Culinary Memoir

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Los Angeles Times NPR Men’s Journal BookPage Booklist Publishers Weekly In the fall of 2009, the food world was rocked when Gourmet magazine was abruptly shuttered by its parent company. No one was...

For more than 30 years, Patience Gray, author of the celebrated cookbook Honey from a Weed, lived in a remote area of Puglia in southernmost Italy. She lived without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone, grew much of her own food, and gathered and ate wild plants alongside her neighbors in this economically impoverished region. She was fond of saying that she wrote only for herself and her friends, yet her growing reputation brought a steady stream of international visitors to her door.

The communal family table bears witness to our lives. The way we approach each meal speaks volumes about who we are and what we are going through in that very moment. It’s where the spirits of those who left too soon can be conjured back to mind through taste and smell. Still, we underestimate its pull and often miss the soulful nourishment and magic that happens at sobremesa—the time spent talking after a meal—due to our increasingly busy lives.

America is in the midst of a meat zeitgeist. Butchers have emerged as the rock stars of the culinary world, and cozy gastropubs serving up pork belly, lamb burgers, and sweetbreads rule the restaurant scene. If butchers are our new rock stars, then Berlin Reed is their front man. Through the lens of Berlin's personal story, The Ethical Butcher educates listeners about how they can improve the meat industry by participating in it.

Written and read by food writer and New York Times contributor Besha Rodell—(formerly) one of the world’s last anonymous restaurant critics—comes this this witty and lively memoir. When Besha Rodell moved from Australia to the United States with her mother at fourteen, she was a foreigner...

Gold Logie-nominated TV personality and food icon Melissa Leong bites down on her demons in this searing memoir, exploring themes of abuse in the hospitality industry, racism, mental health and, for a light palate cleanser, the thrill of mouth-wateringly memorable food. Most of all, she inspires the courage to create a life you really, really want.

A James Beard Award-winning writer captures life under the Red socialist banner in this wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir of feasts, famines, and three generations Born in 1963, in an era of bread shortages, Anya grew up in a communal Moscow apartment where eighteen families...

A cookbook and culinary memoir about growing up as the daughter of revered chef/restaurateur Alice Waters: a story of food, family, and the need for beauty in all aspects of life. In this extraordinarily intimate portrait of her mother--and herself--Fanny Singer, daughter of food icon and...

Sasha Martin set herself a rather ambitious goal: to cook - and eat - her way around the world, with 196 recipes from196 countries in 196 weeks. Enter Global Table Adventure, a project that proves to be more than just a culinary challenge as Sasha attempts to navigate the vicissitudes of marriage, motherhood, and life's failures and successes, all inextricably linked to her troubled past.

When a New Jersey native moves to Minnesota, she discovers a local food movement strong enough to survive the toughest winter. Fascinating and heartfelt, this memoir demonstrates that even in a place with a short growing season, food grown locally and organically can be healthy, community-based, environmentally conscious, and - most of all - delicious.

Rien ne prédestinait Guillaume Gomez, gosse du 93 et fils de brocanteurs, à entrer dans les cuisines de l’Élysée à 18 ans et à se retrouver orphelin à 22. Il est devenu, à 25 ans, le plus jeune lauréat de sa catégorie à remporter le concours Un des Meilleurs Ouvriers de France, puis à servir quatre présidents de la République dont il sera le chef attitré. Après avoir officié auprès de Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande et Emmanuel Macron, il devient en 2021 le premier ambassadeur de la gastronomie française de notre histoire.

Follow this family of six on their passage - extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreakingly poignant-from Bright Lights (of New York City) to the Northern Lights (of Norway) to the City of Light (Paris) to the speed-of-light of the Autobahn (in Munich). Continue deep into the tropics of Southeast Asia (Singapore) and end your voyage in the heights of the Swiss Alps (Geneva).

In 1949, a young Chinese housewife arrived in Taiwan and transformed herself from a novice to a natural in the kitchen. She launched a career as a cookbook author and television cooking instructor. Years later, in America, flipping through her mother's copies of Fu Pei-mei's Chinese cookbooks, historian Michelle T. King discovered more than the recipes to meals of her childhood. She found, in Fu's story and in her food, a portal to another time, when a generation of middle-class female home cooks navigated the postwar transformations taking place across the world.

In his lively, unprecedented close-up portrait of Ferran Adrià, award-winning food writer Colman Andrews traces this groundbreaking chef’s rise from resort hotel dishwasher to culinary deity, and the evolution of El Bulli from a German-owned beach bar into the establishment voted annually by an international jury to be “the world’s best restaurant”.

JAMES BEARD AWARD WINNER A young chef whose dreams were cut short savors every last minute as she explores food and adventure, illness and mortality in Savor, an “inspiring” (The New York Times Book Review) memoir and family story that sweeps from Pakistan to Manhattan and beyond...

A love-letter to the unexpected delights (and occasional despair) of so-called “first-hand food”—meals we grow, forage, fish, or even hunt from the world around us. To Boldly Grow is “part memoir, part how-to guide and wholly delightful” (Washington Post). Journalist and...

"[Ian Purkayastha] has a true, deep expertise in everything he sells--caviar, truffles, fish. He knows the stories that we need to sell the stuff tableside . . . he can disrupt the entire luxury foods market." ---From the Foreword by David Chang Ian Purkayastha is New York City's leading truffle...

In the Technicolor glow of the early 70s, Jessica B. Harris debated, celebrated, and danced her way from the jazz clubs of the Manhattan's West Side to the restaurants of the Village, living out her buoyant youth alongside the great minds of the day - luminaries like Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison. My Soul Looks Back is her paean to that fascinating social circle and the depth of their shared commitment to activism, intellectual engagement, and each other.

Julia Child's 20' x 14' kitchen was a serious workspace and recipe-testing lab that exuded a sense of mid-century homey comfort. Now, it has been on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, for most of the past twenty years. Between lively narrative and detailed commentary on Julia's favorite kitchen gadgets, Julia Child's Kitchen illuminates the stories behind the room's design, use, significance, and legacy, showing how deeply Julia Child continues to influence food today.

During a 30-year boom period in France between the end of World War II and the 1974 oil crisis, Paris was not only the world's most delicious, stylish, and exciting tourist destination; it was also the world capital of gastronomic genius and innovation. The Gourmands' Way explores the lives and writings of six Americans who chronicled the food and wine of this era, paying particular attention to their individual struggles as writers, to their life circumstances, and to their particular genius at sharing awareness of French food with mainstream American audiences.