Seemingly scared of nothing and brassy as anything it’s Ruth Reichl’s "Delicious!" that really throws a punch. She is noted for her non-fiction as an American chef, food writer and editor, and in addition to decades as a food critic, she did mainly spend her time at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times (plus she wrote many cookbooks). And so this is her first work of fiction, a brave and fearless attempt if anything. A masterful story teller that has you eating up every page with your snacks as you cannot get enough of this umami kind of tasty delight. It’s delicious, what can I say.
In this novel it’s Billie Breslin (yes like the Ace Hotel restaurant) who runs off from California and comes east to New York who wins your heart. She comes for a job, at a food magazine of course, and begins a new life only to find an old life she never imagined could exist. Of course she’s running from something, including her family, and the reader discovers that quite quickly and the pain of cooking for our now heroine is most perfectly placed. But that is not all that is interesting in this novel.
The story is also very much about New York - she works in a food shop downtown over weekends (in Little Italy), the characters are quintessential New Yorkers that you know from the streets and subways. Billy of course then finds letters in the magazine’s library that lead her deeper into the city she now calls home. The letters between Lucy, a young girl in World War II, and James Beard capture a certain essence about destiny and finding your feet first.
The story is really about reinvention, about finding yourself and how the past (no matter how clichéd it seems) will always come to find you. It’s a fairy tale really with the heroine being the hero, a man taking on a second fiddle part – the rise of Hillary feminist values really is everywhere. But that’s the perfect approach for the book, a novel about deliciousness – not just in food but in relationships too. Some may find this slightly trite (and could call it a little sweet) but it is worth sinking your teeth into for the afternoon sometime during this heat wave whilst eating something equally dare-I-say-it delicious.
Ruth Reichl
$17.07
Random House
