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Reichl knows what we talk about when we talk about cooking

by Jeanne McDonald

I am a woman who hates to cook. While my friends scour the Internet and the cooking channel for recipes and hungrily await the next issue of Gourmet, I prefer to spend my time gardening, writing, or reading. When holidays approach, I am consumed with guilt, worrying about the appetizers, cookies, and crown roasts I should be making, and while Martha Stewart's head dances with visions of sugarplums, mine is throbbing with nightmares of all the time I will be spending in the kitchen and wondering whether the brown sugar and Crisco I bought last year, but never used, will still be safe to cook with.

Worse, cooking is tied to two other horrific activities—grocery shopping and cleaning up. The only good part is the eating. Shopping is particularly grueling, mainly because, like Holden Caulfield, I worry over the basic mechanics of things. I am consumed with the mystery of who keeps the supermarket shelves in order and who replaces whatever I take from the perfectly aligned rows of goods. Then I start fretting that overhead, someone might be monitoring cameras and reporting to an unseen recorder: "Aisle 9. Time-saver. Tall woman with red sweater. She's picked up a Bisquick." Obviously, they know I am taking the easy way out.

Don't misunderstand me. I've actually been complimented on some dishes I have cooked. It's the time and effort I begrudge, when the food is eaten so quickly and then there are the dishes to face.

Living among culinary devotees is hard enough. Now, to make matters worse, comes a woman who is not only the consummate cook, but the consummate writer. Her name is Ruth Reichl, and she has just published the second in a planned trilogy of books about cooking. The cover of the first, Tender at the Bone (Random House, $24.95), is a photo of Reichl taken by her father in 1955. She's only a little girl, for heaven's sake, and she's cooking at a range top that comes up almost to her shoulders. Reichl quickly explains her early forays into cooking as a survival tactic, her recourse to the bizarre culinary efforts of her mother, a manic-depressive whom Reichl labels "The Queen of Mold."

The first book takes Reichl from childhood through college, marriage, and life in a commune to a job as a chef. The second, Comfort Me with Apples (Random House, $24.95), picks up with her job as a restaurant critic (on her first assignment, her credit card is rejected) and follows her meteoric rise to international recognition. Dispersed throughout her passionate and hilarious accounts are mouth-watering recipes and descriptions of food so appealing, you almost expect to see grease spots and gravy drippings on the pages, or at least your own drool. The tea is "achingly sweet and filled with mint," spicy pork kidneys are like "eating fragrant clouds" and the meat in sea-turtle soup is "like velvet hugging bones as smooth as stones."

How Reichl survived her childhood is a breathtaking story in itself. Her parents went out most nights, leaving their small daughter alone in their New York apartment. Then, when she was 13, without warning, her mother picked her up after school one snowy day, whisked her to Canada, and left her at a girl's school with the terse explanation: "You were the one who said you wanted to learn French." When she was two, her father drove her to her first day of pre-school at 7 a.m. When he discovered that the school didn't open until 8 a.m., and no teachers were present, he left Ruthie on the swing on the playground and drove off to an early meeting in the city.

Somehow, Reichl managed to find comfort in food, and somehow she always managed to be saved by guardian angels, each of whom, it seems, taught her something new about cooking. Formerly food critic at The New York Times and food editor and restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times, she is now editor-in-chief at Gourmet and has emerged a self-cooked woman, miraculously whole and talented. Some of the recipes sprinkled throughout her books are stunningly simple, others are excruciatingly complicated. But there is not a single word I would have skipped on these pages. And when I finished, I felt comfortably satisfied, as if I had eaten a rich and sumptuous meal.

Rating: Well done.