Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

by Ruth Reichl

gotten it wrong.

When I’d contemplated the job I’d worried about the burden of being a boss, afraid the staff would fear and resent me. But now I saw that there was another side to that coin: Nothing feels as good as building a team and empowering people, watching them grow and thrive.

But we were very different people, living in a very different time. And the magazine we were trying to make was for our moment, not theirs. “We’re having fun too,” I said to Mrs. Montant, understanding for the first time how much I’d come to love this job.

Bright, agile, and fast on her feet, she was the most competitive person I’d ever encountered. She never gave up, turned every lemon into lemonade, and obviously relished a fight. Conflict makes me so uncomfortable that I’ll do almost anything to avoid it, but Gina got under my

Truman’s words stayed with me the entire time I was at Gourmet, but as the years went on I began to see them very differently. At first I thought of them in a wistful way, hating myself for not being more Truman-like. But I just didn’t have it in me. Was it because I’m a woman, trained to be a good girl and play by the rules? Truman had related that tale with a kind of glee. Why wouldn’t he? He’d figured out how to manipulate the system. And so, although I behaved with the grudging grace of a bratty teenager, each time Gina called, I went. But in later years, when I was throwing myself wholeheartedly into the chase for advertising dollars, I wished I’d followed Truman’s example when I still had the chance. And at the end, when my primary job had become the endless quest for the money that might save the magazine, I looked back at those words with incredulity: They were proof positive of how enormously our entire world had shifted.

walked into the kitchens at 9:00 A.M., the place was packed. Word had gone out—Drew, of course—and people were desperate to help. A restaurant PR person showed up with her parents, an ad salesman from GQ came with his kids, and one of the sales reps brought his entire family. In this mad mix of food lovers, half were strangers. I channeled my inner Larry: You should send everyone who’s not staff away. There are insurance issues. What if someone cuts off his finger? What if someone sues? Then I silenced the voice: The regular rules did not apply. I cranked up the music, and as the kitchens filled with the scent of chili and chocolate, we began to dance, defiant in the face of disaster. We all knew why we were there, knew it was as much for ourselves as for the firefighters, knew we were attempting to snatch hope from the rubble of our broken city. And food was the perfect way to do it.

Gina Marie iced the cake in white and covered it with jaunty polka dots. She piled the tiny cupcakes, each a vivid bright color, into a pyramid on top. Richard took one look and put the cake on the cover, setting it against a vibrant green background. It was bright, it was cheerful, it was innocence personified. And it really caught your eye. The issue sold extremely well, so the first angry letters took us all by surprise. How dare we, subscribers wanted to know, put cupcakes on the cover? I was baffled. What were they so upset about? But as the letters continued to pour in, I began to understand that longtime readers of the magazine had decoded a message we hadn’t even known we were sending. Throughout human history, food trends have come from the top, slowly working their way down from royal tables to the modest homes of the hoi polloi. Restaurants owe their very existence to the French Revolution, which sent chefs who’d been feeding the aristocracy looking for new ways to earn money. Old-guard gourmets considered this trickle-down cuisine the natural order. But the world of food was in turmoil. For the first time in history, food trends began to work their way up from the street.