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

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

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

Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

Gabrielle Hamilton · 291 pages

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 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

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

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

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

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

Consuming Passions: A Food-Obsessed Life

Michael Lee West · 262 pages

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

Delancey: A Man, a Woman, a Restaurant, a Marriage

Molly Wizenberg · 241 pages

"When Molly Wizenberg married Brandon Pettit, she vowed always to support him, to work with him to make their hopes and dreams real. She evinced enthusiasm about Brandon's enthusiasms: building a violin, building a boat, and opening an ice cream store--none of which came to pass. So when Brandon started making plans to open a pizza restaurant, Molly felt sure that the restaurant would join the lis

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

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

Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly

Anthony Bourdain · 320 pages

A celebrity chef shares anecdotes of his experience in the restaurant industry, and of his journey from dishwasher to a position of fame in the food industry.

Under a Mackerel Sky

Rick Stein

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

32 Yolks

Eric Ripert · 251 pages

"Before he earned his third Michelin star at his iconic restaurant, Le Bernardin, the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef of the Year, became a regular guest judge on Bravo's Top Chef, even before he knew how to make a proper omelet, Eric Ripert was a young boy in the South of France who felt that his world had come to an end. At the age of five, his parents went through a bitter divorce. Eric

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.

Roasting in Hell's Kitchen: Temper Tantrums, F Words, and the Pursuit of Perfection

Gordon Ramsay · 287 pages

Everyone thinks they know the real Gordon Ramsay: rude, loud, pathologically driven, stubborn as hell.For the first time, Ramsay tells the full inside story of his life and how he became the world's most famous and infamous chef: his difficult childhood, his brother's heroin addiction, his failed first career as a soccer player, his fanatical pursuit of gastronomic perfection and his TV persona—al

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 Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef

Marco Pierre White, James Steen · 296 pages

In the UK, White's brilliant cooking and high-wattage antics have made him a legend: the first British chef (and the youngest chef anywhere) to win three Michelin stars, a chain-smoking, pot-throwing, multiply married culinary genius whose fierce devotion to food and restaurants has been the only constant in a life of tabloid-ready turmoil. Here, he tells the story of his life in food, spanning hi

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