Cake
—Warm Salad

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