Unexpectedly gripping, this book. You might think you won’t care that much – we admit might have had a similar thought – about what happened to a high-flying American food editor six years ago. Old news, right? Well, maybe. But this honest, beautifully written account of dealing with grief is engaging, sad, funny, honest; something anyone who’s dealt with loss can relate to. And it’s certainly not all sadness either.
When she lost her job with the shockingly unexpected closure of Gourmet magazine, cooking helped a reeling Ruth Reichl recover. My Kitchen Year shares her ups and downs, and 136 recipes “that saved my life”. Passages begin with the tweets where she shared her mood and what she was cooking.
This extract captures the days when, nine weeks after Gourmet closed, the reality of her new life hits home. Reichl had been kept frantically busy with the publicity for a book, but suddenly that, too, was done. What now?
Source: Murdoch Books
Sparkling sun. Melting ice.
A perfect day for chocolate cake.
I was sleeping in a doorway on a desolate street, huddled against the cold. The stone steps were an icy pillow against my cheek. A doorman’s boot banged against my head, and I woke up falling into freezing snow. Disoriented.
Men apparently worry that they’ll end up alone in a hotel room. Women take it one step further: our fear is that we’ll end up alone and homeless. But this morning my recurring nightmare felt like more than fear: it felt like a warning. My friends and colleagues were starting to find jobs, recover, put Gourmet behind them. For me the bad times were just beginning. I had entered the land of grief.
It hit me like a wave, a physical force that knocked me back against the sheets. Was it worse because I’d staved it off so long? Perhaps. Now the reality hit me, and the line that ran through my head was the old blues refrain, ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’. I’d forgotten that loss can be so painful, that life can feel so bleak. I looked into the future seeing endless empty days, incapable of imagining how my life would ever change.
I tried reminding myself of all the good things. Michael. Nick. My friends. The cats came padding onto the bed, pressing their cold noses against my face and gently kneading my skin with their soft paws. They became more insistent, reminding me that they were hungry, that it was time to get up and think about them.
I reluctantly pulled back the covers, got out of bed and opened a couple of tins of cat food. I made a pot of coffee, knowing I needed an antidote to the poison of self--pity. What I needed, I decided, was to bake a chocolate cake.
I emailed a few friends, asking them to tea; I was giving myself a deadline, creating insurance against backing out. I slowly started gathering ingredients.
Why a cake? Because the precision of baking demands total attention. Why this cake? Because the sheer size of it makes special demands. But most of all, because it is impossible to hold on to gloom with so much chocolate wafting its exuberant scent into every corner of the house.
The cake that cures everything Source: Murdoch Books
The sexy sweetness of bay scallops.
Such a fugitive flavour. So subtle. Raw. Sparked with shards of jalapeño.
Showered with lime.
Such a fugitive flavour. So subtle. Raw. Sparked with shards of jalapeño.
Showered with lime.
Chocolate cake is a fine cure, but it doesn’t last. I woke up the next morning still filled with the same empty feeling. Dread. I looked at my calendar, knowing there was nothing on it. I set off for the bookstore, hoping to distract myself, and ended up at the fishmonger’s instead. ‘The Peconic Bays are in!’ trumpeted the sign in the window that lured me inside.
Scallops from the Peconic Bay are tiny and as lovely as pearls. They have a remarkable sweetness that resembles nothing else that lives in the ocean. Their season is extremely fleeting, usually no more than a few weeks. But much as I yearned for them, their astonishingly high price gave me pause. For a woman with no job it was a reckless extravagance.
I bought them anyway. At home I opened the package and put a scallop in my mouth; it was like diving into the sea on a warm summer day. I couldn’t bear to cook them, so I simply heaped the pile onto a pretty plate, dusted the scallops with coarse salt (Maldon is particularly good because of its flaky, triangular shape) and added a few flecks of jalapeño pepper and a small, refreshing shower of lime juice. They were so sweet, so straightforward, so refreshing. Simple pleasures, I thought, as I tweeted my solitary meal.
I had not been expecting the returning rush of tweets. ‘Raw?’ someone
answered. ‘Do I dare?’
‘Yes!’ someone else replied, and before long we were having an online debate about uncooked seafood. Engrossed in this virtual conversation, I had the sudden realisation that this was very much like being in the Gourmet test kitchen.
It was not what I expected when I first signed up for Twitter in the autumn of 2008. I hadn’t even done it myself; two friends, astonished to discover that I was ignorant of Twitter, went online during a dinner party and signed me up. The next morning I tweeted at them, thinking it was a fine way to stay in touch with old friends. I had no inkling that this would become a way to make new ones, or that before long I would be completely engaged with a passionate group of food people whom I had never met.
Thunder rumbling.
Bitter broccoli rabe: sweetened with garlic, softened in olive oil, heaped on crispbread.
Just right.
Bitter broccoli rabe: sweetened with garlic, softened in olive oil, heaped on crispbread.
Just right.
December wore on, feeling as if it would never end. The weather was awful. Michael went into the hospital for shoulder surgery. Everything felt wrong. My mood was sour.
I trudged into freezing rain to buy some broccoli rabe; an acerbic taste, I thought, for a sullen mood. Indeed, as I began to cook, the green scent hovered at the very edge of unpleasantness.
But once I had drained the vegetable and started sautéing it with oil and garlic, the aroma morphed into something entirely different. The fragrance turned pleasant, inviting, and by the time I was piling it onto grilled bread and topping it with softly melting cheese, the broccoli rabe had become an extremely amiable mouthful. How quickly things can go from bitter to sweet. How reassuring.
Source: Murdoch Books
