Looking for a new read to inspire you in the kitchen, or the perfect gift for your food-loving friend? Here are 18 books that every foodie should read.
1. Crying in H Mart
Crying in H Mart is Michelle Zauner’s memoir of coping with her mother’s cancer diagnosis and ultimately grieving her loss. It also shares her experiences as a Korean American. As her mother’s health deteriorates, Zauner attempts to be helpful by learning to cook all of her mother’s (and her own) favorite Korean dishes. After her mother’s death, she continues this learning process. Cooking these recipes serves as a way to connect with her Korean heritage, and to still feel connected to her belated mother.
This book is riddled with references to Korean food, including this kimchi that I made as a Cooking the Books feature.
2. Sweetbitter
Sweetbitter follows recent college grad Tess as she moves to New York City and attempts to build a life for herself. With no close family and a seemingly clean break from her past, Tess gets a job as a back waitress at a prestigious New York restaurant. It is there that she begins to both find herself and develop her palate. Sweetbitter is simultaneously a look at the inner workings of restaurant culture and a chronicle of a young woman’s education in taste.
3. Gourmet Rhapsody
Muriel Barbery’s novel Gourmet Rhapsody depicts a dying Parisian food critic’s look back on a life dedicated to food. As he searches his memories for a particular taste he can’t quite place, Pierre Athens revisits several significant times in his life, each recollection brought on by a different food. This book is a look at the ways in which taste and memory are deeply intertwined.
4. Kitchen Confidential
You can’t have a list about food literature without including Anthony Bourdain’s classic food memoir, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Published in 2000, Kitchen Confidential was the world’s introduction to the future travel show host, then the executive chef at New York’s Brasserie Les Halles. Bourdain’s memoir is an exposé on the inner workings of the restaurant industry, with insider tips like avoiding fish on Mondays. It is also a humorous look at the characters who inhabit this industry.
Get my Cooking the Books recipe for Vichyssoise, inspired by Kitchen Confidential, here.
5. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World tells two different, but connected, stories through alternating chapters. “Hard-Boiled Wonderland” is the story of a data processor who uses his subconscious to encrypt information. “The End of the World” follows a newcomer to a strange, walled-in Town where inhabitants must part with their shadows.
If you’ve read any Murakami, you’ve probably come to expect certain elements in his fiction. A thirty-something male protagonist who has a penchant for whiskey and jazz or classical music. A young woman who befriends this man and helps him on his quest. And an appreciation for good food. This work does not disappoint. While Murakami’s other novels clearly show a love of food, in Hard-Boiled Wonderland he’s just having fun. The narrator befriends a librarian who suffers from gastric dilation, meaning she can eat and eat and never feel full. This leads to some pretty epic meals.
6. My Life in France
You can’t have a foodie list without including the queen of French cuisine. This book was such a joy to read, not only because of its obsession with food, but also because Julia Child is such a likeable person. Beginning when the Childs relocate to Paris and Julia first takes a serious interest in cooking, this memoir shows all of the struggles and successes that follow. Along the way she name drops intricate examples of French cuisine as casually as us plebians would talk about a peanut butter and jelly. This book does a great job of encapsulating Julia’s witty humor, her sense of adventure, her wonderful partnership with her husband, and her genuine love and passion for food and cooking.
7. Ghosts
Dolly Alderton’s novel Ghosts centers on thirty-something Londoner Nina Dean, a cookbook author searching for love. After her friends convince her to download a dating app, Nina meets Max and they hit it off. Things seem to be going well, until Max suddenly ghosts her. But this book is not just about being ghosted by a partner, but the ways in which we are haunted by nostalgia and the past. This is apparent not just in her suddenly nonexistent romantic life, but also in Nina’s strained relationship with her friends who seem to be moving on with their lives, and in her father’s increasingly worse dementia that causes him to think he’s living in the past. Rather than running from all of this, Nina draws inspiration from it, making nostalgia the theme of her new cookbook. As she researches the ways that food and memory are intertwined, Nina learns to live with her ghosts.
Get my Recipe for Tomato Bisque, inspired by Ghosts, here!
8. Taste
For those of you living under a rock, Stanley Tucci is an actor (known for such movies as The Devil Wears Prada and for playing Julia Child’s husband in Julie and Julia). His recent claim to fame is as the host of Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy, a TV docuseries in which he explores different regions of Italy and their local cuisine. Taste is his memoir of growing up in an Italian-American family. His childhood instilled in him a love of food that he has carried with him throughout his life, and that clearly has had an impact on his career. Within these pages he also shares some of his treasured family recipes.
9. From Scratch
Actress Tembi Locke’s memoir From Scratch, which has recently been adapted into a Netflix miniseries, explores the process of grieving the loss of her husband, Saro, to cancer. Tembi first meets Saro, a chef from Sicily, while she is studying abroad in Florence. The two fall in love quickly, aided by his cooking for her. Saro’s family, however, is less quick to fall in love with Tembi.
This memoir mainly focuses on the three summers following Saro’s death, during which Tembi and her daughter travel to Sicily, to maintain relations with his family. It resonates with an appreciation of good food–particularly unprocessed, simple foods made with fresh ingredients harvested locally, and produced using old traditions handed down through generations. It also has an appendix with some of the recipes mentioned in the book.
10. Mango and Peppercorns
Mango and Peppercorns is the memoir of three women: Tung, a Vietnamese refugee who manages to escape during the fall of Saigon; Kathy, an American woman who takes Tung in once she reaches the United States; and Phuong Lien, Tung’s daughter who her and Kathy raise together.
Growing up in poverty in Vietnam, Tung develops a hard work ethic, and also discovers a natural gift for cooking. Once she arrives in the United States, Kathy recognizes Tung’s talent, and the two open Hy Vong Vietnamese restaurant in Miami. Through this memoir, both women reminisce upon their years living and working together, learning to understand and work with each other’s cultural differences. Interspersed throughout their recollections are recipes from the restaurant.
11. Fatty Fatty Boom Boom
Rabia Chaudry is a lawyer best known as a host of the podcast Undisclosed, and for her fight to prove the innocence of Adnan Syed, featured in the podcast Serial. While much of her work focuses on helping other people, Fatty Fatty Boom Boom is a much more personal look at her own life. In this memoir Chaudry describes her love of food and her lifelong struggle with her weight.
Growing up in a Pakistani family, Rabia moves to the United States with her parents when she is very young. Her struggles with weight begin there, as she quickly falls in love with (unhealthy) American food. However, through her mother’s cooking and her visits to her family back in Pakistan, she learns to love the food of her native land as well, including several mouth-watering recipes in these pages. This memoir is both a love letter to food and a reflection on learning to love one’s own body.
12. Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
I picked up this book a few years ago on a whim and I’m so glad I did. In Barbarian Days, William Finnegan makes surfing interesting, even if you know absolutely nothing about it (see: me). This is Finnegan’s memoir of growing up a surfer and a lifelong passion for riding the waves. But it’s not just about surfing. This is a story about friendship, being an outsider, finding your way in the world, and following your dreams. It’s also a story about the seemingly endless possibilities of youth, and coming to terms with growing older.
Finnegan spends his life living in and traveling to some of the best places in the world to surf. Along the way he makes a point of meeting the locals and, of course, trying the food. While this isn’t specifically a “food book,” it contains so many references to and descriptions of food from various cultures that it is sure to leave you hungry.
13. Butter Honey Pig Bread
Butter Honey Pig Bread shifts between the perspectives of three Nigerian women: Kambirinachi and her twin daughters, Kehinde and Taiye. Estranged due to unresolved past traumas, these three women find themselves in the same house after many years apart. Here they must face the past–and each other–and try to figure out a future for themselves.
As the title suggests, this book is very food-centric–aided in large part by Taiye’s profession as a chef. Author Francesca Ekwuyasi even describes how to make a handful of recipes within the text of the novel.
14. Like Water for Chocolate
Like Water for Chocolate tells the story of a woman named Tita in twelve parts. Each section tells a different part of her story, while also focusing on a specific Mexican dish. Unable to marry the love of her life because of her domineering mother’s strict rules, Tita spends her days cooking for her family. She pours her emotions into the food she cooks, whether it’s her love for Pedro, her frustration at not being able to be with him, her anger at her mother, or her devastation when Pedro marries her older sister. These feelings are instilled in the food she cooks and felt by those who consume it. The end of each section contains a recipe, so readers can cook along as they read of Tita’s struggles.
15. Down and Out in Paris and London
While Down and Out in Paris and London has some fictionalized elements, it is largely a memoir of George Orwell’s own experiences of hard times in these two cities. While living in Paris, the narrator struggles to scrape by, looking for work and not knowing when his next meal will be. He eventually lands a job as a dishwasher–or plongeur–in a few different Paris restaurants. Within these pages, Orwell pulls back the curtain to reveal the grimy inner-workings of the Paris restaurant scene in the 1930s. It’s no wonder Anthony Bourdain considered this book essential reading.
16. Heartburn
Heartburn is a semi-autobiographical tale of love lost from the queen of rom-coms herself, Nora Ephron. It follows Rachel Samstat, a pregnant cookbook author who has just discovered her husband’s infidelity. While this book is more of an anti-rom-com, Ephron still manages to inject a lot of humor into a not particularly humorous subject matter. She also shares several recipes throughout the book.
17. The God of Small Things
I will recommend The God of Small Things again and again. It tells the story of twin brother and sister Estha and Rahel growing up in Kerala, India, in the 1960s, alternating with the twins as adults reconnecting in the 1990s. The novel focuses on a series of events surrounding the young twins and their mother’s forbidden romance with a man outside her caste. It is a look at how seemingly small things can ripple out to have major–and devastating–consequences.
Like a few other books on this list, The God of Small Things is not specifically a food book. However, Arundhati Roy’s beautiful, lush language is filled with mouth-watering references to the local cuisine of Kerala. And the book even contains a recipe for banana jam from the family’s pickle factory, Paradise Pickles and Preserves.
18. Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto’s short novel Kitchen follows Mikage, a young woman who finds herself with no remaining family after the death of her grandmother. During her period of grief she is invited to live with Yoichi, a young man who knew her grandmother, and Eriko, his mother (formerly his father). She lives with them for a period of time and then she doesn’t. Following a tragic event, she reconnects with Yoichi.
This book is about loss, grief, and the connections between people, and the spaces in which these connections take place–namely the eponymous room. It is in the kitchen, especially when cooking for others, that Mikage finds comfort and solace.
