Title: Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

Author: Ruth Reichl

Publisher: Random House 2019

Genre: Memoir

Pages: 269

Rating: 4/5 stars

Reading Challenges: 

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America’s oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone’s boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?

This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl’s leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media—the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down.

Another Anne Bogel Summer Reading List pick. I’m slowly working my way through the entire list for this summer and most of the picks have been enjoyable. I haven’t followed Reichl’s career, but I loved reading about her time at the editor of Gourmet magazine. I was fascinated by her transition of jobs and quick learning I never knew exactly what an editor-in-chief of a magazine did, and this book was a great lesson. However, my favorite parts were when she dove into food itself. Now that I’ve read this one, I feel like I need to read Reichl’s other works.

Next up on the TBR pile: