DELICIOUS!, A BOOK REVIEW (Cheri)

I miss my Monterey book club, and when I say my “Monterey book club,” I mean the patients that I chatted with at the Pacific Physical Therapy counter.  We didn’t get together at the same time, and there was little in the way of baked goods and no wine, but I had a great group of rotating patient friends that shared book recommendations with me before and after their therapy appointments.

I finished Delicious! A Novel, by Ruth Reichl, during our trip to Atlanta, on a day that was too windy to get out and see local quilt shops. 

Delicious! is the first in what may be the only multi-genre trilogy out there.  Reichl was the editor of Gourmet magazine until Condé Nast ceased publishing it, surprising even her with the announcement.

I started with the last of the three books that Reichl wrote about this experience, Save Me The Plums:  My Gourmet Memoir.  I’m glad that I did, because it actually gave me background for Delicious!, which is not entirely based upon her own experience, as the Delicious! protagonist is in her 20’s, rather than 60+, but clearly treads in the emotional avenues that Reichl travelled in the aftermath of Gourmet being shut down.

Foodies are the obvious market for this book, and it starts solidly within this world.  Protagonist Billie Breslin has the ability to recollect an unlimited number of tastes and smells, thus the ability to create, identify, and recreate complex recipes at will.  Early in the book a mentor takes her on a whirlwind tour of Manhattan’s food shops that will have you calling American Airlines . . . until you remember the feeling of wearing a mask for 10 hours straight.

Fans of Robin Sloan’s San Francisco-based books Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough, or Lois and Her Adventures in the Underground Market (which I liked even better than Mr. Penumbra) should enjoy Delicious!, as it features a quest and obscure clues, like Mr. Penumbra.

Design aficionados will luxuriate in the descriptions of architecture and fashion.  If I had to pick one thing that this book does best, it is pandering to each of our senses.

Finally, there is a secondary plot line that takes place during World War II that works as well as the primary plot line.  In the same way the cable news is able to help us experience the war in Ukraine like none before, this book takes the reader to life in wartime in a way that facts and figures simply do not.  I have always thought that, after a brief overview of those facts and figures, we should teach history by reading a selection of memoir and novels.  As Reichl says in this book:  “History is the story we tell the future about the past.”

The last of Reichl’s post-Gourmet “trilogy” that I will be reading is actually the second that she published:  My Kitchen Year:  136 Recipes That Saved My Life:  A Cookbook.  If the first and third books are any indication, I would enjoy its memoir fragments even if I couldn’t cook the recipes!