A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family

Mastering the Art of French Eating: Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris

Ann Mah · 273 pages

When journalist Ann Mah’s diplomat husband is given a three-year assignment in Paris, Ann is overjoyed. A lifelong foodie and Francophile, she immediately begins plotting gastronomic adventures à deux. Then her husband is called away to Iraq on a year-long post—alone. Suddenly, Ann’s vision of a romantic sojourn in the City of Light is turned upside down. So, not unlike another diplomatic wife,

Paris to the Moon

Adam Gopnik · 342 pages

Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafes, breathtaking facades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light.

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

Yes, Chef

Marcus Samuelsson · 327 pages

"It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Mar

A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle · 207 pages

In this witty and warm-hearted account, Peter Mayle tells what it is like to realize a long-cherished dream and actually move into a 200-year-old stone farmhouse in the remote country of the Lubéron with his wife and two large dogs. He endures January's frosty mistral as it comes howling down the Rhône Valley, discovers the secrets of goat racing through the middle of town, and delights in the glo

Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking: A Memoir of Food and Longing

Anya von Bremzen · 338 pages

Born in a surreal Moscow communal apartment where eighteen families shared one kitchen, the author grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy Fruit gum at school, and longing for a taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively joyous, melancholy and, finally, intolerable.

L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food

Roy Choi, Tien Nguyen, Natasha Phan · 340 pages

"Los Angeles: A patchwork megalopolis defined by its unlikely cultural collisions; the city that raised and shaped Roy Choi, the boundary-breaking chef who decided to leave behind fine dining to feed the city he loved--and, with the creation of the Korean taco, reinvented street food along the way. Abounding with both the food and the stories that gave rise to Choi's inspired cooking, L.A. Son tak

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

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

My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes)

Luisa Weiss · 310 pages

The story of how one thoroughly confused, kitchen-mad perfectionist broke off her engagement to a handsome New Yorker, quit her dream job, and found her way to a new life, a new man, and a new home in Berlin -- one recipe at a time

Maman's Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen

Donia Bijan · 254 pages

""Donia Bijan discovers a way back to home and what it means to belong. A memoir both universal and intimate, anchored in history and lifted by the mysterious elements that only occur in a warm and inviting kitchen." --Marsha Mehran, author Pomegranate Soup For Donia Bijan's family, food has been the language they use to tell their stories and to communicate their love. In 1978, when the Islamic R

My Life in France

Julia Child, Alex Prud'Homme · 344 pages

Julia Child singlehandedly created a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, but as she reveals in this bestselling memoir, she was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the coun

The Language of Baklava: A Memoir

Diana Abu-Jaber · 341 pages

"From the acclaimed author of Crescent, here is a vibrant, humorous memoir of growing up with a gregarious Jordanian father who loved to cook. Diana Abu-Jaber weaves the story of her life in upstate New York and in Jordan around vividly remembered meals: everything from Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts with her Arab-American cousins to goat stew feasts under a Bedouin tent in the desert. These se

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir

Michelle Zauner · 256 pages

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her gra

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

From Scratch

Tembi Locke · 352 pages

Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

Bill Buford · 336 pages

Writer Buford's memoir of his headlong plunge into the life of a professional cook. Expanding on his award-winning New Yorker article, Buford gives us a chronicle of his experience as "slave" to Mario Batali in the kitchen of Batali's three-star New York restaurant, Babbo. He describes three frenetic years of trials and errors, disappointments and triumphs, as he worked his way up the Babbo ladder

Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

A.J. Liebling · 185 pages

From an interview with thriller writer Jane Ciabattari on LitHub: *"In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five

Only in Naples: Lessons in Food and Famiglia from My Italian Mother-in-Law

Katherine Wilson · 287 pages

"In the tradition of M.F.K. Fisher and Peter Mayle, this enchantingly warm and witty memoir follows American-born Katherine Wilson on her adventures abroad, where a three-month rite of passage in Naples turns into a permanent embrace of this boisterous city on the Mediterranean. It is all thanks to a surprising romance, a new passion for food, and a spirited woman who will become her mother-in-law

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

Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War

Annia Ciezadlo

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

The Sweet Life in Paris: Delicious Adventures in the World's Most Glorious - and Perplexing - City

David Lebovitz · 282 pages

Like so many others, David Lebovitz dreamed about living in Paris ever since he first visited the city in the 1980s. Finally, after a nearly two-decade career as a pastry chef and cookbook author, he moved to Paris to start a new life. Having crammed all his worldly belongings into three suitcases, he arrived, hopes high, at his new apartment in the lively Bastille neighborhood. But he soon discov

Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table

Ruth Reichl · 320 pages

Warm, very descriptive of mouth watering food interspersed with receipes. A story of food and her life which was quite an exciting one of a restaurant critic.