46 pages • 1-hour read
Save Me the Plums
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Chapters 1-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Magic Door”
Reichl first encountered Gourmet magazine at the age of 8, when she discovered a vintage copy at an antique store. She was instantly fascinated with the magazine, which featured stories of exotic meals and adventurous chefs from around the world. The magazine sparked her obsession with food, and she began cooking elaborate meals for her parents, including a suckling pig. The pig triggered her father’s childhood memory of eating Kassler rippchen—a type of German roast pork—in his German immigrant community in New York. Reichl spent weekends exploring New York City’s ethnic enclaves with her father.
When she began her career in food writing, Reichl was initially too intimidated to pitch stories to Gourmet. Inspired by a Thai restaurant in Berkeley, California, she decided to pitch a story about the growing popularity of Thai food. The pitch was rejected for being too trendy, and Reichl realized that the Gourmet she fell in love with no longer exists.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Tea Party”
Twenty years later, in 1998, Reichl, a food critic at The New York Times, was invited to meet James Truman, editorial director of Condé Nast, the media company that owns Vanity Fair, GQ, and Gourmet. Reichl assumed that Gourmet was looking for a new restaurant critic. Embarrassed by her rejection decades earlier, Reichl considered cancelling the meeting, but her husband convinced her to go.
When Truman asked what she thought of Gourmet, Reichl told him honestly that the magazine had grown boring and old-fashioned, and seemed aimed at helping rich people impress other rich people, rather than introducing readers to new foods. Truman offered her the position of editor-in-chief, explaining that she would have a staff of 60 and could hire anyone she wanted. Reichl considered herself an outsider and could not imagine taking this position of authority. She rejected the offer and left. As she walked home, she began to regret the decision, knowing it could help her current work-life balance. She remembered visiting a friend’s astrologer, who told her a new, life-altering job was in her future.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Garlic”
Truman convinced Reichl to meet with Si Newhouse, the billionaire owner of Condé Nast, to discuss the future of Gourmet. Although skeptical, Reichl researched Newhouse and learned that he was willing to spend extravagantly on his magazines. Over lunch, Reichl criticized the recipes in Gourmet. When Newhouse admitted that his personal chef found the recipes too complicated, Reichl identified inaccessibility as the root of Gourmet’s problem: The magazine should not be aimed at people with chefs.
As food began arriving, Newhouse told the waiter that he wouldn’t eat any food with garlic and sent the plates away. Reichl was astonished that he would choose an Italian restaurant for their meeting if he didn’t eat garlic, and asked whether garlic was served in Condé Nast’s offices. Newhouse confirmed that the cafeteria is garlic-free, and Reichl privately affirmed her decision to reject the job. After lunch, Newhouse insisted on driving Reichl home. He assured her that her experience as editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Times’s food section made her perfect for Gourmet, and urged her to take the job.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Washington Square”
Rattled by her conversation with Si, Reichl walked away from her apartment. She thought back 15 years to the moment the Los Angeles Times offered her the position of food critic. Although she was scared to leave her home in Berkeley, the older female food writers who were her mentors—Mary Frances Fisher, Marion Cunningham, and Cecilia Chiang—encouraged her to take the job, knowing the change would be good for her. She knew now that the move was good for her and brought her to her current position at the New York Times.
Reichl realized that her walk had brought her to Washington Square Park, close to where she was raised. As she looked up at her house, she remembered a time when her mother hired movers to bring a dead birch tree into their home. Her mother’s bipolar disorder made life unpredictable for Reichl and her father, who believed his wife was unhappy because she was not challenged. Throughout her life, he had urged Reichl to find work that was challenging and made her happy. Reflecting on her father’s advice, Reichl suddenly realized she should accept the job.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Attire Allowance”
Reichl’s agent, Kathy Robbins, advised her to meet with Gina Sanders, the magazine’s publisher, who was married to Si Newhouse’s nephew Steven. Robbins worried that, if Sanders and Reichl butted heads, Newhouse would side with his family over an outsider. At the meeting, Reichl sensed that Sanders was unimpressed by her vintage clothes and casual nature, but perked up when she learned that they grew up in the same neighborhood. Reichl liked Sanders despite their differences and decided they could work together.
Later that afternoon, Condé Nast sent an official offer to Reichl. They offered her six times her salary at the New York Times, plus a wide variety of benefits, including a driver, clothing allowance, and membership to a country club. Although she worried that the money would change her family, Reichl decided to accept the job at the urging of her son, who was delighted that she wouldn’t be eating dinner at restaurants every night.
Chapter 6 Summary: “Plan Check”
Immediately after receiving the contract, Reichl got a call from Maurie Perl, head of public relations for Condé Nast. Perl gave Reichl a minute-by-minute timetable for her transition from the New York Times to Gourmet, beginning with Reichl giving her notice to the executive editor of the Times. Then, Perl said, Truman would fire the current editor of Gourmet, and Reichl would begin press interviews. Reichl was shocked by the formality of the process and the Condé Nast team’s belief that they would make headline news.
The next day, Reichl became nostalgic as she prepared to leave the Times. Executive editor Joe Lelyveld anticipated that she had been poached by Condé Nast, but seemed relieved when he learned Reichl was going to Gourmet and not a more prestigious Condé Nast publication like The New Yorker or Vanity Fair. Reichl vowed to make men like Lelyveld respect the magazine. Reichl left the Times’s offices and went straight to Condé Nast, where she did a series of interviews under Perl’s supervision. As she was leaving, Truman introduced her to the designer in charge of Condé Nast’s new offices, and Reichl began designing her office.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Adjacencies”
The next day, Reichl returned to the offices of Condé Nast to introduce herself to the staff of Gourmet. She nearly had a panic attack, but managed to move through it and make a short speech. Reichl promised to come to the office daily for the next three months as she transitioned away from the New York Times, although she privately wondered how she’d handle two jobs at the same time. She met the editor’s secretary, Robin, who was relieved to learn Reichl didn’t have her own secretary.
In another meeting, Reichl was forced to tell Gourmet’s executive editor, Alice Gochman, that she planned to bring her friend Laurie Ochoa in as the new executive editor. When an assistant came in with news about a problem with an adjacency, Gochman was visibly delighted to see that Reichl was unfamiliar with the term, reveling in her ignorance. Humiliated, Reichl reached out to her friend Donna Warner, who offered her a crash course in magazine editing. That night, Reichl was home in time to cook dinner for her son. The chapter ends with a recipe for the spicy peanut noodles Reichl and her son shared.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Yaffy”
Reichl notes that her favorite kitchen was in her communal home in Berkeley, California: a large, shared space always occupied by someone responsible for producing meals for large crowds. When she first stepped into the Gourmet test kitchen, Reichl was surprised to find that it reminded her of the Berkeley kitchen. The Gourmet kitchen felt like an overgrown version of a home kitchen, and she felt immediately at home.
Inside, the Gourmet cooks (known as food editors) debated the merits of a chocolate cake recipe, referring to it repeatedly as a yaffy. Reichl noticed that the food editor who baked the cake, a shy woman named Amy, seemed to be taking the criticism personally. The head of the test kitchen, Zanne Stewart, asked for Reichl’s opinion on the cake. Reichl correctly identified the cake as an English recipe and suggested using higher-quality chocolate and more eggs, impressing the editors. Later, Reichl privately revealed to Stewart that she recognized the cake as an adaptation of a recipe from a London café. Steward explained that yaffy was really YAFI: an acronym for “You Asked For It,” a reader-led category of recipe most food editors disdained. The chapter ends with the cake recipe.
Chapters 1-8 Analysis
In the opening chapters of Save Me the Plums, Reichl positions herself as an outsider in print media whose connections and skill in food and writing earn her the respect of the establishment. Because the memoir focuses on Reichl’s career at Gourmet, these early chapters present her as “a novice in this corporate world” (53) at the beginning of her arc. Despite her role as food critic for the New York Times, Reichl feels largely unaware of the inner workings of the print media industry. She claims that although she “knew that Condé Nast stood for luxury, class, and fashion and owned a lot of high-end magazines” (12), she was “so oblivious [she] hadn’t even known they’d bought Gourmet” (12). Depicting Reichl as an outsider in this way establishes the arc of her career from newcomer to established leader of her team.
Reichl references the early years of her career to reinforce her portrait of herself as a nonconformist. Although she works at one of the most important publications in the country, she writes that “at heart, I was still a sixties rebel with a deep mistrust of corporate ways” (15). After accepting the position at Gourmet, she feels that her new colleagues at Condé Nast have an “exaggerated sense of the importance” (39) of the brand and their roles in it. By defining herself in opposition to the corporate leadership at Condé Nast—a maverick newcomer facing off with the print media establishment amid the Changes in American Publishing in the 20th Century—Reichl lays the groundwork for an underdog’s success story.
Despite viewing herself as an outsider, Reichl’s opening chapters establish her strong relationships in the food writing industry over the course of her career. While reflecting on her decision to become editor of the Los Angeles Times food section, she describes conversations with three “formidable women” (25) in the food industry: Mary Frances Fisher, “America’s most famous food writer” (24), the “bright and famous” Marion Cunningham, whose cookbook Breakfast Book was “a huge bestseller,” and restaurateur Cecilia Chiang, “a whirlwind with very decided opinions” who introduced “sophisticated Chinese food to an American audience” (25). Reichl’s relationships with these famous women affirm her place as a major force in American food journalism.
The anecdotes Reichl includes from her early life emphasize The Connection Between Food, Memory, and Emotion. Reichl writes that her mother encouraged her early interest in food by bringing home exotic ingredients like “a can of fried grasshoppers, a large sea urchin with dangerously sharp spines, and a flash magenta cactus flower” (5). Although these ingredients were practically unheard of in Western food culture at the time, cactus fruits (prickly pear) and sea urchin (uni) now appear in high-end, avant-garde restaurants across the United States and Europe, and grasshoppers are popular internationally. The inclusion of these specific ingredients suggests that, from an early age, Reichl was exposed to a wide variety of foods that helped her to develop her culinary taste, which later empowered her to be an effective editor-in-chief at Gourmet.
Reichl consistently identifies the influence of her early memories of both food and food writing on the content she commissions at Gourmet. The opening chapter describes how, as a child, Reichl fell in love with the magazine while reading an article about lobster fishers written by Robert P. Tristram, “the poet laureate of Maine and a Pulitzer Prize winner” (4). Decades later, in her interview with Newhouse, Reichl laments that the magazine “used to be filled with such great writing” (13), namedropping American writers Annie Proulx, Ray Bradbury, and her old mentor Mary Frances Fisher. Although Reichl feels like an outsider in the literary community, her lifelong engagement with literary culture contributes to her success as an effective editor.
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