Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

by Ruth Reichl

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.