Reading List
Ruth Reichl
Food Writer and Editor
Ruth Reichl was restaurant critic of the New York Times from 1993 to 1999, where she reviewed in a series of wigs and assumed identities to test whether the food changed once the staff recognised her. It did, and the resulting reviews became famous, the one on Le Cirque especially. She then edited Gourmet until Condé Nast closed it in 2009.
Her memoirs, among them Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples and Garlic and Sapphires, treat food as a way of writing about family and appetite rather than technique. Save Me the Plums covers the Gourmet years and its ending. She has also written a novel, Delicious!, and several cookbooks.
The Art of Eating
50th Anniversary Edition
by M.F.K. Fisher
“MFK Fisher was a wonder and a huge influence, and someone I got to know pretty well at the end of her life. She had this epiphany when she went as a young bride to France and discovered food – to me, in the best possible way – and brought that back to America. What I love about her is that she’s really a wonderful writer. She’s very thoughtful about the subject of food – it’s a subject that she embraces and takes on.” — via Interview, November 2012
Diet for a Small Planet
by Frances Moore Lappé
“We didn’t pay enough attention. The industrialisation of food and the vertical integration of agriculture just galloped forward. She’s not even talking about things like confinement animal facilities. The difference is that the political food movement was a fringe movement in 1970 and now it’s very mainstream. Frances Moore Lappé was sounding a call to battle which was not picked up for three decades.” — via Interview, November 2012
The Unprejudiced Palate
Classic Thoughts on Food and the Good Life
by Angelo Pellegrini
“Pellegrini is, in many ways, my hero. He’s such an advocate for paying attention to life. There is a point where he says what a lost opportunity it is if you bring someone in to do your cooking or your gardening. There’s real joy to be found in doing these things for yourself.” — Source
The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook
by Alice B. Toklas
“It doesn’t go into great detail, but it does also convey some sense of Alice Toklas’s life with Gertrude Stein, hanging out in Paris with famous artists. For example, she has ‘‘Bass for Picasso” in there as one of her recipes. He had some specific dietary requirements I think.” — Source
Between Meals
An Appetite for Paris
by A. J. Liebling
“Yes, and he trapped rabbits. There’s also a wonderful passage about his father taking the intestines of chickens and washing them very carefully and leaving them to soak overnight. His Sunday morning ritual was cutting them into little pieces and frying them crisp and then folding them into an omelette. He talks about how Americans won’t eat these things. It’s still one of the really high hurdles for Americans.” — Source