Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

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. She would hover over guests, trying to discourage them from eating the worst of it. She was not always successful, however, and many guests in their home ended up with food poisoning. She believes these early experiences made her acutely observant about food, encouraged an awareness of how personality intersects with food choices, and taught her to make sense of the world through food.

A recipe for “Miriam Reichl’s Corned-Beef Ham” serves as an illustration of the chaotic food culture Reichl grew up in. A story about a party her mother hosted follows. When Reichl’s much-older half-brother, Rob, announced his engagement, Miriam decided to throw an engagement party. She sourced huge amounts of completely unrelated foodstuffs from discounters and stored the food improperly. She insisted on holding the party at the family’s ramshackle summer property in the Connecticut woods and declared that it would double as a fundraiser for Unicef. She contacted the newspapers to arrange coverage and invited huge numbers of people.

Reichl tried to convince her intellectual and reserved book-designer father, Ernst, to stop the party, but he seemed oblivious to how disastrous and unusual Miriam’s preparations were. Reichl notes that, in any case, her father was just as helpless as she was when it came to dealing with Miriam’s mood swings and unpredictable behavior. As the date of the party drew near, Reichl did what she could to get her mother organized and help with preparations, but she could not stop her mother from serving bizarre and tainted foods. In the end, many people ended up getting very sick.

Reichl had three women who functioned as grandmothers in her life—her two biological grandmothers and her Aunt Birdie, who was the mother of her father’s first wife, Hortense. None of these women cooked, but Aunt Birdie employed a housekeeper named Alice, who was a wonderful cook. Reichl often stayed with Aunt Birdie and Alice. Alice would always make Reichl apple dumplings, and Reichl loved helping her in the kitchen. She used this as an opportunity to ask about Hortense, whom no one would ever talk about—but Alice was also reluctant to share any information about Hortense.

Reichl notes that Alice was a Black woman from Barbados. She recalls Miriam portraying herself as believing in racial equality, but Reichl noticed that she did not actually associate with any Black people. Miriam referred to any Black or brown domestic servants as “the girl” rather than by their names, which bothered Reichl (22). The only food that Aunt Birdie ever cooked was potato salad, which she would make especially for Ernst. Reichl includes a recipe for “Aunt Birdie’s Potato Salad,” followed by another for “Alice’s Apple Dumplings With Hard Sauce.”

When Reichl was six, her mother insisted on a month-long European vacation. Reichl was left in the care of Miriam’s mother, who lasted three days before leaving Reichl with Aunt Birdie and Alice. During this visit, Alice took Reichl grocery shopping with her, and Reichl realized how carefully Alice investigated the origins and quality of her ingredients. Alice told Reichl of her dream of retiring someday and returning to Barbados. Birdie showed Reichl her wedding album and reminisced enthusiastically about the meal served at her reception. For days afterward, Alice and Reichl made a project of slowly cooking through all of the fancy dishes from that meal.

Reichl took the opportunity to ask questions about Hortense. She learned that Hortense was a sweet child, but that she changed as she grew older. Alice made the cryptic remark that Ernst “married two of them,” but she would not explain what she meant by this (30). On the night that Reichl’s parents were scheduled to return, she learned that, contrary to what she had always believed, Hortense was not dead. Alice would not say anything further about her fate, however. Reichl did not learn for many more years what actually happened to Hortense.

When Reichl was in college, Birdie inherited some money. She used part of it to buy Alice a home in Barbados. Reichl and Alice corresponded by letter, and in one of her letters, Alice finally explained that Hortense had developed mental illness and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. Reichl thought back to Alice’s strange comment many years before and realized that what Alice meant was that her father had married not one but two women with mental illness.

Reichl’s mother was highly educated but could not hold onto a job. As a result, she was bored and entertained herself by bargain-hunting and finding new foods for the family to try. Reichl got an early introduction to foods that were just becoming more widely available on the American market: cactus fruit, lychees, and sea urchins among other things. Miriam did not cook often, as this was a task for the long series of maids the family employed—and later for Reichl, as she got older.

The maid who lasted the longest was Mrs. Peavey, who started with the family when Reichl was eight. Mrs. Peavey had a mysterious background. She had clearly been raised in a wealthy family and was extremely well-educated. She refused to cook things that struck her as bourgeois and lacking refinement. She taught Reichl to make Wiener schnitzel, which was Ernst’s favorite food. Reichl includes this recipe.

Reichl recalls when Mrs. Peavey’s three sons tried to visit. They waited in their limousine while Reichl ferried messages back and forth between them and their mother. They begged to see Mrs. Peavey, and she allowed that she loved and missed them, but she refused to see them. The following day was her day off, but she did not come back when expected. She was gone for several days without explanation and then simply returned and resumed her duties.

Mrs. Peavey told Reichl that when she was married, her upper-class husband thought it was odd that she wanted to take cooking lessons and refused to actually allow her to cook the family’s meals. She had to sneak into her own kitchen and kick the cook out to secretly prepare food. Reflecting on why her own cooking was better than that of any cook that ever worked for her, she told Reichl that cooking requires both imagination and organization.

Mrs. Peavey did not approve of Miriam, believing her to be careless and a negligent mother. Reichl was left on her own on Mrs. Peavey’s nights off while Ernst and Miriam went out to dinner. Reichl found it frightening to be alone for hours at night, and she was relieved when, one night, Mrs. Peavey unexpectedly came back to the house and picked her up to take her along for her night out.

Mrs. Peavey and her boyfriend, Mr. Holly, took Reichl with them to a bar. While Mrs. Peavey was out of earshot, Mr. Holly explained that Mrs. Peavey’s husband had left all of his money to his sons and that they tried to use the money to control Mrs. Peavey’s behavior. After this excursion, Mrs. Peavey disappeared again for several days. When she returned, she helped Reichl make Wiener schnitzel for dinner and then explained that she was leaving. She could not be a maid any longer, and she was going to start a career as a cook. Before leaving, she told Reichl not to let anyone control her and to understand that she must take care of herself.

When Reichl was twelve, her parents took her on vacation to France. She enjoyed the food immensely—she includes a recipe for a lemon souffle that particularly impressed her—but she did not enjoy her mother’s insistence on taking her for repeated fittings at a couture house, where Miriam had secured a discounted outfit for Reichl. Both Reichl and her father had begun to suspect that Miriam had bipolar disorder, but they had no idea what to do about it and felt responsible for working around Miriam’s broad mood swings and impulsive decisions.

Reichl unintentionally triggered one of these impulsive decisions by mentioning at dinner that she wished she could speak French like her parents. Shortly afterward, Miriam left her at a boarding school in Montreal, Canada, where she would be immersed in the French language for five months. The school was grim and confusing, and Reichl called home over and over, begging to be allowed to come home, but Miriam always refused, assuring her that she would someday be grateful for her fluency in French.

When Reichl arrived at the school, she spoke almost no French and was desperately lonely. On weekends, the other girls would go home, and Reichl was left alone in the school. She began sneaking out and exploring Montreal’s food scene. One weekend, a girl named Béatrice, the daughter of extremely wealthy parents, was also forced to stay at school. Although she had been bullying Reichl, when she learned that Reichl knew where to go to get delicious food, the two bonded, and Reichl began going home each weekend with Béatrice.

Reichl’s food knowledge impressed Béatrice’s father, M. du Croix, and he introduced her to many new foods. She cooked her first souffle—a lemon souffle like she had had in France—with Béatrice, as a gift for M. du Croix’s birthday. Slowly, she began to learn French and fit in at the school, and she found that when her five months were up, she was sad. She made up her mind to return for the following school year.

Reichl attended two more school years in Montreal before she was finally ready to return to living year-round with her parents in New York. What drew her home was not her parents but the idea of attending an American high school. Her mother thwarted her plan to attend a New York City school, however, announcing that the family was moving to a new house she had bought near their former summer home in Connecticut.

At the new house, Reichl rebelled by making friends with people her mother disapproved of, dressing in clothes Miriam disliked, and spending her time at home shut up in her room. She went out drinking with her new best friend, Julie, and took advantage of her parents’ frequent absences to throw parties in their new house. Most of the week, she was alone, as her mother soon decided she preferred New York.

Reichl began cooking for her new crowd of friends, relying both on recipes she had already learned and new ones from magazines and cookbooks. A particular favorite was devil’s food cake, for which she includes a recipe. She gained weight, which she felt self-conscious about, and she worried that she would never get a boyfriend. After one wild night, however, she woke up on the couch next to a boy she had a crush on, Tommy, and remembered that they had finally kissed the night before. The house was a shambles. Her parents were due home any minute, and she and her friends scrambled to clean up the evidence of their partying. When her parents arrived, she and her friends were sitting together at the breakfast table, pretending that they had just gotten together for a wholesome breakfast.