TENDER AT THE BONE:
Growing Up at the Table
By Ruth Reichl
Random House, 282 pages, $23
As the restaurant critic for The New York Times, Ruth Reichl, perhaps more than most people, has had to eat–and make sense of–the inedible. She got an early start, as she makes clear in her poignant, flavorsome memoir, “Tender at the Bone.”
Reichl’s mother, Miriam, a manic-depressive with a taste for bizarre decor and even more bizarre food (“Everything Stew,” a dish she invented while creating a casserole using a two-week-old turkey carcass,
was a house specialty), was uninterested in recipes and, Reichl writes, “unafraid of rot. `Oh, it’s just a little mold,’ I can remember her saying on the many occasions she scraped the fuzzy blue stuff off some concoction before serving what was left for dinner. She had an iron stomach and was incapable of understanding that other people did not.
“This taught me many things. The first was that food could be dangerous, especially to those who loved it. I took this very seriously.”
She also took it upon herself at a tender age to steer away from the groaning buffet table anyone who was a big eater and those family friends she particularly liked. Nowhere was this intervention more crucial than at the engagement party Miriam threw for Ruth’s older brother, an event the author recalls in horrifying and hilarious detail. It was summer, the chicken and crabmeat had been out of the refrigerator for days, and the piece de resistance was a mush concocted from leftovers offered on special at the automat Horn & Hardart. Despite Reichl’s best efforts, 26 guests had to have their stomachs pumped.
Reichl’s early life-saving work was good training for her life’s work. Without quite realizing it, she’d begun classifying people by their taste in food. “Like a hearing child born to deaf parents, I was shaped by my mother’s handicap, discovering that food could be a way of making sense of the world.”
Initially, Reichl paid mind only to family members’ basic tastes in food, for example the fact that her mother had a sweet tooth, that her father preferred salt to sugar. As time went on, she refined her observations to take in such details as how and where people chose to eat. “My brother liked fancy food in fine surroundings, my father only cared about the company, and Mom would eat anything so long as the location was exotic. I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.”
And in “Tender at the Bone,” you find out a good bit about who Reichl is and the way food has shaped her life. Early training came from Alice, housekeeper to “Aunt” Birdie, mother of Reichl’s father’s first wife, who taught little Ruth the secret of fried oysters (get the Crisco really hot). Further instruction was provided by the elegant, alcoholic Mrs. Peavey, one in a series of cooks hired by the Reichls, who taught Ruth, among other life lessons, the importance of preparing extra pastry when making beef Wellington. She began developing her palate when on a whim her mother packed her off to a Montreal boarding school to learn French. There she was befriended by Beatrice du Croix, a wealthy classmate with a world-class cook and a gourmet father.
There are plenty of successful comics who reminisce about their formative years spent as class clowns; making jokes became their way of fitting in. Making meals became Reichl’s. She learned that dessert was an inexpensive trick, and that high school boys were particularly susceptible to the charms of heavily frosted devil’s-food cake. (The recipe for this and other treats pepper the book). For Reichl, food seemed to be the music of love. Her future husband began as the man who came over looking for her roommate. He quickly became the man who came to dinner–sauerbraten and brownies, Wiener schnitzel and tollhouse cookies–and never left.
“Tender at the Bone,” which chronicles Reichl’s tenure as a waitress at a pretentious French restaurant in Ann Arbor, Mich., her attempts to teach basic culinary skills to a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, and her tour of duty at a Berkeley restaurant co-operative, sometimes seems more snack than meal. An account of a summer spent in France as a camp counselor falls into this category, but even at its most skimpy, the book is an enticing portrait of the sensualist as a young woman. You want to sit at Reichl’s table not just for the food but for the pungent, highly seasoned talk.
