September Book Club

*** REGISTRATION WILL OPEN ON 7/9/24 AT 12AM.

Join Ginger and the team for a lively discussion on this month’s food themed book, Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir by Ruth Reichl.

Food and drink will be available for purchase during the event and a complimentary snack from the book will be served.

Visit Old Firehouse Books in Old Town to purchase your book – Book Club books purchased at Old Firehouse the month before or month of book club receive a 20% discount for being a part of the Ginger and Baker Book Club!

Book Club is a free event. No ticket is necessary but RSVPs are required.

More about Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir:

Trailblazing food writer and beloved restaurant critic Ruth Reichl took the job (and the risk) of a lifetime when she entered the glamorous, high-stakes world of magazine publishing. Now, for the first time, she chronicles her groundbreaking tenure as editor in chief of Gourmet, during which she spearheaded a revolution in the way we think about food.

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America’s oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone’s boss. And yet . . . Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?

This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl’s leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media—the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down.

Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams—even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be.

If you are looking to dive into next month’s delicious read, in October we will be reading: Love, Loss and What We Ate: A Memoir by Padma Laksmi.

A vivid memoir of food and family, survival and triumph,  Love, Loss, and What We Ate  traces the arc of Padma Lakshmi’s unlikely path from an immigrant childhood to a complicated life in front of the camera—a tantalizing blend of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn Long before Padma Lakshmi ever stepped onto a television set, she learned that how we eat is an extension of how we love, how we comfort, how we forge a sense of home—and how we taste the world as we navigate our way through it. Shuttling between continents as a child, she lived a life of dislocation that would become habit as an adult, never quite at home in the world. And yet, through all her travels, her favorite food remained the simple rice she first ate sitting on the cool floor of her grandmother’s kitchen in South India. Poignant and surprising,  Love, Loss, and What We Ate  is Lakshmi’s extraordinary account of her journey from that humble kitchen, ruled by ferocious and unforgettable women, to the judges’ table of  Top Chef  and beyond. It chronicles the fierce devotion of the remarkable people who shaped her along the way, from her headstrong mother who flouted conservative Indian convention to make a life in New York, to her Brahmin grandfather—a brilliant engineer with an irrepressible sweet tooth—to the man seemingly wrong for her in every way who proved to be her truest ally. A memoir rich with sensual prose and punctuated with evocative recipes, it is alive with the scents, tastes, and textures of a life that spans complex geographies both internal and external. Love, Loss, and What We Ate  is an intimate and unexpected story of food and family—both the ones we are born to and the ones we create—and their enduring legacies.