Me and Ruth

[Another one for A.]

I have a confession to make. It's a tough one, but I feel you have a right to know. I just hope you don't think any less of me. Deep breath. OK, here goes.

Everyone knows that Nigella is my main squeeze. She's my girl. But lately, well, it's true, lately I've been straying. Cheating, you might even call it. Yes, I've been hooking up with Ruth.

Ruth and I actually go way back. Not as far back as Berkeley or L.A., but when she arrived in New York, I sat up and took notice. She wove narrative into her descriptions of food, service, and decor. She escaped Manhattan and headed for Korean barbeque joints in Queens. She raved, she razzed, she made restaurant reviewing exciting. She was my girl.

I read Tender at the Bone in the hammock on the wrap-around porch of the most beautiful house in the most beautiful valley in the White Mountains. I must confess, since this is a confessional kind of post, that I stole the book because I hadn't finished it when we had to leave. I'd plucked it off the eclectically well-stocked bookshelves, but I knew the woman living in the house wouldn't miss it--she was the hemp underwear type, not the truffle oil type. Though then again, if hemp underwear had been around during Ruth's Berkeley days, I bet she would have worn it.

I liked Tender at the Bone a lot. It had wacky New York family, organic Berkeley hippies, and Alice (it does have Alice, doesn't it? my purloined copy is at the moment inaccessible and memory fades). Comfort Me with Apples didn't do it for me, though. Ruth moved to L.A. and got kind of name-droppy and egotistical and eventually self-pitying. Eh.

Then she left the New York Times and moved to Gourmet and things got pretty bad between us. S and I had subscribed to Gourmet for years because it was hard-core food. When Ruth took over, it suddenly became fluffy lifestyle: look at the beautiful people having a beautiful party for their beautiful friends in their beautiful house full of beautiful appliances--oh, and they're eating some food too. Uh, no thank you. We switched to Bon Appetit when we got some kind of a subscription deal, and then the food magazines just started taking up too much space (because, you know, you have to save them all in case some day you might be inspired to go back to them and actually cook some of the recipes), so we gave them all up, though sometimes we're still tempted to subscribe to Cook's Illustrated, especially when we go to my aunt's house and read the back issues stacked up in her bathroom.

But Ruth, you're pleading, get back to Ruth, tell us what's going on.

What's going on is The Gourmet Cookbook. J ordered a copy for her and a copy for us before it even came out. It's bigger than Joy or Julia. It leaps capital letters in a single bound (old Electric Company joke, anyone?). It's the sine qua non and the ne plus ultra of the every-recipe-you-could-want generalist cookbook. If it were a man, it would be sponge-worthy (Seinfeld joke, mom, don't worry about it) (why am I flagging all my allusions? does this signal a lack of trust in my erudite readers?).

So, yeah, I've gone there. Not to the cake section--oh no, I wouldn't do that to Nigella. But to a few soups, maybe some pasta sauces, garlic bread (yeah, garlic bread--you wanna make something of it? sometimes I like to check out a recipe for those things I usually just make without even thinking about it--maybe actually have some proportions for my ingredients--and you know, that was some damn good garlic bread). I'm even contemplating a souffle.

It's been good. I've been happy. Nigella is still an important part of my life--I made another Quadruple Chocolate Loaf Cake just the other day. But sometimes a girl needs a change. And Ruth's new book about her years at the Times just came out. I'm on the list for it at the library. Maybe I'll read it with a nice slice of chocolate cake.

(S likes her too. Menage a trois?)