My Kitchen Year - Ruth Reichl

I'm not a foodie & I don't read foodie books. I enjoy cooking, especially baking, but I don't long to live in a Tuscan farmhouse, growing my own kale & keeping heritage chickens. I'd heard of Ruth Reichl & read admiring reviews of her earlier books but hadn't been tempted to pick them up. This book is a little different. The subtitle is 136 recipes that saved my life, & My Kitchen Year is a beautiful blend of memoir, recovery story & cookbook.

Ruth Reichl was the editor of Gourmet magazine, probably the most prestigious magazine about food & cooking. In 2009, Reichl had been editor for 10 years when the owners, Condé Nast, abruptly decided to close the magazine down. It was October, the December issue of the magazine was at the printers, Reichl was completing work on a TV series & promoting the latest in a line of Gourmet cookbooks when the axe fell. At first, she just kept working, there was nothing else she could do. She had a book tour organised & although the last thing she wanted to do was go out & talk about Gourmet magazine, she couldn't let down the bookstores & the readers who wanted to meet her. In between commitments, Reichl retreated to her kitchens, in New York & the country house in upstate New York where she & her husband spent weekends & holidays. After clearing her desk & completing the book tour, the reality of losing her job hits.

On the first day of my new life I woke, alone, to frosted windows in New York City. Michael was out of town, and for a moment I thought gratefully that I had no responsibilities, nowhere to go. Then the empty day rose before me, and I realised that that was literally true. I had nowhere to go. What would I do with myself? I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door.

Reichl's husband suggests that they might try living year round in the country. If Reichl doesn't get another job, they'll have to sell one of their homes. She realises how much she has missed cooking meals that aren't just thrown together after a long day in the office. She rediscovers New York through walking, visiting different districts & trying out new ingredients. She visits the farmers markets near their country home & finds herself creating a meal in her head as she looks at what's on offer.

This book almost convinced me that Twitter could be a worthwhile activity. Reichl discovers a whole new community of friends on Twitter (some of her tweets are reproduced in the book). The power is cut off at Reichl's country house for several days during the winter, just as she had made some bread dough.

The storm raged but I didn't mind; I was feeling more optimistic. What I did mind was that the electricity had deserted us while my dough was rising, and I didn't know what to do. It might be days until I had a working oven. Should I throw the dough out?
I tossed the question into the Twitterverse and the responses came back. 'Don't throw it out!' at least a dozen people tweeted. 'Just keep punching the dough down'.
Convinced that it was a lost cause, I did it anyway. What did I have to lose? The electricity was out for three days, and by day two I was noticing a change. The dough was capturing wild yeasts with great abandon, and before long it began to smell like fine champagne. I could hardly wait for the power to be restored.

One of her former colleagues on Gourmet had suggested she write a cookbook & the idea appeals to her new self. She realises she would rather be at home in her kitchen than eating out at fancy restaurants on an expense account.

For the past six months, cooking had been my lifeline, and I was grateful for everything I had learned in the kitchen. Most cookbooks, I thought as I reached for an orange and began to squeeze it for juice, are in search of perfection, an attempt to constantly re-create the same good dishes. But you're not a chef in your own kitchen, trying to please paying guests. You're a traveller, following your own path, seeking adventure. I wanted to write about the fun of cooking, encourage people to take risks. Alone in the kitchen you are simply a cook, free to do anything you want. If it doesn't work out - well, there's always another meal.

When Reichl breaks her foot after stumbling in a restaurant in LA, she has a lot of time to think.
She consoles herself for not being able to cook for weeks by thinking about recipes & encouraging her husband to cook. I also love that she has two cats who take advantage of her immobility to make themselves comfortable. I think all cat owners have experience of this! She is writing an Introduction to a new edition of Elizabeth David's recipes & compares David's influence on English food to American writers like Julia Child & James Beard. As the year turns to autumn once more, Reichl considers a new project.

Summer over, cookbook done, I was back in a state of anxiety. I lay fretfully in bed at night. knowing what I should be doing and yet reluctant to commit.
I have always wanted to write a novel. I'm an avid reader, and fiction is my first love; the ability to inhabit someone else's space, even for a little while, makes life so much richer. I've dreamt of writing a novel since I was very small, but I'd always put it off, finding all the reasons why I couldn't do it. I had a job, a child, no time. Now my child was grown, my job was over and my days belonged to me. The time had finally come. Surely it couldn't be that difficult?
But the middle of the night is no time to look for answers. I got out of bed and went into the kitchen. I wanted some hot dark fudge poured over cold white ice-cream, and I knew that just stirring up the sauce would improve my mood.

Apart from anything, the book itself is beautiful. The book follows Reichl through the year after Gourmet closed down. The photography by Mikkel Vang is just gorgeous. The evocation of the seasons through food & scenery is luscious. Following the seasons from the first misery of unemployment in autumn to a place of acceptance & recovery at the end of the following summer is a very effective way of structuring the story. As expected from a writer as renowned as Reichl, the text is intimate & honest, at times it's very moving. This is a memoir about what it's like to lose a much-loved job, a job that defined who you are. It's about the fear of not finding another job at all (Reichl is in her 60s), & what that would mean financially as well as personally. We don't all have the high profile career of Reichl or her privileges but we can all imagine what it would be like to be suddenly unemployed & trying to work out what comes next. It's also a book about food, our relationship to food & the joy of slowing down & really looking at what we eat, where it comes from & the way we cook. The recipes are classics, new variations on old favourites & ideas prompted by new discoveries. My Kitchen Year is a book about food & cooking for non-foodies, a memoir of the grief of unemployment & a gorgeously produced coffee table book of photographs & recipes. I enjoyed it very much.

Hot Chocolate - Alice Castle

Bella Renfrew loves chocolate. She also loves her husband, Tom, her children, Oliver & Madeleine & her job as a features writer on a major daily newspaper. But, chocolate occupies Bella's thoughts most of the time. Her handbag is crammed with emergency supplies, her desk drawer has more chocolate wrappers than pens. Chocolate is a comforter, a consoler & a refuge from all the issues Bella is avoiding in her life. Returning to work after Oliver's birth had been tough. Bella loves her career but journalism is a cutthroat world & she yearns to be at home with her baby. Her best friends Louise & Pete are glad to see her but the boss from Hell, Denise, is not so welcoming. Denise sends Bella on ridiculous, time-wasting assignments with no thought for the routines of children & nannies, obviously hoping that Bella will give up her career & become a full-time mother.

When Bella falls pregnant a second time, Denise is incredulous & very disapproving. On her return from her second maternity leave, Bella finds that her desk has been taken over by Denise's daughter, Gemma, & her own workspace is crammed in next to the photocopier. Determined to regain her spot in the office pecking order, Bella scores an interview with Jane Champion, the new Home Secretary. Champion has some pretty conservative moral views about single mothers & when Bella makes an embarrassing discovery about the Home Secretary's past & gets a quote that will push everything else off the front page, she is triumphant. Denise is grudgingly complementary & Bella's career prospects are looking up. Unfortunately the scoop unravels due to an unfortunate chocolate incident & the Home Office denies everything. Bella is sacked & suddenly she becomes the story. Forced to hide out while her former colleagues stake out her home, she has to reassess her future.

Tom Renfrew is a political journalist & has been offered the position of Europe Correspondent, based in Brussels. Less than enthusiastic about the move at first, once Bella realises that Belgium is the home of chocolate & that she has no hope of getting another job in London, her mood rapidly changes. Tom is amazed by her backflip but accepts the inevitable & the family move to Belgium. Bella & the children love Brussels. Making friends among the ex-pat community, Bella also explores everything Brussels has to offer the chocolate lover. Discovering a chocolatier, Clara's Chocolat Chaud, run by a grumpy woman who nevertheless makes the most divine chocolates, opens a new path for Bella. Unfortunately she also realizes that her marriage is heading for trouble.

Tom is ten years older than Bella &, although he's charming & handsome, he could also flirt for England. Bella has never doubted his love for her but, as her confidence drops & her waist expands, she starts to wonder whether Tom's flirting has moved to another level. Suddenly he's never home, dashing from one meeting & conference to another & conveniently forgetting to mention his gorgeously slim, blonde assistant, Vanessa. Bella has also met Fabrice (in the queue of a local bakery where she buys almond croissants every morning, naturally) & her romantic daydreams about him cause her to question her marriage. It takes another crisis to reveal exactly what Bella & Tom want.

Hot Chocolate is a lovely, warm, funny book. I don't believe anyone could eat as much chocolate as Bella & live to tell the tale but I admit to a few chocolate cravings while reading. Chocolate isn't the only food mentioned in the book though. There are many other scenes of delicious cooking & foodie delights. Bella is a warm character, loving her life as a mother but starting to have some doubts about the worth of her work as a journalist. Moving to Brussels is the beginning of a new life for Bella in more ways than one. I loved reading about Brussels too, a city I know very little about. The only other novel I can think of that I've read that was set in Brussels was Charlotte Brontё’s Villette.

Discovering this book was another little bit of serendipity. When I reviewed John Barlow's thriller, Hope Road, I had a look at his blog & he'd just reviewed Hot Chocolate. I thought it sounded like a lovely read but was disappointed to find that it was only available for the Kindle & wasn't a physical book at all. I then discovered Alice's blog, Dulwich Divorcee, emailed her & asked if she could send me a copy for review. She wasn't able to send me an ePub copy but I read it in Word. If you do have a Kindle, you can download Hot Chocolate at Amazon.

Scoop - Evelyn Waugh

I’ve read quite a few of  Evelyn Waugh’s novels over the years. Brideshead Revisited at the time of the 1980s TV series, of course. Then, I listened to Christian Rodska read the Sword of Honour trilogy audio books & loved them. A couple of years ago, I read Put Out More Flags, a very funny novel about a scoundrel trying to avoid war service. Now, I’ve read Scoop, a satire about journalism that, unfortunately, is still relevant today, even though it was published in 1938.

The 1930s was an era of newspaper barons running their newspaper empires as if they were a private propaganda bureau for their favourite political party. In Scoop, Lord Copper is the proprietor of the Megalopolitan Newspaper Corporation, publisher of the Daily Beast. When Julia Stitch, wife of an MP, wants to help out her friend, impoverished radical writer, John Courteney Boot, she vamps Lord Copper at a luncheon party into offering him a job as foreign correspondent on the Beast. Unfortunately, by the time the directive reaches Salter, the foreign editor, the name of the new correspondent is known only as Boot. As they already have a writer on staff of that name, William Boot, Salter decides he must be the man however odd it seems.

William Boot writes a nature column from his dilapidated estate deep in the English countryside. However, no one questions the Chief, so Boot is inveigled into accepting the job of going out to Ishmaelia, an African country seemingly on the brink of civil war. Boot sets off on the three week journey, falling in with reporters from other newspapers along the way. When he arrives, he finds that nothing is happening & the whole civil war seems to be no more than a rumour. The government of Ishmaelia is corrupt, but no more so than any other & the journalists spend their time sending back local colour reports to their editors & putting everything on their expense accounts. Waugh’s vision of journalism is breathtakingly cynical. When a correspondent has a reputation for accuracy, like the legendary Wendell Jakes, anything they write is believed,

Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window – you know. 
Well, they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution... Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny, and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution underway, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the Press for you. 
They gave Jakes the Nobel Peace Prize for his harrowing descriptions of the carnage – but that was just colour stuff.

William Boot is an innocent abroad. He’d much rather be at home with his eccentric family, watching the badgers in the woods & writing lyrical descriptions of the natural world. But, he’s taken on a job & he tries his best to find out what’s happening in Ishmaelia even though the bureaucracy does its best to run him around in circles. He falls in love with a beautiful but rapacious girl, Katchen, whose husband has disappeared into the country & left her penniless except for a suitcase full of geological samples that she persuades Boot to buy from her.

When all the other journalists are taken off on a supervised tour of the so-called hotspots, Boot stays behind & inadvertently stumbles across the scoop of his life. Scoop is a bitingly funny novel about the power of the Press although I found it depressing that so little has changed in the 70 years since the book was first published.

Evelyn Waugh is set for a revival this year. Penguin are about to begin publishing a lovely hardback collected edition of all Waugh’s books, fiction & non-fiction, in order of publication. I’m especially excited about book no 1, his biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite painter & poet, first published in 1928. As I wrote here a few weeks ago, 2011 is shaping up as a year full of wonderful reading experiences if you love early 20th century English fiction. The Letters of Nancy Mitford & Evelyn Waugh have recently been reprinted as a Penguin Modern Classic & I have it sitting temptingly on my tbr shelves. This could be the year I read more Waugh as well as more Mitford.

NYRB Reading Week - Jessica Mitford

It’s NYRB Reading Week & I haven’t chosen any of the NYRB titles sitting on the tbr shelves. I borrowed one from the library instead. I’m continuing my Mitford theme this year with Jessica Mitford’s Poison Penmanship : the gentle art of muckraking. This is a collection of articles Mitford wrote for various American magazines. Most of the articles come under the heading of muckraking, “one who seeks out and publishes scandals and the like about prominent people”, as Mitford quotes in her Introduction from the OED.

Mitford was first called Queen of the Muckrakers by Time magazine after her article on the Famous Writers School was published. This is one of the most interesting articles in the book. The Famous Writers School was a company that put big, full-page ads in magazines & newspapers to sell their correspondence courses on how to be a freelance writer. They exaggerated the ease of becoming a freelance & how much money one could earn. Their door-to-door salesmen used hard sell tactics & they engaged well-known writers to lend their names to the ads. It turned out that these writers had very little to do with the company, apart from accepting large fees for the use of their name & photo. They didn’t teach the courses, read the submissions & hadn’t even read the course material. The courses were expensive & most of the students never completed the assignments. They were dissatisfied with the lack of direction & personal contact. Not surprising when each assignment would be corrected by a different person, using standard phrases & jargon from a script they followed.

Mitford’s article was published in Atlantic Magazine, but only after it had been rejected by several other journals because they were afraid of losing the advertising revenue they made from the Famous Writers School. When the article was published, the reaction was immediate. Stock in the company plunged & their profits dropped dramatically. A wonderful example of the power of the Press to alert consumers to a scam & expose crooks. Even more interesting than the articles are the Comments Mitford adds at the end of each one. She sets the article in context & examines the impact the article had, what she would have done differently, & how she went about researching & structuring the piece.

The most famous article in the collection is St Peter, Don’t You Call Me, which is about the funeral business. This led to the bestselling book, The American Way of Death. The article examines the way funeral directors take advantage of grieving families to make a profit. There are many wonderful examples of the euphemistic language used to describe coffins, shrouds, embalming techniques. It’s funny & gruesome at the same time. It’s also shocking to realise how often funeral directors would discreetly find out how much families could afford to pay & tailor the costs so they would exactly match the amount of the insurance payout or funeral plan fund. Mitford’s article led to a backlash against unnecessarily expensive funerals & the growth of co-operative societies that provided a service while keeping costs down.

In the Introduction, Mitford explains how to research such articles. The importance of getting hold of trade journals for background information (this was crucial in the funeral article), compiling a list of questions ranging from Kind to Cruel when interviewing potentially hostile subjects, how to structure the article & avoid libel actions. Poison Penmanship could still be used as a textbook for journalism students today, although, as it was originally published in the 1970s, they would have to take account of the internet as a research tool. I read Jessica Mitford’s Letters earlier this year & it was fascinating to read the articles she wrote about in her letters. It enriched the experience of reading this book so much. I’d recommend the letters to anyone who loves reading other people’s letters but they also gave a lot of insight into the process of researching & writing these articles as she often wrote to family & friends while she was working on them. Poison Penmanship is an insight into radical journalism in the 60s & 70s when it was perhaps easier to enrage & shock the public about injustice & dishonesty than it is today.

You can find all the details of NYRB Reading Week on The Literary Stew & Coffeespoons blogs, where you’ll also find links to lots of other reviews of NYRB titles. It's not too late to join in if you have NYRB books on the tbr shelves, and there are prizes to be won for posting a review. Thank you to Mrs B & Honey for hosting the Reading Week.