Eatdrink #80 November/December 2019 - The Holiday Issue
The LOCAL food and drink magazine serving London, Stratford & Southwestern Ontario since 2007
The LOCAL food and drink magazine serving London, Stratford & Southwestern Ontario since 2007
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eatdrink: <strong>The</strong> Local Food & Drink Magazine<br />
<strong>November</strong>/<strong>December</strong> <strong>2019</strong> | 57<br />
FRESH gift ideas yule love<br />
Select from over 70 flavours of oils and balsamics.<br />
Sample the freshest oils from across the globe, paired with savoury<br />
white & dark balsamic vinegars from Modena, Italy.<br />
Personally bottled to suit your individual taste.<br />
Stocking<br />
Stuffers<br />
Corporate<br />
Gifts<br />
Sample<br />
Packs<br />
Custom<br />
Gift Baskets<br />
Gift<br />
Cards<br />
<strong>The</strong><br />
Pristine<br />
live<br />
Est. 2012<br />
884 Adelaide Street N.<br />
884 Adelaide Street N. | London | 519-433-4444<br />
www.thepristineolive.ca<br />
manage HR issues that were not her forte.<br />
Readers of the book will not be surprised<br />
by the story’s unfortunate conclusion, so<br />
Reichl presumably focuses on her colleagues<br />
(whether she liked working with them or<br />
not) to pay homage to their handiwork<br />
in regenerating an iconic magazine for a<br />
time. Even though she was dealing with the<br />
business of magazine editing more than<br />
tasting dishes or writing about them, there<br />
are still the requisite delicious descriptions<br />
she is known for from her previous books:<br />
taste testing a chocolate cake in the Gourmet<br />
test kitchen; sharing the Spicy Chinese Noodle<br />
recipe she makes for her son; describing bread<br />
from a neighbourhood bakery by writing it<br />
was “like tasting history, like savoring the<br />
first loaf of bread ever baked.” It is a Reichl<br />
memoir, after all, and she always comes back<br />
to the food.<br />
I enjoy memoirs that are narrower in<br />
scope, not sprawling narratives from cradle<br />
to grave. Reichl’s career as a writer has many<br />
layers and Save Me the Plums covers a decade<br />
of her life when Gourmet became one more<br />
notch in her literary belt. Her contributions to<br />
Gourmet were transformational: she embraced<br />
the changes surfacing in the restaurant<br />
scene, tackled the rise of celebrity chefs by<br />
putting them on the cover in rock star poses<br />
(photographed by Matthew Rolston who did<br />
Rolling Stone covers), and commissioned<br />
cutting-edge articles from authors like David<br />
Foster Wallace. Amid these successes, what<br />
is most heartbreaking about her story is how<br />
Condé Nast shut Gourmet down when the high<br />
times of the print magazine world crumbled<br />
under the pressure of the internet. Reichl<br />
had to live through it and she reveals how the<br />
extraction of something that had touched her<br />
personal life and shaped her career so much<br />
was devastating. For Reichl, “A world without<br />
Gourmet was unimaginable.” She could not<br />
move forward by publishing more issues,<br />
but only be inspired by her collection of back<br />
issues, in the same way they had stirred her as<br />
a child.<br />
DARIN COOK is a Chatham-based freelance writer<br />
who keeps himself well-read and well-fed by visiting the<br />
bookstores and restaurants of London.