Ruth Reichl

Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet and the author of Comfort Me With Apples: More Adventures at the Table (Random House, $25), picks six favorite books. “I thought I’d focus on authors who, without meaning to write about food or cooking, do it awfully well.”

Crossings by Chuang Hua (Northeastern University Press, $17). I first read this 30 years ago, and it’s haunted me ever since. The best book I’ve read about what it is like to be a Chinese woman in America, it explains, without meaning to do so, the importance of food in Chinese culture. The heroine makes increasingly complicated meals for her lover, and no one has ever written better about the contemplative pleasure of cooking.

If the River Was Whiskey by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Penguin USA, $13). “Sorry Fugu” is the single best story ever written about restaurant reviewing. Also, I might add, the meanest: The person the story was written about threw a glass of whiskey in the author’s face after she read it. It was not, I might add, me.

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Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans (out of print). Bemelmans is the great unsung American food writer (and illustrator). And, of course, he’s not American. Hotel Splendide is a pseudonym for the Ritz, where Bemelmans worked for many years. My father used to read these tales to me as bedtime stories, and they continue to have a familiar magic for me.

The Collected Stories by Grace Paley (Noonday Press, $15). Although Paley never writes about food, most of her stories are about ordinary life, and my favorite, about a woman whose husband leaves her after giving her a dustpan for Christmas, takes place almost entirely in the kitchen (or on the kitchen floor). Paley is such an amazing writer—I’d give anything to have written something as good as these stories.

Never Change by Elizabeth Berg (Pocket Books, $24). Here’s an author who telegraphs huge amounts of information about her characters through what they eat. They’re all odd and interesting, and she’s amazingly generous with them. On top of that, I happen to know that she’s a terrific cook.

Bel Canto by Ann Patchett (HarperCollins, $25). Patchett is incapable of writing a bad sentence. Is there another author who could make you root for the bad guys (as well as the good ones)? Her newest book unfolds in a single house, and some of my favorite scenes take place in a closet off the kitchen.