Book Review: Comfort Me With Apples by Ruth Reichl

By Stephen J Miller
In the early 1970s, Reichl was living with her sculptor husband in a commune in Berkley. She worked part-time in a collective restaurant, and every so often she would freelance as a writer. She had dreams of writing the great American novel, but that didn’t work out. She also wanted a child.

When she started as the restaurant critic for New West (the west coast New Yorker) little did Ruth know she would be making contacts with the people who would invent California cuisine and put American restaurants on the international map. Even though her commune buddies hated her bourgeois job ("You’re going to spend your life telling spoiled, rich people where to eat?"), Reichl met people like Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck.

She also met famous people like Henry Winkler and Danny Kaye. And she went through bouts of marital and darer trouble, she traveled to exotic places like China and Spain, and she dealt with her ill father and crazed mother. New West became California, and Reichl was offered the lead restaurant job at The Los Angeles Times. It’s impressive how she writes with such candor. It’s interesting how her communal life morphs into a life of strange travel, odd food, and the haute cuisine elite of the US. The few recipes she includes show that she is not just a consumer but also pretty knowledgeable on how food is made.

Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
by Ruth Reichl
320 pages
ISBN-10: 0375758739
ISBN-13: 978-0375758737
Random House Trade Paperbacks, April 9, 2002
$10.17 on Amazon