Save Me the Plums by Ruth Reichl

Title: Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

Author: Ruth Reichl

Publisher: Random House 2019

Genre: Memoir

Pages: 269

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: 

*When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America’s oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone’s boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?

This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl’s leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media—the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down.*

Another Anne Bogel Summer Reading List pick. I’m slowly working my way through the entire list for this summer and most of the picks have been enjoyable. I haven’t followed Reichl’s career, but I loved reading about her time at the editor of Gourmet magazine. I was fascinated by her transition of jobs and quick learning I never knew exactly what an editor-in-chief of a magazine did, and this book was a great lesson. However, my favorite parts were when she dove into food itself. Now that I’ve read this one, I feel like I need to read Reichl’s other works.

Next up on the TBR pile: