Tender at the bone
Food critic and writer Ruth Reichl’s memoir, Tender at the bone, is a masterpiece. Through her experiences with food and cooking, the author shares her life: her childhood with a manic-depressive mother and a “resigned” father, the French boarding school in Canada where she had her first proper culinary experience, her job as a waitress in a restaurant, her experience as a cook in an ”anarchic” café, and so on.
An exceptionally gifted cook and writer, Ruth Reichl captures readers with her engaging, frank, insightful story, and her magnetic, elegant, and pleasant writing. It reads more like a novel (or a fairy tale) than a memoir, for the delicate style and the structure make it a book for you to taste – together with the recipes included – and to lose yourself into.
Funny and serious events are well balanced, creating a perfect rhythm, and leaving the reader anxious to read all of Reichl’s works. Food and cooking are the stars here, for their ability to bring people together and to help us cherish ourselves and each other. Ruth Reichl writes that she soon discovered that, “food could be a way of making sense of the world” and “I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were”.
I personally enjoyed the first part of the book the most, Reichl managed to vividly depict her childhood experiences, her curiosity and the lessons learned, starting from her relationship with her mother, the Queen of Mold, whose culinary experiments put at risk many people’s health, to her very first French dinner at a schoolmate’s house, where her amazement for the discovery of new flavours jumps off the page, highlighting Reichl’s natural poetic style: “It was just a filet of beef. But I had never tasted anything like this sauce, a mixture of red wine, marrow, butter, herbs, and mushrooms. It was like autumn distilled in a spoon.”
The recipes in the book are not just an extra, but are essential to understand everything deeper, phasing and illustrating events like photographs, letting us taste those memories and atmospheres. Tender at the bone is an exceptional book, and an essential reading for those who love food and good writing, and it’s a touchstone for aspiring professional writers.
Ruth Reichl – Devil’s Food Cake Recipe + Seven-minute frosting
Devil’s food cake
1 cup milk
¾ cup cocoa
⅓ cup white sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup brown sugar
3 eggs
¼ cup sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 cups sifted cake flour
1½ tsp. baking soda
½ tsp. salt
Seven-minute frosting
4 egg whites
1½ cups sugar
¼ cup water
1 tsp. cream of tartar
⅛ tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla extract
Steps
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour two 9-inch round cake pans.
Heat the milk in a small pan until bubbles begin to appear around the edges. Remove from the heat.
Mix the cocoa and white sugar together in a small bowl and slowly beat in the warm milk. Let cool.
Cream the butter with the brown sugar. Beat in the eggs, sour cream, and vanilla. Add the cocoa mixture.
Mix the remaining dry ingredients together and gently blend into the butter mixture. Do not overbeat.
Turn the batter into the prepared cake pans. Bake 25 to 30 minutes, or until the cake shrinks slightly from the sides of the pans and springs back when touched gently in the center. Cool on a rack for a few minutes, then turn out of the pans onto the rack. Let cool completely before frosting.
To make the frosting, combine the egg whites, sugar, water, cream of tartar, and salt in the top pan of a double boiler. Set the pan over simmering water and beat with an electric mixer for about 5 minutes, or until soft peaks form.
Remove from the heat and stir in the vanilla. Keep beating until frosting is stiff enough to spread. Use immediately. It looks like a lot, but use it all; it is enough to fill and frost the sides and top of the cake.
