She’s the author of a cookbook titled Uncle Seymour’s Beef Borscht, once convinced Isaac Bashevis Singer to make a noodle kugel on the pilot of her cooking show, and has a well-honed comedy routine involving Jewish men who reveal themselves as Jewish princes through their inability to locate butter in the refrigerator. Rachel tells us that her mother used to serve lox and onions and eggs on New Year’s Day, and that she herself learned about the origin of hamantaschen while being fingered by a college paramour. The food in Heartburn is rooted in Ephron’s own Jewish upper-middle class upbringing and the bourgeois culinary landscape of the early 1980s. And while certain aspects of the book have aged very, very poorly over the last 40 years - most notably the instances of casual racism, xenophobia, and homophobia sprinkled through parts of the story like strychnine - the way Ephron wrote about food remains improbably fresh.

In Heartburn, food is many things: a constant, a salve, a memory, a mark of class and identity, a metaphor, a punchline, and, most memorably, a literal weapon. Get past that, though, and you still have a book that has a lot to say about love and betrayal, and the ways that food can be employed in service of both. (“If I tell the story, I control the version,” Ephron wrote in its final pages.)

It’s also unclear why Stanley Tucci, a noted food person but also a noted man, was chosen to write the foreword for a book that is famously by and about a woman telling her own story as a form of revenge and agency. The reissue has a truly unforgivable cover, one that employs Shutterstock clip art and a weak font and is altogether unbefitting of an anniversary anything. (Please don’t make me get into it.) Or maybe it’s because of Heartburn’s appearance last December in a viral Guardian essay whose author called Ephron “the patron saint of militarized vulnerability.” Or maybe it’s because you’ve heard that Alison Roman, an avowed Heartburn stan, is including Heartburn’s bread pudding recipe in her new cookbook, which comes out this month (Roman describes it as “almost like a dry, caramelized tres leches.”) If you haven’t heard of Heartburn lately, well, here it is again in the form of a 40th-anniversary edition, published this week with a new forward by Stanley Tucci. If you’ve heard of Heartburn lately, it’s probably because of Ephron’s vinaigrette recipe, which made an unlikely but memorable cameo in the high drama surrounding Don’t Worry Darling last fall.

Heartburn novel