Ruth Reichl Audiobooks

Save Me the Plums recounts the Gourmet years, by the critic who edited the magazine

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Who is Ruth Reichl?

Ruth Reichl, born in 1948, is an American chef, food writer and editor whose career reads like a map of modern food journalism. She spent two decades as a food critic, chiefly at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, then moved to the editor’s chair as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. Along the way she has been culinary editor for the Modern Library, a co-producer and host of PBS food programmes, and a six-time winner of the James Beard Foundation Award.

She is as much a memoirist as a critic. Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires and Not Becoming My Mother chart a life lived at the table, while Save Me the Plums, published in 2019, recounts the Gourmet years. Add Gourmet Today, a cookbook of over 1,000 recipes, a novel, Delicious!, and My Kitchen Year, written in the year after Gourmet closed, and the result is one of food writing’s most complete careers.

Ruth Reichl in audiobooks

Food writing lives or dies on voice, and Reichl’s is one of the most assured in the business – which is why she translates so naturally to audio. This catalogue carries Save Me the Plums, her memoir of the Gourmet years, and it offers the pleasures her reputation promises: a critic’s palate, an editor’s eye and a memoirist’s honesty about what a life in food costs and gives.

For UK listeners it doubles as a backstage tour of American food media at its most glamorous. Best enjoyed with snacks within reach; listening hungry is a genuine risk.