Reichl - My kitchen year : 136 recipes that saved my life

Copyright 2015 by Ruth Reichl

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

R ANDOM H OUSE and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA
Reichl, Ruth.
My kitchen year : 136 recipes that saved my life / Ruth Reichl.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-4000-6998-9ISBN 978-0-679-60522-5 (eBook)
1. Seasonal cooking. I. Title.
TX714.R4438 2015
641.564dc23
2014029197

randomhousebooks.com

Photographs by Mikkel Vang

v3.1_r1
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Mysterious misty morning. Crows wheeling, cawing. Storm is on the way. Coffee black. Eggs fried. Toast burnt. Gourmets over. What now?

In the fall of 2009, Id been the editor in chief of Gourmet for ten years. Advertising revenues were falling throughout the magazine industry, and we were no exception. But despite the recession it never crossed my mind that Cond Nast might close the magazine. Gourmet was a sixty-nine-year-old institution; many people had lifetime subscriptions. We were constantly hearing from readers who had grown up reading the magazine, learned to cook from it, and continued to stand by the mailbox each month, eager for its arrival.

My response to the challenge of publishing in a recession was to do what the industry calls expanding the brand; by 2009 we had two shows on public television and a string of books. I was, in fact, in Seattle promoting our just-published doorstop of a cookbook when I received an ominous call from my boss, Tom Wallace.

Forget about Gourmet Today, he said. You have to come back to New York. I was in a restaurant, being interviewed by a reporter, and I stepped outside to take the call.

Is something wrong? I asked.

We need you in the office was all he would say. I took the first plane out and was at 4 Times Square the following morning, standing with my staff, when we learned that Gourmet was history.

It took a while for the enormity to sink in: the next day I left for Kansas City. Everyone else was packing up, but I was obliged to go back to promoting the cookbook. When I wasnt doing that, I was working on our television show Adventures with Ruth, which was in postproduction. I had no time to process the events, but as I traveled from one town to the next, people told me, often in tears, how much they were going to miss the magazine. What I thought about most, though, was how much I was going to miss my Gourmet family. And how badly Id let them down. Wed spent ten years together, trying to make a magazine that mattered, but now the staff was scattering across the country. It was over. Americas first epicurean magazine had survived for almost seventy years, and it had closed on my watch.

Still, it was not until the book tour ended that I fully grasped how much my life had changed. Home again, I stared at an empty calendar. My husband, son, and family were immensely supportive, and I was surrounded by close friends. Compared to those of many others, my problems were small. I was in good health. I was not about to starve. But I was sixty-one years old, and I wasnt sure Id ever get another job. I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life and no notion how wed pay the bills.

And so I did what I always do when Im confused, lonely, or frightened: I disappeared into the kitchen.

It had been so long since Id had time to really cook. For years Id been sticking to familiar foods, rushing home from work to throw quick meals together for my family. Now I began roaming New York, exploring ethnic neighborhoods. On weekends I went upstate to our country house and haunted farmers markets, coming home laden with unfamiliar ingredients.

Looking back, I see that I was repeating what Id done when I graduated from college. Back then I was working in a job I hated, and I had no clue about the direction my life should take. Miserable, I began rambling the city, discovering new neighborhoods and collecting recipes from butchers, cheesemongers, and ethnic shopkeepers. I wrote a cookbook trying to explain how much cooking meant to me. I was twenty-two, and Mmmmm: A Feastiary is a document of its time, a rollicking period piece that reflects what was happening in 1970, when we were just beginning to discover that there was more to American food than hamburgers and hot dogs. I was not a trained chef; Id never taken a culinary course, and my knife skills were pathetic. But I was an omnivorous eater, a question asker, and a very curious cook.

Fast-forward forty years. In the intervening time Ive worked in restaurants, written about food, been a restaurant critic and the food editor of a major newspaper. Ive spent time in kitchens all over the world. Ive watched food become an important part of popular culture. But two things havent changed. My knife skills are still pathetic. And I still believe, to the core of my being, that when you pay attention, cooking becomes a kind of meditation.