SAVE ME THE PLUMS
My Gourmet Memoir
By Ruth Reichl
Spoiled for choice, Ruth Reichl frets over a major career choice. Should she accept her dream job as editor in chief of a magazine she has loved since childhood and risk becoming a corporate creature? Or stay put in her imperial post as restaurant critic for The New York Times?
We know the ending to this foodie fairy tale, but it’s still fun to read “Save Me the Plums,” Reichl’s poignant and hilarious account of what it took to bring the dusty food bible back to life with artistic and literary flair through the glory days of magazine-making — from 1999 to the day in the fall of 2009 when she was informed that Condé Nast had decided to close Gourmet’s pantry for good.
The first course is served when Reichl is courted at a clandestine meeting with a member of Condé Nast’s brass at the Algonquin Hotel, followed soon after by lunch with S.I. Newhouse at Da Silvano, the media mogul’s favorite downtown watering hole, where she discovers that Newhouse despised garlic (so much that he banned it from Condé Nast’s Frank Gehry-designed cafeteria). Undeterred by this and other eccentricities, Reichl peels away the layers of drama that arrive with her new job. (Caution: Former editors might experience indigestion while reveling in Reichl’s rich servings of publishing world intrigue.)
She wondered whether she was up to the task of managing a large staff of editors, fact checkers and art directors. As 10 years of inspiring Gourmet issues and now this memoir would attest, the answer was an emphatic yes. Magazine junkies will look back in amazement at the groaning board of perks that once were staples of the job. “Apparently they pay for everything,” Reichl informed her husband. “Country clubs … hairdressers, travel. You name it.” Other accouterments of the position included a private office bathroom and dining room, a limo and a driver named Mustafa.
Reichl takes us through her crash course in publishing lingo as she discovers the difference between “teeosees” (table of contents), “adjacencies” (ads situated next to text) and “inadequate sep” (when ads are improperly spaced). The ultimate indoctrination into the fraternity of fat expense accounts comes at the airport when Reichl is checking into economy class and the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, standing in the first-class line with the New Yorker editor David Remnick, reprimands her: “You’re at Condé Nast now. … You shouldn’t be traveling like that.”
Working mothers will sympathize with Reichl’s descriptions of the exhausting rhythms of a “dream job” — in her case, book tours, media interviews and advertising events. One particularly touching moment comes when Reichl realizes that she can’t make more time in her schedule for her family and weighs the ultimate compromise: “Children, I came to understand, need you around even if they ignore you. In fact, they need you around so they can ignore you.”
Tantalizing recipes provide punctuation to the career twists and turns. These include the Thanksgiving turkey chili she and her staff cook for rescue workers at ground zero and the spicy Chinese noodles her young son begs her to make for him on a rare night when Reichl is finally able to fix his dinner.
Cooks will marvel at the tasting-kitchen coup when Reichl dazzles her new staff by guessing the origin of a recipe at a blind chocolate cake test — and even suggests using a better brand of chocolate (Scharffen Berger). Readers will wince at Reichl’s discomfort when, at a signing for a book of recipes, she is confronted by a chef about a review that cost him his job. “‘“Bitter salad,”’ he quoted sourly — he had memorized the entire review. ‘“Mushy sole. Cottony bread.” They fired me after your hatchet job, and I haven’t been able to find work since.’”
Hard as a restaurant critic’s job can be, Reichl learns that it isn’t nearly as draining as navigating the business side of a magazine. She begrudgingly accepts the necessity of making sales calls with publishers. Of course, the upside of dealing with corporate types is having lunch at the Four Seasons, where Reichl is taken by Steve Florio, Condé Nast’s chief executive. Her description of the Grill Room’s caviar-stuffed “Florio potato,” along with her account of the publisher’s hostile relationship with Condé Nast’s waiflike editorial director, James Truman, is simply delicious.
Reichl also recounts the ins and outs of human resources: the revolving door of publishers, the firing and hiring of staff, and how she lured talent to the magazine — including brilliant writers like Ann Patchett, who puts a turtle on her expense account to save it from certain death in a market on the Amazon, and David Foster Wallace, who delivers 10,000 controversial words on the Maine Lobster Festival. Magazine makers will appreciate Reichl’s recipe-like telling of how the art director Richard Ferretti reinvented Gourmet’s covers, infusing them with cinematic clarity and drama.
When the stock market plunges in 2008 and the housing crisis threatens newsstand sales, Reichl and her staff take a counterintuitive path and head for Paris, jettisoning the Condé Nast ethos of spending as they create an entire issue devoted to budget travel and food. A three-course meal for only 12 euros foreshadows Reichl’s final release from Condé Nast’s golden handcuffs. When the waitress takes the menu away, announcing that she will decide what’s for lunch, Reichl reflects on the barriers money can create: “The more stars in your itinerary, the less likely you are to find the real life of another country.”
Of course, the French know very well that true luxury is measured in portion size, and Reichl eventually loses her appetite for the hefty perks of magazine life. But before she can sign off with her painful descriptions of the “terrible sense of failure” that overwhelmed her when she lost her job, each serving of magazine folklore is worth savoring. In fact, Reichl’s story is juicier than a Peter Luger porterhouse. Dig in.