More Reading for Comfort
After reading Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table, I can’t help being jealous of Ruth Reichl on many levels. She constructed a career out of eating and writing about it and has tasted her way across France, had secret cooking lessons in China, and has dined at most of the restuarants in California and New York. Even more impressive, her path to becoming the food writing guru she is today crossed those of other foodie masters: M.F.K. Fischer, Alice Waters, Wolfgang Puck, and the maker of my favorite sausage–Bruce Aidells.
But while she’s having all these adventures and her career is blossoming, the rest of her life is unravelling. Her first husband, whom we met in Tender at the Bone, also has work success that leads to travel and then giving away his heart, so that she embarks on her own affair, and meanwhile, her beloved father is dying. But her passion for food begins to translate into passion for life, and, in turn, the opposite becomes true. There’s a Like Water, For Chocolate aspect to the book in that when she cooks certain dishes and includes the recipe, the ingredient that she leaves unwritten is her current emotion. Like making the Fall Mushroom Soup to fill the void for her and her mother or the Big Chocolate Cake into which she poured all of her love for the man who would become more… her creations become an extension of how she feels, and you can almost taste them through the pages.
(p.s. I made that mushroom soup and it’s quite delicious, even if you’re not grieving.)
Here’s my main complaint, and it has nothing to do with the writing. Of the trio, I still enjoyed Garlic and Sapphires the most, but I think it would have had even more power if read in sequence. I wish I had read Ruth’s three novels in the order they were written because I think you can chart her personal and professional growth through their progression, each one improving with more experience, building on the last. Just as a recipe tastes better the more comfortable you are making it….
Image source: Farley Walker
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