Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

In her brief Author’s Note, Reichl explains that storytelling is highly valued in her family and that, from this family tradition, she learned that factual details are not as important as the impressions a story makes on an audience. Accordingly, she has taken some small liberties with facts in her memoir—changing some names, compressing timelines, combining people into a composite characters, and so on.

Reichl describes a typical morning in the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her parents when she was a child. Breakfast would be bread, cold cuts, cheese, and coffee cake served with fresh orange juice, and the family would begin with a ritual toast: “Cheerio. Have a nice day” (3). On one such morning, she recalls her mother rousing her father from sleep early to make him taste something. He later said it was the worst thing he had ever tasted; apparently, Reichl’s mother had suspected the food was spoiled and just wanted confirmation.

Reichl describes her mother, Miriam, as “taste-blind and unafraid of rot” (4). Miriam frequently served rotten or moldy food and seemed impervious to both its taste and its gastrointestinal effects. Reichl herself, however, understood that this could be dangerous—particularly to guests whose systems were unused to Miriam’s food.