Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

An Amazon Best Book of April 2019: When Gourmet magazine closed its doors, no one was more surprised than its editor-in-chief, Ruth Reichl. Reichl’s previous release, My Kitchen Year, is a cookbook of the recipes that saw her through this sudden and heartbreaking change. Save Me the Plums is a memoir of how Reichl came to be at the magazine she’d pored over as a child, how she transformed it from a stuffy relic of the old guard into a publication that embraced a new culinary era, and how Gourmet magazine met its end. Reichl is a marvelous writer, and in Save Me the Plums readers experience her exhilarating journey from New York Times restaurant critic, to the farm-to-table movement of Los Angeles, and finally to the job she never expected to get: editor-in-chief of Gourmet. Reichl’s passion for the role food plays in our lives is evident on every page, including a smattering of recipes that complement the narrative. Save Me the Plums is a book not only about a changing food culture, but also about a woman taking on new challenges, pushing boundaries, and hanging onto the sense of wonder that started her on this road to begin with. A memoir to savor. --Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review