New York Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table Ruth Reichl Former New York Times restaurant critic and current editor of Gourmet magazine, Ruth Reichl tells of meals great and small in this memoir of her culinary apprenticeship in the 1950s and '60s. For Reichl, food is "a way of making sense of the world.... If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Reichl's self-discovery begins at her mother's table, laden with lavish bargain dinners of day-old (or worse) food. While she and her brother quickly learn to push food about their plates to avoid another bout of food poisoning, many guests find their visits curtailed by a trip to the hospital. Reichl finds safer food at her Aunt Birdie's, where she learns to make apple dumplings and other delicacies remembered from her aunt's wedding reception. While at boarding school in Montreal, an interlude Reichl terms "Life on Mars," she finds comfort on weekend forays for smoked meat and cream puffs at the home of her friend Beatrice. Her introduction to restaurants begins while at the University of Michigan with a stint waitressing at a failed French bistro. She continues her gustatory education on trips through North Africa and Europe. Reichl recalls her stay in Berkeley, California, where she worked at a collectively owned restaurant, with nostalgic wit. Her story reaches its climax in 1977, when she returns to New York to save one of her mother's "poison parties." The following fall, she becomes restaurant critic for a San Francisco magazine, finally finding the work she is meant to do. Throughout this humorous remembrance, Reichl calls up the voices of the chefs, waiters, friends, and family who taught her to love food and its preparation. Recipes are interspersed throughout the book so that readers can experience the tastes her words cannot fully evoke. She continues her culinary tale in Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table, which follows her journey from chef to restaurant critic, counter-culture hippie to foodie, and single woman to wife and mother.