There’s only one recipe in “Delicious!,” Ruth Reichl’s first novel, but it’s a keeper. You have to flip to the back to find it. It’s for a gingerbread cake enlivened by orange zest and fresh ginger and black pepper and cloves and cardamom. It’s for grown-up taste buds.
Ms. Reichl’s novel, however, is strictly kid stuff. It’s a gauzy ode to the liberating virtues of pleasure, glazed with warmth and uplift, so feebly written and idea free that it will make you wonder if the energy we’ve been putting into food these last few decades hasn’t made us each lose, on average, a dozen I.Q. points.
Ms. Reichl has no need to prove herself as a writer. As a restaurant critic for The Los Angeles Times and then The New York Times, her columns had brightness and bite. Her several memoirs, though they require a high tolerance for earnestness, have some magic to them in the form of sexiness and truth telling. Gourmet magazine, during the decade that she edited it, bloomed. It was under her watch that it commissioned and ran “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace’s essay, an instant classic of the form.
It’s hard to know where to begin with “Delicious!” though. The verbal chloroform arrives so quickly that you’re put in mind of Mike Tyson’s observation: Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
Welcome to earth mother adjectival Götterdämmerung. On just the first three pages, cakes are “Strong. Earthy. Fragrant” and “rich, moist, tender.” Scents spangle the air. Nutmeg is “delicate” yet “ferocious,” like the quiet storm radio format. Ginger is “mysteriously tingly,” cinnamon “nose-prickling,” crushed cloves filled with “startling power.” Vanilla beans are “supple, plump, purple.”
Note - Published by Allen & Unwin in ANZ - NZ$36.00
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