Delicious! by Ruth Reichl Read Free Book Online

smile. “But if I let you in, I’d have to let everyone else in too. So, no, I’m sorry, you’re going to have to depend on the database.”
    “And Maggie,” I said glumly.
    “That’s not what I want to talk about. You’ve been here two weeks,” he began, so hesitantly that I got nervous. Was he about to tell me the trial wasn’t going so well? “And it’s time you tackled one of the mostimportant parts of your job. What do you know about the
Delicious!
Guarantee?”
    “ ‘Your money back if the recipe doesn’t work’?”
    Jake nodded. “So you’ve heard of it.”
    “I always assumed it was a gimmick.”
    “Oh, it’s real. When the first Arthur Pickwick started the magazine, he wanted to make a splash. It was a hundred years ago, and back then everybody was trying to make recipes more efficient. But nobody’d ever come up with the idea of
guaranteeing
them.
The New York Times
called it one of the most brilliant public-relations ploys of all time. Everybody assumed Young Arthur would put an end to it when he took over, but he decided not to mess with success.”
    “Don’t you end up refunding an awful lot of money?”
    Jake shook his head. “The truth is, we rarely send anyone a refund.”
    “So it
is
a trick!”
    “Not at all. The offer’s real. But most people can’t follow instructions. They think they’re making our recipe, but what they’re really doing is inventing their own. What
you
have to do is go through the recipe with them, step by step, and try to figure out where they went off the rails.”
    “That sounds like fun.”
    “I hope you’re still saying that a week from now.” Jake handed me a pile of letters. “But that’s highly unlikely. As you can see, most of the people who write in don’t even own computers, which says a lot about who they are. My last assistant loathed the Guarantee.”
    I picked up the first letter, which was from a Little Rock matron who’d sustained a severe risotto disaster. Jake was right: When I called, it turned out she’d used Minute Rice. Mrs. Amanda Bienstock had substituted baking powder for baking soda in her cake (“Really, what’s the difference?” she complained). As for the woman whose batter had overflowed, causing enough smoke to bring out the fire department, she’d seen no reason why a recipe for a dozen cupcakes wouldn’t fit into a six-inch cake pan.
    John Kroger of Boulder, Colorado, was a different case. In a calmvoice, he told me he’d followed the instructions to the letter. “When it said to toss the salad,” he said earnestly, “I did just that. And, believe you me, it wasn’t easy getting all that lettuce into the bowl from the other side of the room.”
    I couldn’t dispute his point. I promised him a refund and picked up the next letter.
    “I am absolutely furious about the scallop mousse in the current issue,” wrote a Mrs. Cloverly from Cleveland. “It is simply vile.”
    On the phone, her querulous voice conjured up white hair and a pasty body muffled in a voluminous apron. “I have made a great many dishes in my life,” she informed me, “and this was, without any doubt, the vilest of the lot.”
    I tried to sound sympathetic. “I’m so sorry, let me find that recipe.” I punched it into the database and up it came, along with ecstatic four- and five-star reader comments.
    “I would never have believed,” a reader wrote, “that scallops, cream, a couple of eggs, and a splash of wine could make anything so divine.”
    Mrs. Cloverly had indeed gone off the rails.
    “This is the first complaint we’ve had about that recipe—”
    “Most people are just too lazy to call!” I pictured her shaking a finger at the phone. “But that is a dreadful recipe, and I consider it my duty to warn other cooks away. A magazine that once employed James Beard has no business running such trash. And I’d like to point out that those ingredients were very costly. I expect you to honor the
Delicious!
Guarantee and