Tender at the Bone comes before Comfort me with Apples, which I actually read first. Oops...oh well. I enjoyed Comfort Me quite a bit and so I was delighted when I found Tender at Half Price Books earlier this year.
In Tender at the Bone, Reichl examines at her formulative years and follows her growing love of food as a small child and later an adolescent. She starts off the book with a very witty tale of how she would save people from her mothers cooking and very questionable food safety habits. She felt it her duty to protect these unassuming guests from a gastronomic mishap.
Later we follow Ruth to Canada, where she is dumped unceremoniously in a French boarding school because her mother thought she wanted to learn French. Here she befriends a rather wealthy schoolmate, whose Father discovers Ruth loves to eat. This girls parents only eat together rarely, but now Ruth finds herself there nearly every weekend and holiday dining with the parents. She does learn French in the meantime...
...and so the chapters go. We follow her through her first job, college, marriage, a trip to Europe, and home again. We follow her through food markets, her mother's social events, restaurants, and those people Ruth makes food for.
Tender is just a delight to read. Ruth's family is rather dysfunctional and her interactions with her mother and father are witty, wry, sad, and humorous all at the same time. And through it all winds the foods she eats, the food she makes and those people in all sorts of food industries. I recommend this book if you like reading about people and food.
In Tender at the Bone, Reichl examines at her formulative years and follows her growing love of food as a small child and later an adolescent. She starts off the book with a very witty tale of how she would save people from her mothers cooking and very questionable food safety habits. She felt it her duty to protect these unassuming guests from a gastronomic mishap.
Later we follow Ruth to Canada, where she is dumped unceremoniously in a French boarding school because her mother thought she wanted to learn French. Here she befriends a rather wealthy schoolmate, whose Father discovers Ruth loves to eat. This girls parents only eat together rarely, but now Ruth finds herself there nearly every weekend and holiday dining with the parents. She does learn French in the meantime...
...and so the chapters go. We follow her through her first job, college, marriage, a trip to Europe, and home again. We follow her through food markets, her mother's social events, restaurants, and those people Ruth makes food for.
Tender is just a delight to read. Ruth's family is rather dysfunctional and her interactions with her mother and father are witty, wry, sad, and humorous all at the same time. And through it all winds the foods she eats, the food she makes and those people in all sorts of food industries. I recommend this book if you like reading about people and food.
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