Tender At The Bone
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
Fast, funny, always near the knuckle.The best kind of food writing - it makes you hungry' Elizabeth Luard'While all good food writers are humorous.few are so riotously, effortlessly entertaining as Ruth Reichl..[She] is also witty, fair-minded, brave, and a wonderful writer' New York Times Review of Books At an early age, Ruth Reichl discovered that 'food could be a way of making sense of the world. If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.' Her deliciously crafted memoir, Tender at the Bone, is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal measure by a passion for food, unforgettable people and the love of tales well told. Beginning with Reichl's mother, the notorious food poisoner known as the Queen of the Mold, Reichl introduces us to the fascinating characters who shaped her world and her tastes, from the gourmand Monsieur du Croix, who served Reichl her first soufflé, to those at her politically correct table in Berkeley who championed the organic food revolution in the 1970s. Spiced with Reichl's infectious humour and sprinkled with her favourite recipes, Tender at the Bone is a witty and compelling chronicle of a culinary sensualist's coming-of-age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reichl discovered early on that since she wasn't "pretty or funny or sexy," she could attract friends with food instead. But that initiative isn't likely to secure her an audience for her chaotic, self-satisfied memoirs, although her restaurant reviews in the New York Times are popular. Reichl's knack for describing food gives one a new appreciation for the pleasures of the table, as when she writes here: "There were eggplants the color of amethysts and plates of sliced salami and bresaola that looked like stacks of rose petals left to dry." But when she is recalling her life, she seems unable to judge what's interesting. Raised in Manhattan and Connecticut by a docile father who was a book designer and a mother who suffered from manic depression, Reichl enjoyed such middle-class perks as a Christmas in Paris when she was 13 and high school in Canada to learn French. But her mother was a blight, whom Reichl disdains to the discomfort of the reader who wonders if she exaggerates. The author studied at the University of Michigan, earned a graduate degree in art history, married a sculptor named Doug, lived in a loft in Manhattan's Bowery and then with friends bought a 17-room "cottage" in Berkeley, Calif., which turned into a commune so self-consciously offbeat that their Thanksgiving feast one year was prepared from throwaways found in a supermarket dumpster. Seasoning her memoir with recipes, Reichl takes us only through the 1970s, which seems like an arbitrary cutoff, and one hopes the years that followed were more engaging than the era recreated here.
