What I know now: Ruth Reichl
The author and former editor of Gourmet magazine has been informing and entertaining serious food nerds for five decades. She has a famously evocative Twitter account, a book deal about her years at Gourmet and, naturally, a Netflix show on the way. Isha
I started cooking out of self-defence.
My mother was the world’s worst cook. The first thing I made was a cheese fondue when I was five-and-a-half. My mother had a party and everybody said: “Wow!” You get so much positive reinforcement that no matter what you make, people will tell you it’s great and it never occurs to you that you could make a mistake. Then you become a good cook.
When Gourmet magazine closed,
I was devastated. It was totally unexpected. I felt like I’d let both my staff and the audience down. My cookbook, My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life (Random House) was the result. The only thing that got me through that period was cooking. I realised that I had an expense account since 1978 and then, nothing. I thought maybe this was the time to talk about what cooking means to me and maybe it would inspire others, because it’s really about the journey and not the end.
I’ve handed in my
Gourmet memoir [part of a five-book deal]. It’s the anti The Devil Wears Prada. One of my other books [Comfort Me With Apples] is (fingers-crossed!) being signed with Netflix. We have a great team of women putting it together. My tweets (@RuthReichl)
started very organically. I never thought anyone would read them, except for my friends. I feel we have to take the time to be grateful for the way the rain smells, a passing cloud, the flavour of a peach. I try and find a little moment of grace every day. Some people have prayer, that’s what I have.
I can’t stand honey. But I will eat virtually everything else. If it’s in a cake, I’ll eat it because aren’t I a professional? But it really makes me gag!
I’m not a great cook. But I’m a good cook and I love the sensual nature of it. I love the aromas. There’s nothing more fun than making a pie crust – you do it with your fingers and you feel it when you put in just enough water. I love that when you are cooking you are completely in it.
I think we are in terrible trouble.
The food system is broken. People worry about climate change; they want to eat organic food. But unless we include the labourers in our calculation, we’re going to be in even worse trouble. In the US, the entire food system works on the back of undocumented workers who are horribly underpaid.
We had a golden moment
between 2000 and 2007 at
Gourmet, then, the recession. I guarantee you that of the one million subscribers to Gourmet, most did not want to hear that the tomatoes they were buying were picked by people treated like slaves. But we could and we had to. We also gave them beautiful recipes and trips to Paris. Today, food magazines have gotten scared.
When I was eight, my mother
gave me money to do the
shopping by myself. And the idea of going to the grocery store and buying anything I wanted … I still get that feeling: isn’t this great!
I never go to bed unless all the
dishes are done. My husband has a bad back, but the truth is he’s never washed a dish in his life! There’s something wonderful at the end of a party, when it’s a big mess and you know in an hour you’ll have cleared out the chaos.
My general advice to food writers is to know more about your beat
than anybody else, anywhere. Read good writers and don’t think about it as food writing. Think about is as writing about food, which is different.