One year my perfect apple cake is embodied by an apple pie with a crisp shell covered with grains of sugar and a melting filling, the next year I’ll vow eternal love to a cinnamon pound cake enriched by cubes of apples and a good dose of warming spices. Have I reached perfection? Nope, and I’m happy to keep on searching and experimenting. Each season brings new ideas, scents and textures. The quest for the perfect apple cake is like searching for the Holy Grail: infinite, legendary, epic, exciting. Simple and domestic, romantic enough, juicy, fragrant, accessible, sensual, everyday food: apples know how to tell stories that fascinate generations of people since immemorial time. (By the way, did you know that Ruth Reichl has a newsletter here on Substack? She has a thread on comfort food, too.) In Comfort Me With Apples, Reichl again demonstrates her inimitable ability to combine food writing, humour and memoir into an art form.I’m borrowing Ruth Reich’s memoir title to introduce the theme of today’s newsletter: comfort and apples. Reichl also shares the intimacies of her personal life in a style so honest and warm that readers will feel they are enjoying a cosy dining-table conversation with a friend. She shares some of her first recipes so readers can make the Dry-Fried Shrimp she first tasted in China, or the Dacquoise served at the end of a magical visit to a Paris bistro. Throughout it all, Reichl is unafraid, even eager, to poke holes in the pretensions of food critics, making each and every course a hilarious and instructive occasion for novices and experts alike.

Reichl lovingly recreates all her marvellous meals in such succulent detail that readers will yearn from truffles in Provence and shrimp in Beijing.

She cooks and dines with world-famous chefs and the three star aristocracy of French cuisine, and her accounts of these meetings range from the madcap to the sublime. Ruth Reichl's pursuit of good food and good company leads her to New York and China, France and Los Angeles.

In this delightful sequel to her bestseller Tender at the Bone, the beloved food writer Ruth Reichl returns with more tales full of love, life, humour and marvellous meals.

Comfort me with apples ruth reichl