A Gut Feeling

Fiction To Devour…

Its considered rude to stare at someone in the act of eating, a voyeuristic yearning that many of us sublimate by reading about food in literature. A pleasure that is akin to the satisfaction of feeding, and that of being fed.

Food is love. Food is nourishment. Food is connection. Food identifies who we are and where we have been. It strengthens us in times of fragility and calms us in times of discord. And it cannot be left unsaid that food can be wielded as an instrument of death.

Food preoccupies our thoughts daily so it’s no surprise that it appears in almost every book, to some degree or another. Food is everywhere in fiction, tantalizing readers with luxurious and lavish descriptions of the aromas and flavours being consumed by the characters.

For this collection of reading recommendations, I have gone beyond books where food is only glimpsed at. Instead choosing those that evoke and entice with their seemingly endless capacity for sensory pleasure.

Content Warning: Reading these books may cause hunger pangs that can lead to loud, possibly embarrassing growling to emerge from your stomach, as well as likely salivation that results in drooling. Proceed with no caution whatsoever…

Culinary Connection…

Kitchens Of The Great Midwest – J. Ryan Stradel

When Lars wife, Cynthia, falls in love with wine, and a dashing sommelier, he’s left to raise their baby, Eva, on his own. He’s determined to pass on his love of food to his daughter. As Eva grows, she finds her solace and salvation in the flavors of her native Minnesota. We see Eva’s journey as she becomes the star chef behind a legendary and secretive pop-up supper club, culminating in an opulent and emotional feast. Each chapter tells the story of a single dish and character, delving into the ways food creates community and a sense of identity.

Serving Crazy With Curry – Amulya Malladi

Between the pressures to marry and become a traditional Indian wife and the humiliation of losing her job in Silicon Valley, Devi is on the edge, where the only way out seems to be to jump. Yet Devi’s plans to “end it all” fall short when she is saved by the last person she wants to see: her mother. Forced to move in with her parents until she recovers, Devi refuses to speak. Instead, she cooks . . . nonstop. And not the usual fare, but off the wall twists on Indian classics. Now family meals are no longer obligations. Devi’s parents, her sister, and her brother-in-law can’t get enough, and they suddenly find their lives taking turns as surprising as the impromptu creations Devi whips up in the kitchen each night.

The Kitchen Daughter – Jael McHenry

After the unexpected death of her parents, shy and sheltered Ginny, isolated by Asperger’s Syndrome, seeks comfort in family recipes. But the rich, peppery scent of her Nonna’s soup draws an unexpected visitor into the kitchen: the ghost of Nonna herself, who appears with a cryptic warning. A haunted kitchen isn’t Ginny’s only challenge. Her domineering sister insists on selling their parents’ house, the only home Ginny has ever known. As she packs up her parents’ belongings, Ginny finds evidence of family secrets she isn’t sure how to unravel. The more she learns, the more she realizes the keys to these riddles lie with the dead, and there’s only one way to get answers: cook from dead people’s recipes, raise their ghosts, and ask them.

Miss Cecily’s Recipes For Exceptional Ladies – Vicky Zimmerman

When her life falls apart on the eve of her 40th birthday, Kate finds herself volunteering at the House for Exceptional Ladies. There she meets 97-year-old Cecily. Cecily's tongue is as sharp as her mind, but she's fed up with pretty much everything. Having no patience for Kate's choices in life or love, Cecily prescribes her a self-help book...of sorts. Thought for Food: an unintentionally funny 1950s cookbook featuring menus for anything life can throw at the "easily dismayed," such as: breakfast with a hangover, tea for a grouchy aunt, dinner for a charming stranger. Kate is about to learn far more than recipes.

Sourdough – Robin Sloan

Lois is a software engineer at a San Francisco robotics company with world-changing ambitions. She codes all day and collapses at night, her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall from which she orders dinner every evening. Then, disaster! Visa issues. The brothers quickly close up shop. But they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, the sourdough starter used to bake their bread. She must keep it alive, feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. As she starts to share loaves with her colleagues, a whole new world begins to emerge.

The School Of Essential Ingredients – Erica Bauermeister

Once a month, eight students gather in Lillian's restaurant for a cooking class. Among them is Claire, a young woman coming to terms with her new identity as a mother; Tom, a lawyer whose life has been overturned by loss; Antonia, an Italian kitchen designer adapting to life in America; and Carl and Helen, a long-married couple whose union contains surprises the rest of the class would never suspect. They have come to learn the art behind Lillian's soulful dishes, but it soon becomes clear that each seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen.

Food Whore: A Novel – Jessica Tom

Food whore: a person who will do anything for food. When Tia moves to New York City, she plans to put herself on the culinary map in no time. But after a coveted internship goes up in smoke, Tia’s suddenly just another young food lover in the big city. But when Michael, a legendary restaurant critic, lets Tia in on a career-ending secret, that he’s lost his sense of taste, everything changes. Now he wants Tia to serve as his palate, ghostwriting his reviews. In return he promises her lavish meals, a bottomless cache of designer clothing, and the opportunity of a lifetime.

The Kitchen Front – Jennifer Ryan

Two years into the second World War, in an effort to help housewives with food rationing, a BBC radio program called The Kitchen Front is holding a cooking contest, and the grand prize is a job as the program’s first-ever female co-host. For four very different women, winning the competition would present a crucial chance to change their lives. For a young widow, it’s a chance to pay off her husband’s debts and keep a roof over her children’s heads. For a kitchen maid, it’s a chance to leave servitude and find freedom. For a lady of the manor, it’s a chance to escape her wealthy husband’s increasingly hostile behavior. And for a trained chef, it’s a chance to challenge the men at the top of her profession.

Dinner At The Homesick Restaurant – Anne Tyler

As their mother Pearl lays dying, three siblings are brought together, each recounting the bitter memories of their childhood, each believing the other is the favourite and had it easy. Contending with the troubles of their past and present, the oldest makes a final attempt to bring the family together for a meal, where the siblings will each hash out their repressed feelings and welcome a surprise visitor.

Crescent – Abu Diana Jaber

Sirine is thirty-nine, never married, and living in the Arab-American community of Los Angeles. She has a passion for cooking and works contentedly in a Lebanese restaurant, while her storytelling uncle and her saucy boss, Umm Nadia, believe she should be trying harder to find a husband. One day Hanif, a handsome professor of Arabic literature, an Iraqi exile, comes to the restaurant. Sirine falls in love and finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew about her own torn identity as an Arab-American.

A Moveable Feast – Anthony Bourdain

Life-changing food adventures taking us around the world. On the road, food nourishes us not only physically, but intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. It can be a gift that enables a traveller to survive, a doorway into the heart of a tribe, or a thread that weaves an indelible tie; it can be awful or ambrosial, and sometimes both at the same time. Celebrate the riches and revelations of food with this 38-course feast of tales set around the world.

Edible Concoction…

The Hundred-Foot Journey – Richard C. Morais

After tragedy finds them eating their way around the world, the Haji family settles in a small town in France. They open an inexpensive Indian restaurant opposite an esteemed legendary eatery, that of the famous chef Madame Mallory, and infuse the sleepy town with the spices of India. Transforming the lives of its eccentric villagers and infuriating their celebrated neighbor. Only after Madame Mallory wages culinary war with the immigrant family, does she finally agree to mentor young Hassan, leading him to Paris, the launch of his own restaurant, and a slew of new adventures.

Recipe For Persuasion – Sonali Dev

Chef Ashna Raje desperately needs a new strategy. How else can she save her beloved restaurant and prove to her estranged, overachieving mother that she isn’t a complete screw up? When she’s asked to join the cast of Cooking with the Stars, the latest hit reality show teaming chefs with celebrities, it seems like just the leap of faith she needs to put her restaurant back on the map. She’s a chef, what’s the worst that could happen? First in a culinary series with a spin on Jane Austen!

Season To Taste – Natalie Young

Lizzie is an ordinary housewife living with her dog and her husband, who is a bit of a difficult fellow, in a quiet cottage in the countryside. She's a wonderful cook. Even occasionally making food for the village parties. One day people notice that no one has seen Lizzie's husband for a few days. That's because last Monday, Lizzie snapped and cracked him on the head with her garden shovel. Over the course of the following month, with a body to get rid of and few fail-proof options at hand, Lizzie will channel her most practical instincts and do what she does best: she'll cook him, and then she'll eat him.

A Certain Hunger – Chelsea G. Summers

Food critic Dorothy loves what she does. Discerning, meticulous, and very smart, Dorothy’s clear mastery of the culinary arts make it likely that she could, on any given night, whip up a more inspired dish than any one of the chefs she writes about. Dorothy loves sex as much as she loves food, and while she has struggled to find a long-term partner that can keep up with her, she makes the best of her single life, frequently indulging in her tastes for both. But there is something within Dorothy that’s different from everyone else, and having suppressed it long enough, she starts to embrace what makes her uniquely, terrifyingly herself.

Mistress Of Spices – Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Tells the story of Tilo, a young woman from another time who has a gift for the mystical art of spices. Now immortal and living in the gnarled and arthritic body of an old woman, Tilo has set up shop in California, where she administers curatives to her customers. But when she's surprised by an unexpected romance with a handsome stranger, she must choose between everlasting life and modern society.

Hungry Hearts: Tales Of Food & Love – Elise Chapman

Welcome to Hungry Hearts Row, where the answers to most of life’s hard questions are kneaded, rolled, or baked. Where a typical greeting is, “Have you had anything to eat?” Where magic and food and love are sometimes one in the same. Told in interconnected short stories that explore the many meanings food can take on beyond mere nourishment, this is a stunning anthology about the intersection of family, culture, and eating.

Gourmet Rhapsody – Muriel Barbery

In the heart of Paris, Pierre Arthens, the greatest food critic in the world, is dying. Revered by some and reviled by many, Monsieur Arthens has been lording it over the world’s most esteemed chefs for years, passing judgment on their creations, deciding their fates with a stroke of his pen, destroying, and building reputations on a whim. But now, during his final hours, his mind has turned to simpler things. He is desperately searching for that singular and sublime flavor, once sampled is never forgotten. Indeed, this flamboyant and self-absorbed man desires only one thing before he dies: one last taste.

Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe – Fannie Flagg

A novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women, the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth, who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again.

All Four Stars – Tara Dairman

Meet Gladys Gatsby: New York’s toughest restaurant critic. Just don’t tell anyone that she’s in sixth grade! Gladys has been cooking gourmet dishes since the age of seven, only her fast-food-loving parents have no idea! Now she’s eleven, and after a crème brûlée accident, it was just a small fire, Gladys is cut off from the kitchen. She’s devastated but soon finds just the right opportunity to pay her parents back when she’s mistakenly contacted to write a restaurant review for one of the largest newspapers in the world.

The Kitchen God’s Wife – Amy Tan

Winnie and Helen have kept each other's worst secrets for more than fifty years. Now, because she believes she is dying, Helen wants to expose everything. And Winnie angrily determines that she must be the one to tell her daughter, Pearl, about the past, including the terrible truth even Helen does not know. And so begins Winnie's story of her life on a small island outside Shanghai in the 1920s, tracing the happy and desperate events that led to Winnie's coming to America in 1949.

The Sweet Spot…

The Particular Sadness Of Lemon Cake – Aimee Bender

On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the slice. To her horror, she finds that her cheerful mother tastes of despair. Soon, she’s privy to the secret knowledge that most families keep hidden: her father’s detachment, her mother’s transgression, and her brother’s increasing retreat from the world. But there are some family secrets that even her cursed taste buds can’t discern.

Little Coffee Shop Of Kabul – Deborah Rodriguez

After hard luck and heartbreak, Sunny finally finds a place to call home, in the middle of an Afghanistan war zone. There, the thirty-eight-year-old serves up her American hospitality to the expats who patronize her coffee shop, including a British journalist, a “danger pay” consultant, and a wealthy and well-connected woman. True to her name, Sunny also bonds with people whose language and daily life are unfamiliar to most Westerners, but whose hearts and souls are very much like our own.

Chocolat – Joanne Harris

When the exotic stranger Vianne arrives in an old French village and opens a chocolate boutique directly across the square from the church, Father Reynaud identifies her as a serious danger to his flock. To make matters worse, Vianne does not go to church and has a penchant for superstition. Like her mother, she can read Tarot cards. But she begins to win over customers with her smiles, her intuition for everyone’s favourites, and her delightful confections. Her shop provides a place for secrets to be whispered, grievances aired. Slowly but surely, she begins to shake up the rigid morality of the community.

The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe – Mary Simses

Ellen is going to fulfill her grandmother's dying wish, to find the hometown boy she once loved, and give him her last letter. Ellen leaves Manhattan and her buttoned up fiancé for Beacon, Maine. What should be a one-day trip is quickly complicated when she almost drowns in the chilly bay and is saved by a local carpenter. The characters she encounters at the local café show her the promise of a simpler life.

The Coincidence Of Coconut Cake – Amy E. Reichert

In downtown Milwaukee, Lou works tirelessly to build her beloved yet struggling restaurant into a success. She cheerfully balances her demanding business and even more demanding fiancé…until the morning she discovers him in the buff, with another woman. Witty, yet gruff Brit Al is keeping himself employed and entertained by writing scathing reviews of local restaurants under a pseudonym. When an anonymous tip sends him to Luella’s, little does he know he’s arrived on the worst day of the chef’s life. The review practically writes itself and he unleashes his worst. When the two cross paths they decide to never discuss work…until of course the truth comes out.

The Tea Girl Of Hummingbird Lane – Lisa See

In their remote mountain village, Li-yan and her family align their lives around the seasons and the farming of tea. Ensconced in ritual and routine, life goes on as it has for generations, until a stranger appears at the village gate in a jeep, the first automobile any of the villagers has ever seen. The stranger’s arrival marks the first entrance of the modern and slowly, Li-yan, one of the few educated girls on her mountain, begins to reject the customs that shaped her early life. When she has a baby out of wedlock, conceived with a man her parents consider a poor choice, she rejects the tradition that would compel her to give the child over to be killed, and instead leaves her, wrapped in a blanket with a tea cake tucked in its folds, near an orphanage in a nearby city. That tea cake will someday lead the child to seek out where she came from.

Somewhere Between Bitter & Sweet – Laekan Zea Kemp

Penelope has always dreamed of opening her own pastelería next to her father's restaurant, Nacho's Tacos. But her mom and dad have different plans, leaving Pen to choose between not disappointing her traditional Mexican American parents or following her own path. When she confesses a secret she's been keeping, her world is sent into a tailspin. But then she meets a cute new hire at Nacho's who sees through her hard exterior and asks the questions she's been too afraid to ask herself.

Together Tea – Marjan Kamali

Darya has discovered the perfect gift for her daughter’s twenty-fifth birthday: an ideal husband. Mina, however, is fed up with her mother’s years of endless matchmaking and the spreadsheets grading available Iranian-American bachelors. Having spent her childhood in Tehran and the rest of her life in New York City, Mina has experienced cultural clashes firsthand, but she’s learning that the greatest clashes sometimes happen at home. After a last ill-fated attempt at matchmaking, mother and daughter embark on a return journey to Iran. Immersed once again in Persian culture, the two women gradually begin to understand each other.