Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (5/5)
by Ruth Reichl
My encounter with Ruth Reichl started when I picked up History in A Glass: Sixty Years of WIne Writing from Gourmet which she edited. I then knew that she was the restaurant critic for The New York Times in the 90s.
I’ve not read her critiques but she was apparently very powerful. This book tells the tale of her job: sometimes the stories are unreal, like when she employed disguises and characters while reviewing. Often, they are insightful, displaying her firm culinary grasp. Occasionally, they tell a common story of a woman struggling in a man’s world (both in the newspaper and in the restaurants). All is written in a straight-forward, detailed, yet hilarious and smooth language. They’re always fun to read.
The book contains snippets of her columns so I get a glimpse of how she writes. I love the way she describes the dining experience. It’s part story-telling, part critique, and part essay. In the age where, on one spectrum, wine can be dissected to smell like manure and the other, food is only described superficially as ‘delish’, finding this kind of food critique is like tasting a well executed dish. As Reichl describes the pleasure of eating something really good, while I was reading her book, I savoured each sentence and discovered new nuances and flavours, searching for more in every line. Before I knew it, the whole book was gone.
She also inserts a few of her favourite recipes and this garners a five from me. Her recipes are excellent not only in terms of technical accuracy but also in the enthusiasm. Her Spaghetti Carbonara recipe stuck with me and provoked a deep craving that I had to try it immediately. The result was much better than the Cordon Bleu Cookbook on Pasta which requires eight eggs instead of two for the same amount of pasta!
Read it for the insightful stories of being a restaurant critic. Read it for the delicious reviews. Read it for the mouth-watering recipes. Just don’t read it in the middle of the night.
