The title of this book, Tender at the Bone, is quite brilliant. As the chef’s description of a roast that is perfectly cooked, it gets to the junction of a memoir told by an author who is renowned for her expertise in the kitchen.
The narrative pacing is deliberate and smart. It would after all be tiresome to start off with the lurid notion that this is a daughter’s story about her manic depressive mother. Instead, Reichl takes us through scenes in which the mother serves rotten food, combines random ingredients, turns on the gas and leaves the room in search of a match and impulsively buys whatever is a bargain. We get a strong sense that this is a narrator with the dawning sense that something is amiss. The big reveal is not, however, until page 51, and by then it is not melodramatic or overstated at all. The reader has “lived” the “disaster…always simmering just below the surface” with the author – and had the opportunity to ”bond” with the character of the mother, reminded that mental illness doesn’t obviate the love for a family member. Reichl’s treatment of the mother character is at once funny, tragic and tender.
Another striking feature of Reichl’s narrative comes as we smell, taste and gaze at all that she takes in (although the reader cannot help but debate the inclusion and placement of nineteen recipes in eighteen chapters). Within a page or two we are apt to have a densely packed olefactory deluge: the smell of steam heat; wet wood and perspiration; a classroom pungent with sour disinfectants and floor wax; a shop smelling of dill and pepper and garlic; and a boy smelling of soap, cigarettes, English leather and motorcycle oil. My memory does not hold the color of the boys hair or his build (she doesn’t specify those), but his character is sealed in these smells.
At another point in the story when Reichl goes to the French camp for poor kids, her characterization of her fellow counselors is drawn entirely from the defining details of what they pull from their bags as they settle into their beds and night tables. It is a master stroke to contrast the girl with chocolate-covered cherries and Bonjour Tristesseto the girl with cologne, movie magazines and a mountain of cosmetics; and the girl covering her table with pictures of Johnny Halliday against the girl with colorless stacks of books. Blonde and blue-eyed is dull by comparison, and Reichl doesn’t do dull. She is similarly a master of period and accessory detail, in one place mentioning the kitchen outfitted with the latest avocado appliances (groan, how I do remember those) and records on the turntable.
So what about those recipes embedded within the chapters? There are a couple of dimensions to consider. First, they do take the reader out of the story and on first reading of the book I skipped over them entirely. My awareness of Reichl’s stature in the culinary world was heightened by the demise of Gourmet Magazine which coincided with the publication of her latest cookbook, so on this reading I decided to reconsider the role of the recipes. (The question is of particular interest since modern writers have twenty-first century opportunities to include material other than strict story, such as emails and blog excerpts).
The fact of the matter is that many of the stories Reichl tells are narratives of what she ate, how it smelled, tasted and was talked about. The succession begins with Mrs. Peavey’s wiener schnitzel, and continues dining with Beatrice’s family in Canada, Claritha’s chicken with Mac in Detroit, tasting with Danielle at the cheese farm in France, the exotic foods in Tunisia, the “Dad food” she cooked for her husband to be, her idea of pumpkin soup cooked in the pumpkin, travels to Greece and a meal of local treats including freshly caught parrot fish, and ending with a meal at the famous Mandarin in San Francisco. Just as nature writers describe the details of foliage and precipices around them, this food writer defines and describes her life in the rich language of food. Food is a source of comfort and anxiety (in her mother’s hands), an avenue to friendship, a creative expression, a way of learning about differences and cultures, the path to survival and personal power, and a part of the fabric of humanity – at once sustenance and art.
Given the constancy of food description and conversation within the memoir’s stories, one wonders again, “why the recipes?” A jaundiced view might hold that the recipes could almost have been an editorial afterthought intended to bolster the book with the author’s unique platform, or renown for culinary prowess. A less jaundiced view takes note that the recipes all belong to some character who has made an appearance in the chapter in which they appear, a kind of homage in food. It makes sense to ask if this memoir would read better without the recipes, or if they add something that is valuable. Having said that they take the reader out of the story, they are Reichl’s particular interest and an entirely credible dimension to her narrators character.
At one point in Detroit, Reichl thinks “about how food brought people together – and kept them apart.” Clearly, food brought her together with many interesting and like-minded people. Perhaps the inclusion of her characters’ recipes is the foodie’s instinct to seal important personages in the readers’ memory through the very thing that the writer appreciates most: a tasty dish.
