Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Because Ruth Reichl is, at the time of writing Tender at the Bone, a highly regarded food writer, critic, and chef, her ideas about food are naturally the central focus of the text. As Reichl explores the various roles that food can play in people’s lives, she discovers that food can be more than simple sustenance: It is a form of self-expression.

For Reichl, food is an expression of personal identity. During a chaotic childhood, she learned that she could feel more stable and centered in the kitchen, and she learned to take pride in having organized routines there. A significant part of her individuation from her mother centered on their differing approaches to food—where Miriam’s approach was careless and haphazard, Reichl’s was discerning, ordered, and even studious. The structure of the text—with the two parties that bookend Reichl’s coming-of-age story—emphasizes how Reichl’s food journey from childhood to adolescence into adulthood is also the story of how she set herself apart from Miriam and Miriam’s approach to food.

Reichl also sees that food is an expression of cultural identity. During her travels abroad, she learns how integral distinct foods and cooking techniques are to each nation’s identity. She offers vivid descriptive detail regarding the traditional foods she encounters in Italy, Greece, Tunisia, and Quebec, evoking not only their deliciousness but their uniqueness and their significance to local people—making it clear how these foods embody identity for each place.

Through her relationships with Serafina and Mac and her explorations of the neighborhood food scenes in New York and Berkeley, she learns that even subgroups within the same country have differing foodways that help define them. She is quick to notice, for instance, when Serafina—after learning the truth about her own background—switches from cooking the “curried chicken and roti” of her Guyanese parents to the “barbecued ribs, sweet potatoes, and greens” that, to Serafina, represent her newly discovered Black identity (169).

Tender at the Bone shows that food is also an expression of feeling—and that it is particularly adept at expressing love. Throughout the story, Reichl shows her love for friends and family by cooking for them—in the suburban Connecticut home her where she partied with friends, in her student apartment, in her Berkeley commune, and at Aunt Birdie’s 100th birthday party, for instance. She shows her love for both Doug and Ernst by cooking German foods for them—and she gives this cooking at least partial credit for Doug’s rapidly growing attraction to her.

Food and food writing are, for Reichl, also an expression of the creative drive. Mrs. Peavey teaches Reichl that cooking is an art form, that it depends not just upon proper technique but on imagination. Reichl’s relentless desire to discover more and more about ingredients, techniques, and recipes provides her with ever more fodder for her imagination and shapes her into an excellent cook. She enjoys creating new recipes and adapting to unusual cooking challenges—as when, in the commune, Nick suddenly decides the house is vegetarian, or that they should get all of their ingredients from dumpsters. This vision of food and food writing as an art form shapes Reichl’s approach to writing Tender at the Bone, inspiring her to push genre expectations into new territory by blending memoir, recipes, and critical commentary about food into one narrative.