Save Me the Plums - Ruth Reichl Page 0,74

a game—but she hopes we’ll surprise her. She said someone always comes up with something really original; this year I want it to be me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I was thinking of a cookbook; I bet no one’s ever done that.”

I answered casually, trying to conceal my delight. “How would you go about that?”

“Look for food references in all the books. Then find recipes for them. Will you help?”

Michael left for Louisiana later that day, to interview a wrongfully incarcerated soldier. (Thanks to his piece, the man was ultimately released. But that’s another story.) In his absence, Nick and I holed up in the apartment all weekend; while he scoured the novels for food references, I went through the cookbooks. “And now,” he said, when we’d collected all the recipes, “I’m going to rewrite them.”

“Rewrite them?”

“You didn’t think I planned on just handing in a bunch of ordinary recipes?”

Well, yes, that’s exactly what I’d thought.

“You’re always saying you can learn a lot about a person by watching what they eat. I thought I’d look at recipes the same way.” Nick handed me the recipe for scrapple he’d concocted for The Great Gatsby. Along with ordinary ingredients like pig’s feet, onions, and cornmeal, he’d included a pinch of escape, a couple of teaspoons of aspiration, and a healthy handful of education. It was, I thought, brilliant.

I kept looking up recipes; he kept rewriting them, growing increasingly inventive as the weekend wore on. The language became more playful; the instructions for Huck Finn’s Stolen Fruit Salad began, “Do you dare to peel a peach?”

When we got hungry, we cooked, stir-frying Thai noodles, rolling out pasta for lasagna, baking brownies. I don’t think I’ve ever been happier.

But I was worried; this was such a mad project. “I hope your teacher has a sense of humor,” I said as he typed up the final draft. “She could give you an A. But she could just as easily flunk you.”

“I know that.” He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand straight up. “But I don’t really care. Doing this was so much fun—and I learned a lot. Isn’t that what counts?”

“I wish you could have known your grandfather,” I blurted out. “He would have loved this book. And he would have loved you.”

I’d embarrassed him. When Nick did not reply, I said, “Will you read the ‘Letter from the Editor’ I’ve been writing?”

He read slowly, nodding his head. I watched as he perused the last paragraph: “The most important lesson we learn at the table is that great rewards await those who take chances. Do we really want to be telling our children, ‘Just eat your nice chicken nuggets’? It would make so much more sense to say, ‘Pull up a chair. Take a taste. Come join us. Life is so endlessly delicious.’ ”

“Nice, Mom.” It was his greatest compliment. “You know, I think we kind of wrote the same thing. We just used different words.”

P.S.: Nick’s teacher, obviously a woman of extraordinary discernment, wrote little notes all over the paper. “Hello, Mr. Prufrock,” she wrote next to the peaches. And on the front of his cookbook, she penciled an enormous A+.

IF YOU NEED INSPIRATION WHEN you’re planning a party, chances are you’ll leaf through cookbooks and magazines, dreaming up dinner. But if you come home from the farmers market with a bushel of ripe peaches or a fine cheese pumpkin, you’ll probably head to the Internet.

Cooks embraced the Internet from the very start, immediately appreciating the ease of googling an ingredient and finding dozens of different ways to use it. They treasured the ability to comment on a recipe and warn other cooks away from a dud or to suggest alternative methods. Instant communities sprang up, as cooks asked and answered dozens of questions. The Internet literally transformed the way we cook.

The possibilities the Internet held for Gourmet were so exciting that I began fighting for a website from my first day on the job. But Si was wary of the Web; while other media companies invested in technology, he sank a reported one hundred million dollars into a new print magazine. “Sank” is the appropriate word: Portfolio, his flashy business magazine, flamed out after two years. Meanwhile, he pursued an Internet strategy that involved shoveling the contents of his many magazines into super-sites like Epicurious and style.

But having Epicurious as our only online presence made me miserable, and for years I tried to persuade Si that Gourmet deserved a