Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life

Stuffed

Patricia Volk · 256 pages

"In a restaurant family, you're never just hungry - you're starving to death. And you're never full - you're stuffed.". "Patricia Volk's family is as American (background: Austrian-Jewish) as "Rhapsody in Blue." They came to these shores determined to make their mark; each of them is a piquant morsel of history. Great-grandfather Sussman Volk brought pastrami to the New World. Grandfather Jacob w

The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp Through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis

Tara Austen Weaver · 228 pages

The Ramen King and I: How the Inventor of Instant Noodles Fixed My Love Life

Andy Raskin · 292 pages

For three days in January 2007, the most e-mailed article in The New York Times was Appreciations: Mr. Noodle, an editorial noting the passing, at age ninety-six, of Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen. The very existence of the noodle inventor came as a shock to many, but not to Andy Raskin, who had spent nearly three years trying to meet Ando. Why? To fix the problems that plagued his l

Charlotte Au Chocolat: Memories of a Restaurant Girlhood

Charlotte Silver · 258 pages

Recounts the author's childhood in her mother's Harvard Square restaurant at the side of a rotating cast of eccentric staff members and her indomitable mother, describing how she grew into an understanding of the sacrifices her mother made to keep the family and restaurant afloat.

Apron Anxiety: My Messy Affairs In and Out of the Kitchen

Alyssa Shelasky · 260 pages

"Apron Anxiety is the hilarious and heartfelt memoir of quintessential city girl Alyssa Shelasky and her crazy, complicated love affair with...the kitchen. Three months after dating her TV-chef crush, celebrity journalist Alyssa Shelasky left her highly social life in New York City to live with him in D.C. But what followed was no fairy tale: Chef hours are tough on a relationship. Surrounded by f

Stir: My Broken Brain and the Meals That Brought Me Home

Jessica Fechtor · 279 pages

" M.F.K. Fisher meets Brain on Fire in this exquisite memoir of a 28-year-old food blogger who cooks her way back to health after a near-fatal aneurysm Jessica Fechtor was on top of the world: a Harvard graduate student, happily married, and thinking about starting a family. Then, while attending an academic conference, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. Multiple surgeries left

The Temporary Bride: A Memoir of Love and Food in Iran

Jennifer Klinec · 230 pages

A relationship was a mathematical formula: the correct variables of age, beauty, morality and finances were entered and the output was a successful, peaceful marriage. It couldn't be, therefore, that their Iranian son could feel desire for someone six years his senior, someone who didn't come to him pure and untouched. I was an amusing visitor from another world and soon enough I should return to

Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India

Madhur Jaffrey · 320 pages

Whether acclaimed food writer Madhur Jaffrey was climbing the mango trees in her grandparents' orchard in Delhi or picnicking in the Himalayan foothills on meatballs stuffed with raisins and mint, tucked into freshly baked spiced pooris, today these childhood pleasures evoke for her the tastes and textures of growing up. This memoir is both an enormously appealing account of an unusual childhood a

Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America

Linda Furiya · 256 pages

While growing up in Versailles, an Indiana farm community, Linda Furiya tried to balance the outside world of Midwestern America with the Japanese traditions of her home life. As the only Asian family in a tiny township, Furiya's life revolved around Japanese food and the extraordinary lengths her parents went to in order to gather the ingredients needed to prepare it. As immigrants, her parents a

The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove

Cathy Erway · 320 pages

In the city where dining is a sport, a gourmand swears off restaurants (even takeout) for two years, rediscovering the economical, gastronomical joy of home cooking. Includes thirty original recipes.

Double Cup Love

Eddie Huang · 218 pages

"As he entered adulthood (of sorts), Huang began to wonder just how authentic his Chinese identity really was, a dilemma that grew more acute as he contemplated proposing marriage to his all-American (well, all-Italian-American) girlfriend. So he enlisted his brothers Emery and Evan and returned to the land his ancestors had abandoned. His immediate goal was to sample the best food in China, from

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl · 294 pages

For better or worse, almost all of us grow up at the table. It is in this setting that Ruth Reichl's brilliantly written memoir takes its form. For, at a very early age, Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world . . . if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Tender at the Bone is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in eq

Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Anthony Bourdain · 288 pages

The long-awaited follow-up to the megabestseller Kitchen ConfidentialIn the ten years since his classic Kitchen Confidential first alerted us to the idiosyncrasies and lurking perils of eating out, from Monday fish to the breadbasket conspiracy, much has changed for the subculture of chefs and cooks, for the restaurant business—and for Anthony Bourdain.Medium Raw explores these changes, moving bac

Give a Girl a Knife

Amy Thielen · 315 pages

"A beautifully written memoir that follows one woman from her childhood in a dysfunctional Midwestern family to becoming a chef in New York City and finally her triumphant return home to reclaim and redeem Midwestern cooking. Amy Thielen, author of the James Beard Award-winning cookbook The New Midwestern Table, traces her journey from Park Rapids, Minnesota, to cooking professionally under some o

Miriam's Kitchen

Elizabeth Ehrlich · 377 pages

As a girl, Elizabeth Ehrlich loved to visit her grandmother's kitchens. These were busy, onion-scented, Yiddish-accented places. Within their steamy plaster walls, the grandmothers - remarkable women of insight, strength, and grace - preserved and handed on history, tradition, community connection, humor, and wry lessons of life. As an adult, Ehrlich followed the path of her assimilating clan, fo

Spilling the Beans

Clarissa Dickson Wright · 336 pages

Life from Scratch: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Forgiveness

Sasha Martin · 352 pages

"It was a culinary journey like no other: Over the course of 195 weeks, food writer and blogger Sasha Martin set out to cook--and eat--a meal from every country in the world. As cooking unlocked the memories of her rough-and-tumble childhood and the loss and heartbreak that came with it, Martin became more determined than ever to find peace and elevate her life through the prism of food and world

Almost French: A New Life In Paris

Sarah Turnbull · 320 pages

A delightful, fresh twist on the travel memoir, Almost French takes us on a tour that is fraught with culture clashes but rife with deadpan humor. Sarah Turnbull's stint in Paris was only supposed to last a week. Chance had brought Sarah and Frederic together in Bucharest, and on impulse she decides to take him up on his offer to visit him in the world's most romantic city. Sacrificing Vegemite f

Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line

Michael Gibney

The back must slave to feed the belly. In this urgent and unique book, chef Michael Gibney uses twenty-four hours to animate the intricate camaraderie and culinary choreography in an upscale New York restaurant kitchen. Here readers will find all the details, in rapid-fire succession, of what it takes to deliver an exceptional plate of food -- the journey to excellence by way of exhaustion. Told i

Talking with My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater

Gail Simmons · 270 pages

When Gail Simmons first graduated from college, she felt hopelessly lost. What was she going to do? A family friend gave her some invaluable advice--make a list of what you love to do, and let that be your guide. Gail wrote down four words: Eat. Write. Travel. Cook. Little did she know, those four words would become the basis for a career as a professional eater, cook, food critic, magazine editor

Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good: A Memoir of Food and Love from an American Midwest Family

Kathleen Flinn · 277 pages

This family history with recipes offers a flavorful tale spanning three generations as Flinn returns to the mix of food and memoir readers loved in her best-seller The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry. From a Route 66 trek to San Francisco to their Michigan farm to the shores of Florida, humor and adventure defines her family even in the worst of times. You'll savor Uncle Clarence's divine co

Love, Loss, and What We Ate: A Memoir

Padma Lakshmi · 336 pages

Television personality Padma Lakshmi examines "her journey from [a humble family kitchen], led 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 brill

Stealing Buddha's Dinner

Bich Minh Nguyen · 272 pages

As a Vietnamese girl coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Nguyen is filled with a rapacious hunger for American identity, and in the pre-PC-era Midwest (where the Jennifers and Tiffanys reign supreme), the desire to belong transmutes into a passion for American food. More exotic- seeming than her Buddhist grandmother's traditional specialties, the campy, preservative-filled "delicacies" of mai

The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food

Judith Jones · 297 pages

From the legendary editor who helped shape modern cookbook publishing-one of the food world's most admired figures-comes this evocative and inspiring memoir. Living in Paris after World War II, Jones broke free of bland American food and reveled in everyday French culinary delights. On returning to the States she published Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The rest is publishing a