food memoir essays

Course Syllabus

Honest to Goodness: Introduction to Writing the Food Memoir

No genre is more powerful at examining what nourishes and sustains us than the food memoir..

In this five-week intensive course, we will take inspiration from work in top-tier publications such as Bon Appétit , the New Yorker, and the New York Times . You will explore ways to incorporate food (both literally and symbolically) into your own writing, brainstorm food-inspired stories you want to tell, *spice* up your prose, and ultimately write and workshop a pair of personal essays in two distinct styles, using food as a vehicle for storytelling. The final week of the course will focus on best practices for submitting food memoir essays for publication.

How it works:

• discussions of assigned readings and other general writing topics with peers and the instructor
• written lectures and a selection of readings
• writing prompts and/or assignments
• the opportunity to submit one or more flash essays for instructor and/or peer review
• an optional video conference that is open to all students (and which will be available afterward as a recording for those who cannot participate)

Aside from the live conference, there is no need to be online at any particular time of day. To create a better classroom experience for all, you are expected to participate weekly in class discussions to receive instructor feedback.

Week 1: The Food Memoir: What is it?

We’ll begin with an overview of the food memoir genre—personal stories involving food preparation and/or consumption. In the first weeks of the course, we’ll focus on descriptive food writing. You will read a sampling of personal essays that describe everything from a father’s preparation process for his famous Persian rice, to a chef’s attempt to produce almond-flavored carrots. Follow this style and take an inventory of your “ingredients”— possible topics for your own descriptive personal essay.

Week 2: Description and the Food Memoir

Learn various strategies for adding rich descriptions to a food memoir essay. This week, you will do a close reading of essays that use a wide range of literary techniques to create a rich sensory experience on the page. You’ll experiment with various techniques and approaches in your own writing to make your story more vivid and inviting to readers. You will also submit a food memoir essay (1,000-1,500 words) for peer and instructor feedback

Week 3: An Appetite for Metaphor

Sometimes, memoirists use food not to make their readers’ mouths water, but to open a window on important social, moral, or cultural issues such as assimilation, homesickness, or the tension between dining in versus eating out. This week, we’ll focus on the concept of food as a representation of an idea. You will read a selection of food memoir essays that use this technique and brainstorm possible topics for your own symbolic food memoir essay.

WEEK 4: SYMBOLISM AND THE FOOD MEMOIR

This week, you will learn various strategies for composing a highly symbolic food memoir essay. You will do a close reading of essays that use figurative language such as simile and metaphor to explore important themes. You will also submit a new food memoir essay (1,000-1,500 words) for peer and instructor feedback.

Week 5: Revising and Publishing Food Memoirs

During our final week, we’ll explore ways to revise essays and learn where to submit food memoir essays for publication. You will also have the option to submit a third essay for peer-only critique.  

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Top 10 culinary memoirs

Going beyond lists of ingredients, these books recall the various ways in which food nourishes our most intimate lives

W hen I was writing about the dinners I had with my elderly friend Edward, I made a decision early on not to include any recipes. Edward, an accomplished cook, rarely wrote down any instructions for, say, his oysters Rockefeller or chicken paillard . While the food we ate was certainly important, the book was not meant to be a cookbook, but instead a memoir about the nature of friendship.

In this pursuit, I was inspired by a rich literature of culinary writing in which food is a central motif, but is held together by the story of its preparation and the fellowship that comes from sharing a meal. So many writers – from MFK Fisher, who wrote lyrically about the pleasures of dining alone, to New York chef Gabrielle Hamilton, who documented her hardscrabble upbringing through family meals – use food as a catalyst for memories and loving nostalgia.

While I’m still a big fan of a good recipe book – anything by Jamie Oliver, Yotam Ottolenghi and Julia Child – it’s the stories in beautifully rendered memoirs that stay with me longer than any recipe. It’s Nigel Slater using burnt toast as a metaphor for his mother’s love, and Anne Fadiman getting drunk as a teenager when she tries to please her vintage-wine-obsessed father. Below, are what I consider some of the best culinary memoirs.

1. The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman Fadiman’s most recent book about her father, the American author and radio personality Clifton Fadiman, is a deftly written memoir – a coming-of-age story written around her father’s oenophilia. He was “a lousy driver and a two-finger typist”, she writes, “but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover”.

2. The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was ahead of her time. After spending “two shaking and making years in my life” with her new husband in Dijon, she returned to California in the early 1940s where she became a serious food writer. The Gastronomical Me recounts some of her very poetic encounters with food. Here was a woman who loved nothing more than dining alone in a restaurant “as if I were a guest of myself, to be treated with infinite courtesy.”

3. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton Hamilton runs Prune, a jewel of a restaurant in New York’s East Village. She is also a gifted writer who takes you on a journey from her difficult adolescence in rural Pennsylvania to New York’s aptly named neighbourhood Hell’s Kitchen, where she moves after high school before opening her restaurant.

4. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin The New Yorker writer and Gourmet magazine columnist’s memoir is about the joys of cooking at home. From her tiny Greenwich Village kitchen, she writes about meals shared with friends and family. “I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in,” she says. I fell for the ordinary extraordinariness of her stories, the reliance on available resources and implements to create something wonderful. This is what I tried so hard to capture in my own book.

5. Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher WH Auden called Fisher “America’s greatest writer”, which is my excuse for choosing a second book by her. It’s easy to see why the poet so admired her, in this slim 1941 volume – an ode to the gastronome’s prize treat. “An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life,” she begins. Fisher tells you everything you ever wanted to know about this bivalve mollusc and writes brilliantly about such unfamiliar ingredients as Herbsaint .

6. My Life in France by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme A great account of the Childs’ life in Paris after the second world war. Working with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, the great chef reminisces about meeting her husband Paul in what was still Ceylon while both were working for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. When Paul took a job in Paris, Julia immersed herself in French cooking. Her description of eating sole meunière for the first time at a restaurant in Rouen is mouth-watering: “It arrived whole: a large, flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top.”

7. Cooking for Mr Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship With Recipes by Amanda Hesser The “Mr Latte” of the title is the author’s boyfriend, a writer for the highbrow New Yorker who has rather lowbrow tastes in food. Although affable and intelligent, he ends each exquisite meal they share with the fine-dining faux pas of a latte. First told in instalments for the New York Times where Hesser worked as a food writer, this is as much a love letter to New York and food as it is to the man Hesser ends up marrying.

8. More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin Since the subject here concerns appetite, I’m going to recommend a second helping of Colwin. I feel a real kinship to her because I share her obsession with what people eat at home. Written the year Colwin died aged just 50, this is a treatise on the importance of the family dinner – no matter who you consider to be family. “We know that without food we would die,” she writes. “Without fellowship life is not worth living.”

9. Talking With My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater by Gail Simmons Simmons is a presenter/judge on Bravo’s Top Chef , but she’s also a fellow Canadian who found herself struggling to make it in a tough industry in New York. In this memoir, she writes about growing up in Toronto with a mother who wrote food columns and conducted cooking classes in their suburban home. Simmons’s trial-by-fire in some of the toughest high-end restaurant kitchens in New York City makes for a great read.

10. Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger by Nigel Slater Slater tells the story of his childhood through a catalogue of British sweets – fairy drops and Bluebird milk chocolate toffees – and the culinary failures of his mother. Burnt toast was her specialty. “My mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning,” writes Slater, who nevertheless longs for blackened bread after she dies and his father marries a woman who is the perfect housewife but very much the evil stepmother.

• Food and drink books
• Autobiography and memoir
• Biography books

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How to Write a Food Memoir? (9 Tips With Examples)

Last Updated on January 16, 2023 by Dr Sharon Baisil MD

Are you curious about the dishes you eat or the stories that led to their creation? If so, consider writing a food memoir. This unique form of writing allows you to share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences with food in an intimate and entertaining way. Writing a food memoir will be a fun project, but it may also give you insights into your culinary preferences that you would never have thought possible. Ready to get started? Here are some tips on how to write a food memoir that will make your cooking journey come alive!

What is classified as a food memoir? How can it be done?

A book full of emotions and recollections is what a food memoir is. Food memoirs aren’t just about taste or how much one enjoys a particular cuisine. They investigate the personal aspect of food, food preparation, and eating.

However, very few cookbook authors make a living from writing cookbooks. For the most part, in reality, you need to be very good and lucky with your book before it makes money for you. Even then, not everyone gets rich or even breaks even on their first book – there are some terrible books that sell tens of thousands of copies but don’t make anyone any money at all. It can take years – sometimes more than one cookbook written — before an author gets close to earning back.

According to her book More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen, Laurie Colwin is not a foodie or culinary savant. She is a lover of food who works as a writer. Nonetheless, she tells personal tales, foibles, and secrets to the reader to explain why she loves it so much throughout the book. The methods are grounded in life and linked to emotional or interpersonal experiences.

Yet, there must be more to a food memoir than simply the food and cooking. Reading about someone who is only passionate about one cuisine and isn’t interested in another quickly gets monotonous. The majority of the text can’t be made up of recipes. There must be conflict or a more prominent tale that connects everything.

The Cooking Gene, by Michael Twitty, delves into Southern cuisine history and his family line. He shares stories and recollections related to the diverse crossroads of his identity and places them in the more extensive framework of the history of the South, slavery, race, and culinary history. 

Top 9 tips to write the best food memoir like Ruth Reichl

Food memoirs are a great way to capture your personal stories and retell them in an engaging manner. More importantly, they can benefit the person who has written it and those around her/him.

Many food stories are sentimental, and so many food memoirs have never been read. Here is how to write a food story by showing off your family’s history of food experiences:

Food stories can also be written like an essay with several paragraphs, as shown above, making the story more readable for readers. Food stories do not always need to include recipes or people, it could be about your childhood memories and growing up around food which makes this book one of a kind.

1 – Don’t get picky!

You shouldn’t try to be a food writer unless you’re willing to eat many different things, which may seem self-evident.

You’ll need a deep understanding of different cuisines if you’re a culinary specialist, and that knowledge can only be gained by trying new things if you’re not afraid.

2 – Drive the narrative with conflict

Ultimately, readers keep reading to find out what happens next. Publishers want non-fiction that reads like a story. This involves comprehending the essential components of a narrative. A narrative with a narrative arc full of struggle and challenges, a climax, and a conclusion is presented by the protagonist’s predicament.

3 – Don’t be a perfectionist!

A fundamental element of “a hero’s voyage,” a style of storytelling that works particularly well with memoirs, is a flawed protagonist. Track and describe your personal journey, whether physical, mental, or spiritual. Accept those horrible, shameful experiences. Make fun of yourself. Be imperfect. Bumble. Be real. Drop that duck. When something succeeds, readers can celebrate.

4 – Some new things may not be strange!

In your food writing, there are specific terms that you shouldn’t use. You may regard a particular meal as “abnormal,” “odd,” or “freaky,” but it may be frequent if not the mainstay of other civilizations. In your food writing, avoid using any of these words. These statements carry negative connotations and imply a restricted perspective on your part, even if your intentions are good. Similarly, it’s best to use the words “cheap” and “inexpensive” with caution. Just because something seems cheap to you doesn’t mean it is for locals.

5 – Artificial Intelligence can make you super creative!

Simply using the Creative Story template of Jasper AI , you can start creating compelling content around the theme. For this purpose, you need to choose the tone of voice and enter the story’s plot, which is our food experiences in this case. Not only you but giants like Facebook, Amazon, etc. are using AI’s help to generate compelling content quickly.

6 – Try various writing styles!

Don’t restrict yourself to writing reviews when there’s so much you can do in food writing.

Not only will branching out into new genres broaden your repertoire, but it will also force you to think about food in new ways. Try writing a combination of reviews, recipes, features, or history pieces if you want to specialize in a specific type of food writing.

Keeping you from getting bored or jaded is another benefit of mixing it up. After you’ve written your fifteenth piece on the finest burgers in your city, it might be time to take a break or try something new. Being a food critic may seem exciting, but it may get tiring.

7 – Be trustworthy for the readers

A memoir is an intimate non-fiction book you’d share with complete strangers. Begin your narrative by pretending you’re whispering a secret to the reader that you’ve never told anyone else. This technique establishes trust by making the reader a confidante from the start.

8 – Consider reaching out to food bloggers

If you want your memoir to reach a wider audience, consider collaborating with other food bloggers. Not only will this give you exposure and help promote your work, but it can also cultivate valuable relationships that could lead to more collaborations in the future. Food writing is a community-building activity that benefits everyone involved!

9 – Be open to feedback

No matter how spectacular your work may be, someone always has something negative to say. Take constructive criticism seriously and use it as motivation to continue improving. Receiving criticism from others helps you hone your skills to produce the level of writing excellence that will make you a household name in food writing.

Best food memoir examples

Food isn’t just a means of survival, but it’s also how we experience pleasure, suffering, love, and humor. An excellent food memoir addresses the valid reasons we eat. These books keep our employees enthusiastic about cooking, reading, and feeling.

1 – The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

2 – Never Eat Your Heart Out by Judith Moore

3 – The Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life by Ruth Reichl

4 – Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes From My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg

5 – Tender At The Bone: Growing Up At The Table by Ruth Reichl

Final Words

Now you know all the tips and tricks to write a successful food memoir. All you have to do now is choose whether or not to write. Keep practicing until you know that writing this book will be a great pleasure and bring some additional income to your life.

If something is missing from our list, feel free to share it in the comments below!

How do you write food stories?

Like soufflés, great food articles are a delight to behold. Its pillowy perfection hides the effort and expertise involved in its creation. You must follow the expert tips below to write the best food stories.   Select a fresh story angle   Food periodicals, websites, and food blogs (such as New York Magazine’s Grub Street and National Geographic’s The Plate) are targeted at a defined, specialized public. Decide on the particular publication you want to pitch and its editorial interests. Know the person’s temperament and energy level. What are the intended viewers or readers? Your suggestion should be intriguing and unique while still fitting into the topic mix.   Layer your story writing   Get started researching and writing as soon as your idea gets approved. Are you looking for an article on food labels? Bring in reports, analysis, and data. Show your readers how reading the fine print affects their health. Reviewing a restaurant? Why a dish delighted or displeased you is detailed in the recipe. Be objective and fair in your judgment.   Create a tempting pitch   These few lines will determine the fate of your piece, so make sure they’re perfect. A stellar pitch should provide a clear picture of your idea. What is the subject of your tale from the beginning? Leave the editor with plenty of food for thought by capturing his or her attention with your insights and arguments. Tell us why you are the ideal author for this job.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80570.Smashed

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/42362558-hunger

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What Makes a Good Food Memoir?

Jaime Herndon

Jaime Herndon finished her MFA in nonfiction writing at Columbia, after leaving a life of psychosocial oncology and maternal-child health work. She is a writer, editor, and book reviewer who drinks way too much coffee. She is a new-ish mom, so the coffee comes in extra handy. Twitter:  @IvyTarHeelJaime

View All posts by Jaime Herndon

There is not much I remember of those first hazy, severely sleep-deprived first few weeks of parenthood, but I do remember the food. I remember eating lasagna one afternoon that a friend had made and brought over and just crying as I ate it because the act of feeding touched something primal in me. Eating the warmed-up lasagna fed more than just my belly. I remember the meals my grandmother would bring over and the takeout that she would insist on having me order extra of, “for the next few days.”

I don’t know what it is — maybe the last 18+ months have felt a bit like those exhausted, hypervigilant, worn out early days of parenthood — but lately I’ve been devouring (no pun intended) food writing. Perhaps, like comfort food on a rainy day, these help nourish me in some way and are a nice respite from everyday life. Articles, criticism, and yes, even memoirs. The Best American Food Writing 2021 shares bedside table space with Salt Sugar Fat ; Taco USA and Delancey have both recently been shelved after reading them. While I love all of it, it’s the memoirs that stick out the most for me. The author doesn’t have to be a world-class chef or even a chef at all — yet if the components of a good food memoir are there, I usually end up liking it. It’s always a bonus if there are recipes sprinkled throughout, too.

But what makes a good food memoir? It’s more than just great food writing.

Breaking Down the Components of a Food Memoir

Food can be wrapped up in emotions and memories, and a food memoir is no different. Food memoirs aren’t just about the food itself or just about how much one likes a certain food. They dig in to the emotional aspect of food, cooking, and eating. In Laurie Colwin’s memoir More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen , she’s not a foodie or a culinary master — she’s a writer who simply loves cooking. But what she does in the book is share personal stories, foibles, and tricks with the reader to show them why she loves it so much. The recipes are tied to emotional or interpersonal events, grounding them in real life. Even as someone who doesn’t love to cook, the book was a joy for me to read because of the emotional context in the writing. Lucy Knisley does this in her graphic memoir Relish: My Life in the Kitchen , as well. She connects her memories of her family with cooking and certain foods, and her own baking experiences that are linked to certain events and times in her life. Food connects us to places, events, and each other, and a good food memoir brings that to the page and evokes these feelings in us as we read it.

But as interesting (and tasty) as food and cooking are, there has to be something more to a food memoir. Recipes can’t make up the bulk of the text, and reading only about how much someone loves one food and doesn’t care for another gets old, fast. There has to be some conflict, or a bigger storyline that ties it all together. Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene not only explores the history of Southern food, but also his ancestry. He brings the reader into his personal life, sharing anecdotes and memories tied to the various intersections of his identity, while also placing them in the larger context of the history of the South, slavery, race, and culinary history. Food writer and restaurant critic Ruth Reichl details lots of publishing gossip and tales of Gourmet magazine — as well as her evolution into a leader — in her memoir Save Me the Plums . Yes, there’s lots of food writing, but it’s only part of the story.

There are also some basic craft and informative details that go into a good food memoir, too. Since I’m not a cook, I appreciate when an author goes into why certain things are done in the kitchen if they’re discussing it, or what they mean when they mention a technique. When a recipe, chef, place, or issue is put into a larger food or societal context, even if it’s as simple as referencing a trend that I may not be familiar with but I can google for more information, that also helps to give more information about the food writing, and I enjoy it that much more. Assuming the reader already knows all of the backstory or references can lose people in the reading.  

Food connects us, and I think the good food memoirs remind us of this. In Buttermilk Graffiti , chef Edward Lee travels around the country to explore the diversity of American food, and gets to know the people and the stories behind the food they serve. Through talking with them and eating their dishes, he connects with so many different people and then shares recipes that they’ve inspired. Jennifer 8. Lee also does this in The Fortune Cookie Chronicles , through exploring Chinese food and Chinese restaurants, and their place in American culture. Her book is also a really good example of a food memoir also having a larger storyline. The book isn’t just about her own life and memories tied to Chinese food, but also about explorations of various issues within the industry.

A good food memoir will draw you in with the food but keep you reading with good writing, a defined story arc, and some sort of connection with you. What is it that the author wants to share about this, and why should it matter? The answers to those questions can help guide the writing and be the reasons we pick it up in the first place. Balancing food writing with the personal story can be tricky, but when done well, it’s compelling.

What’s your favorite food memoir?

For more books about food, check out this post on contemporary YA reads for food lovers , and this post on sci-fi and fantasy cookbooks .

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Review: A Taste of My Life: A Memoir in Essays and Recipes , by Chitrita Banerji

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Kashyapi Ghosh; Review: A Taste of My Life: A Memoir in Essays and Recipes , by Chitrita Banerji. Gastronomica 1 November 2022; 22 (4): 107–108. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.4.107

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Food memoirs are a ubiquitous genre in food writing. Many eminent food personalities, including M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Anthony Bourdain, have made the food memoir their own. The most challenging aspect of a food memoir is to find something new yet relatable to the reader, to make the autobiographical experience universal and available to everyone.

Having written extensively about food history for most of her writing career, culinary historian Chitrita Banerji ventures into the food memoir genre with A Taste of My Life: A Memoir in Essays and Recipes . Banerji pours her heart and experiences into this book. It is as if we are made privy to a written version of her life as it was lived. From her resentment toward her mother asking her about the lessons in school, to her first cup of tea as an adult, to the lingering taste of a chicken sandwich that she searched for throughout the world—food is the backbone of this memoir. The different facets of life, school, college, university, marriage, separation, and death are all ensconced within the narrative of food. Food is a conduit that takes us on a journey with the author as Banerji traverses from school to the crematorium, where she conducts the last rites of her mother and her husband. The accuracy in her description of these memories take us back and forth in time—the hustle-bustle of Calcutta markets, a village in Bangladesh, the dazzle of the United States. Banerji takes the reader along for this journey of food, memory, and self-discovery. The reader is an important witness to all the major events of her life and it reads like a coming-of-age novel. The fabric of the book is such that it gently coerces the reader to reconnect to one’s own childhood memories, to relive those subtle moments of joy in association with food. A memoir like this presents a holistic and personal view of food and its validation through memories. Devoid of the academic devices of footnote, endnote, and citation that can perplex the reader, the memoir form uses myth, history, and trivia to explain the variegated colors of memory and food.

Throughout the book, Banerji makes herself comfortable meandering through food and memory. Her memories of monsoon, her celebratory cup of tea with her father when she secures admission at an undergraduate college, food associated with the winter season and with the scorching tropical summers, all interwoven with snippets of her ordinary life, makes for an endearing read. For the reader of food writing, this is an important text to understand how one can make inroads into the fascinating genre of food and memory. The way Banerji intermingles her entire narrative with food is quite remarkable. As a reader, one feels a fine balance between food and memory, neither in excess. Every incident is coupled with a dominant food memory—drinking palm sap, eating seasonal fruits, buying tea from the local shop. The autobiographical nature of the book is laid out in three parts: “Sundries,” “Mains,” and “Endings,” evoking a three-course meal, or perhaps the three main meals of the day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The sections are also metaphors for three important segments of Banerji’s life: her childhood and early youth, her student life in the United States, and her adult life. However, as Banerji indicates at the outset, the chapters are not organized chronologically. Each chapter is a story in itself. Throughout her travails across Kolkata, Bangladesh, and America, Banerji draws from her experiences to converse about the foodways and the dominant palate of each place she has been. Details of her birthplace, Kolkata; where she spent most of her adult life, the United States; and where her marriage and companionship took her, Bangladesh, are all intricately connected to the greater narrative of food and foodways. At the end of nearly every chapter is an elaborate recipe revealing the everyday cuisine of Bengal. The recipes are similar to the many tropical fruits described: quite esoteric. The ingredients for many of her recipes—such as topa kul (Indian berry) and mocha (banana blossom)—are difficult to source outside Bengal, and understanding the cultural context associated with the recipes can be difficult. But the use of recipes is significant in engaging the reader as an insider to the incidents of the memoir. Each of Banerji’s recipes is a small, personal takeaway from her journey of life

For me, a Bengali residing outside Bengal for quite a few years, reading this book made me nostalgic. Most of the experiences that Banerji vividly describes were a common part of my early childhood in a smalltown in Bengal. The lucid descriptions of the monsoon, the specificity of the recipes, as well as the mundane events that happen in most Bengali middle-class homes opened floodgates of emotion. Banerji, living outside of India for most of her adult life, makes shared nostalgia an integral part of her writing. As a memoirist writing about Bengal, she weaves one tale after another, covering most common aspects of Hindu Bengali life. Her use of subtle satirical remarks about the orthodox Hindu family adds flavor to her simple narrative. One would never guess she has lived outside of India for most of her life.

Interspersed with history and bits and pieces of mythology, the memoir is a page-turner. Written in simple prosaic language, the book is both informative and engaging, covering historical references about the Second Opium War and sugar production in India. Readers keen on learning about food cultures will enjoy reading extensively about the celebration of food in its different forms in Bengal. With its vivid descriptions and autobiographical elements, the book creates an instant connection with readers. The entire range of emotions that Banerji deftly describes is relatable. (That said, footnotes on some of the regional ingredients and dishes would make the book more accessible.)

Overall, the book leaves a lasting impression on readers with its elegant storytelling, anecdotal form, and informative nature. Banerji also leaves the reader impressed by her ability to tell profound tales using minimal stylistic elements.

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Angles / 2017

selected essays from introductory writing subjects at MIT

Home » 21W.012: Food for Thought–Essay 1

21W.012: Food for Thought–Essay 1

• Will you write relatively “pure” narrative or will you choose to use your personal experience to reflect more generally and explicitly on some issues that it raises?
• How will the piece be organized? Will you link together a series of memories in more summary form or will you focus on a few scenes and try to convey them by recreating actions and dialogue?
• How much talking to the reader will you do, offering commentary on what happens from your current point of view?
• What will you learn of significance from your experience, and how will this emerge?

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7 Food Memoirs to Read Right Now

Plus, four to look forward to this spring

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With the world changing every day during this novel coronavirus pandemic — and the industry we report on facing unprecedented challenges — I know I am turning to old comforts for solace, to fill the time, and to make sure I’m supporting the businesses that I love in whatever ways I can. For me, that means getting delivery and takeout from the local restaurants in my Brooklyn neighborhood, but it also means supporting the independent bookstores that mean so much to me and are such a part of my life even when we aren’t practicing social distancing.

If you, too, want to get lost in a book right now, consider some of these food- and restaurant-focused memoirs that I love here, and check out the spring releases that my colleague Monica Burton is most looking forward to. Please let us know if you’d like to see more book recommendations in the coming weeks — you can reach me on Twitter or Instagram at @soniachopra or over email at [email protected] . We hope you stay safe and healthy.

What to read now:

Arbitrary Stupid Goal tells the story of cook and writer Tamara Shopsin’s life growing up in and out of her parents’ corner store-turned-restaurant, Shopsin’s General Store, in the extremely quirky corner of Greenwich Village where the author grew up.

Burn the Place recounts Regan’s life in and out of restaurants — focusing on her family, her addiction, and her identity just as much as the food itself — tracing the path the chef took to opening her acclaimed Chicago restaurant, Elizabeth.

Climbing the Mango Trees is cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey’s beautifully written ode to her upbringing in India and the flavors, family traditions, and the diverse cultures that have shaped her knowledge of food.

Kitchen Confidential , Anthony Bourdain’s groundbreaking memoir about life inside restaurant kitchens, changed the way America thought about chefs and the industry when it was published in 2000; Bourdain later issued a new version with a foreword calling attention to problematic boys-club culture in restaurants, and the book is certainly worth a read with that in mind. Find 12 more of his books here .

Notes From a Young Black Chef chronicles chef Kwame Onwuachi’s upbringing in the Bronx, adolescent journey to Nigeria to live with his grandfather, his rocky rise through the ranks of the fine dining world, his appearance on Season 13 of Top Chef, and the opening and abrupt closure his ambitious Washington D.C. tasting menu restaurant, Shaw Bijou. Read an excerpt here .

Save Me the Plums focuses on food writer and editor Ruth Reichl’s days at the helm of now-shuttered but once-preeminent food magazine Gourmet, wherein the famed food writer and critic spills — in juicy detail — on what it was like to run a print magazine in the heyday of print magazines, and then see it through until the devastatingly bitter end. Read an excerpt here .

Yes, Chef follows chef Marcus Samuelsson’s journey from Ethiopia, where he was born, to Sweden, where he grew up, to the U.S., where he worked his way through restaurants and then opened his own, Red Rooster, which still exists today in New York’s Harlem neighborhood.

Looking ahead:

Wine Girl (March 24) details Victoria James’s path to becoming the youngest sommelier in the country. Now the beverage director at New York City restaurant Cote, James gives an unflinching depiction of misogyny and abuse in the fine-dining world.

An Onion in My Pocket (May 5) tells Deborah Madison’s life story, from growing up in San Francisco’s counterculture, to becoming a Buddhist priest, to leading a burgeoning vegetarian movement as chef at Greens Restaurant in San Francisco.

Dirt (May 5), the newest memoir from Heat author Bill Buford, recounts his quest to master French cooking. To do it, he uproots his family — his wife and twin boys — to Lyon; antics ensue.

Eat a Peach (May 19) the highly anticipated first memoir from Momofuku chef David Chang promises a frank exploration of the failures and successes that made Chang one of the most influential chefs of his generation, and the feelings of self-doubt that plague him either way.

Disclosure: Marcus Samuelsson is the host of No Passport Required , a show created by Eater and PBS. This does not impact coverage on Eater.

David Chang is producing shows for Hulu in partnership with Vox Media Studios, part of Eater’s parent company, Vox Media. No Eater staff member is involved in the production of those shows, and this does not impact coverage on Eater.

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The 50 best food memoirs

There is a special skill required to making food sound interesting and that means you should pick your food memoirs carefully. Publishers see 'foodoirs' as a lucrative genre these days and if I see another one about moving to France and cooking traditional French cuisine I may go mad.

Food memoirs can be divided into three main categories - finding and/or growing food, making food and eating food - but these often merge. Books about the histories of particular foods can be very interesting but we're dealing here with memoirs - books about real-life experiences. The best food memoirs go way beyond the food and into someone's reality - food memoirs can be deeply revealing about families and working environments.

Several memoirs have been particularly influential. Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential was published in 2000 and helped develop the cult of the chef. It's a gritty account of life in professional kitchens with as much booze and drugs as cooking. Bourdain is greatly missed.

A Year in Provence , from 1989, is not a food memoir but an autobiographical novel by Peter Mayle - however it established the idea that life and eating is simply better in France (it also influenced the French real estate market). Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell is a gimmicky memoir but helped ignite a fresh wave of interest in Julia Child and continued the theme of the French doing it better. Child has her own memoir called My Life in France if you want to hear it from the horse's mouth.

I heartily recommend Heat by Bill Buford and Toast by Nigel Slater. After reading Heat, I had a new-found respect for anyone who works in a restaurant kitchen. Buford, a writer on the New Yorker, goes to work in a major New York restaurant and suffers for his literature, literally - cuts, burns, extreme tiredness and bullying in a high-pressure environment. Toast is completely different and very personal, almost too personal at times. Much of it is about bad food in the 1960s and 1970s during Nigel Slater's rather painful childhood in Worcestershire.

However, quality food writing has been around for a long time. Connisseurs of food literature should pick up anything written by MFK Fisher , the finest of all American food writers, and also Delights and Prejudices by James Beard. Fisher wrote more than 25 books with her first, Serve It Forth , being published in 1937. Beard shared Fisher's era and campaigned for America to adopt the Gourmet standards found in France.

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The Epicurious Staff's 9 Favorite Food Memoirs

By Becky Hughes

All products are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something, we may earn an affiliate commission.

A great food memoir touches on the real reasons we love food—it's not just a means for survival, but it's how we experience joy, pain, love, and humor. These are the books that make our staff excited to keep cooking, reading, and feeling.

Never Eat Your Heart Out by Judith Moore

According to digital director David Tamarkin, this is "perhaps one of the only food memoirs published that isn't precious. In fact, I'd call this book anti-precious. It's about the way we remember not just our happy memories through food, but also our awkward memories, and our painful memories. And Moore is such a good writer that even when the food doesn't sound particularly delicious (a tiki-party scene comes to mind), you want to keep reading."

BUY IT: Never Eat Your Heart Out , $29.95 on Amazon

An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamar Adler

The 2012 debut of writer (and former Chez Panisse cook) Tamar Adler is part memoir and part, as senior editor Anya Hoffman describes, "homage to the controversial fridge dweller known as leftovers." Anya says, "Written in quiet but precise prose, the book sets out an economical and inspired approach to daily cooking that advocates for using the tail end or discards of a past meal to start the next one (sautéing broccoli stems in olive oil to spread on toast or turning a heel of bread into garlicky breadcrumbs to sprinkle on pasta). Adler’s premise is simple but powerful and it helped convince a generation of cooks that really—no, really—there’s something to eat in your kitchen. With Adler’s help, you can find it."

BUY IT: An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace , $11.99 on Amazon

The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

The Gastronomical Me , a moving story of the American food writer's travel experiences, is about food. Specifically French food. But it's not a story told through rose-colored glasses—it's also about wartime tensions, sexual taboo, and hunger, both physically and emotionally. Fisher poses the question, "why write about food?"—and answers it in this beautifully executed memoir.

BUY IT: The Gastronomical Me , $13.20 on Amazon

Give a Girl a Knife: A Memoir by Amy Thielen

"There is such a beautiful juxtaposition of cooking in this memoir: a peek behind the veil of first-rate dining in New York and the struggle of getting dinner on the table at an off-the-grid farmhouse in the Midwest," says associate director of audience development Erika Owen. "I love this story because it's funny, at times, but then showcases the incredibly real experience of following someone you love across the country while trying to keep your own ambitions in check."

BUY IT: Give a Girl a Knife: A Memoir , $16.06 on Amazon

My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life by Ruth Reichl

E-commerce editor Elaheh Nozari loves this one—which is somewhere between a cookbook and a memoir. "Ruth Reichl is my idol (mainly because she has great hair) and because this book, which is about the recipes she made after Gourmet closed down, came out right when I got laid off from an editorial job (albeit a very bottom-of-the-ladder job). The recipes really show how cooking can be such a source of comfort."

BUY IT: My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life , $19.89 on Amazon

A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table by Molly Wizenberg

Molly Wizenberg, blogger at Orangette and another one of our 100 Greatest Home Cooks , shares how she discovered her calling in the kitchen. Associate editor Emily Johnson highly recommends the read—there are tons of recipes nestled in here, too, like a Julia Child–inspired tarte tatin, a dish she fell in love with while living in Paris.

BUY IT: A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table , $11.99 on Amazon

I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting by Rebecca Harrington

Commerce editorial assistant Zoe Sessums digs this one, in which the author attempts to mimic the diets of 14 different celebrities, both dead and alive. "Harrington goes through the wild, surprising, and often disgusting eating habits of famous people. From Beyonce's Sasha Salad (chicken salad with jalapeños in it) to Jackie O's baked potato with Beluga caviar, it's a very entertaining read."

"I'm also looking forward to reading I Hear She's a Real Bitch by Toronto restaurateur Jen Agg," Zoe says. "Aside from the fact that Agg has some serious swagger, I'm fascinated to learn more about her journey starting a restaurant and becoming a voice in the feminist revolution in the culinary world."

BUY IT: I'll Have What She's Having: My Adventures in Celebrity Dieting , $11.99 on Amazon

BUY IT: I Hear She's a Real Bitch , $14.36 on Amazon

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table by Ruth Reichl

Emily said it best: "Of course I like this book, which is a cliché...but for a reason." Reichl's 1998 memoir is a coming of age story, in which she recounts her most powerful food memories, from childhood on, that shaped her love for the kitchen. "Food could be a way of making sense of the world," Reichl writes. "If you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were."

_ BUY IT: Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table , $14.99 on Amazon

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

This is one of the more entertaining memoirs I've ever come across—Hamilton, who opened New York institution Prune, details her sometimes idyllic, often dark, and entirely strange trajectory into the world of cooking. Hamilton deals with her sexuality, a fraught marriage, and the way female chefs are positioned in the industry—all with lots of wit and lots of food.

BUY IT: Blood, Bones and Butter : , $11.99 on Amazon , $11.99 on Amazon

20 tasty and tantalizing food memoirs

• BY Anne Bogel
• IN Book Lists , Books & Reading
• 119 Comments | Comment

Readers, with no events to attend or sports practices keeping us busy, family dinners have become a major thing in our house. I’m not talking Downton Abbey-style gowns and dinner jackets here, but our nightly meal has certainly become much more of an event than it was during pre-quarantine times.

As someone who loves to cook and spend time in the kitchen, I’ve appreciated the nudge to slow down while preparing and enjoying our meals. My cookbooks are getting lots of love lately as we revisit favorite recipes and find new ones to try.

I’m also finding fresh inspiration in one of my favorite literary genres: food memoir. Food is full of stories, from the family history behind a handed-down dish to juicy kitchen drama at a high-end restaurant to a culture’s roots and traditions.

Even if you don’t love to cook, perhaps you love to eat, and most certainly you enjoy a great story, well-told. Today’s list contains food memoirs from chefs, home-cooks, and food critics.

Perhaps one of these titles will inspire you to cook up a feast—or savor some delicious takeout. Much like your favorite meal, these food memoirs are sure to entertain, inspire, and comfort.

Some links (including all Amazon links) are affiliate links. More details here .

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks

The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South

Kitchen Confidential

Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking

Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen

Life, on the Line: A Chef’s Story of Chasing Greatness, Facing Death, and Redefining the Way We Eat

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

The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest for the Perfect Dish to Mend a Broken Heart

My Berlin Kitchen

The Language of Baklava: A Memoir

Yes, Chef: A Memoir

The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

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

Notes from a Young Black Chef: A Memoir

A Homemade Life

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

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

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life Of A Critic In Disguise

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Orchard House: How a Neglected Garden Taught One Family to Grow

The Sweet Life In Paris: Delicious Adventures In The World’s Most Perplexing City

From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home

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

My Life in France

Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir

What favorite food memoirs would you add to this list?

119 comments

A lot of these books sound really interesting! I didn’t even know food memoirs were a thing. I’m not a big fan of cooking but I do love trying new foods.

The Cooking Gene by Michael W Twitty is beautifully written. I highly recommend it to anyone.

Dinner: A Love Story would be one of my picks. It’s probably shelved with cookbooks, but the essays before the recipes makes the whole thing read more like a memoir. The author had two kids in less than two years, and I read it for the first time when my two-under-two set were still really little, and I completely related to everything she said about how two babies totally upends your coooking and eating routines. I loved it, and have made her pizza crust recipe nearly every Saturday night for 6 or 7 years.

Ah! My favourite niche non-fiction genre: the food memoir! There are so many on here that I’ve read and enjoyed – plus a few new discoveries. A couple that I’ve loved are ‘Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone’ edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler, ‘The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry: Love, Laughter and Tears at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School’ by Kathleen Flinn, ‘A Half Baked Idea: How grief, love and cake took me from the courtroom to Le Cordon Bleu’ by Olivia Potts, ‘Adventures of a Terribly Greedy Girl: A memoir of food, family, film and fashion’ by Kay Plunkett-Hogge. There are so many more – both to read and discover. A great list!

One of my favorite genres. My TBR pile for my summer vacation just got a little bigger.

Julia and Julie, Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good, I Loved I Lost I Made Spaghetti, The Pleasure of Cooking for One, My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story.

While not a memoir, but fiction, my favorite Ruth Reichl book is “Delicious”. I reread this often and I love it anew each time!

I loved this novel, too!

Yes! It was my selection for our book club, ages ago.

Keeping the Feast by Paula Butterini

I also really enjoyed The Sharper your Knife the Less You Cry and Pancakes in Paris!

Love, love, love The Sharper the Knife!

I just read The Sharper Your Knife on your recommendation and LOVED it! Thanks so much!

Oooh, one my favorite genres – thanks for some new titles to add to my TBR! A few others: Delancey by Molly Wizenberg; Love in a Tuscan Kitchen by Sheryl Ness; Cooking for Mr. Latte by Amanda Hesser; We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time by José Andrés; Love, Loss and What We Ate by Padma Lakshmi; The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen by Jacqués Pepin. I could keep going but I’ll stop! Wait, one more, My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life by Ruth Reichl. Looking forward to seeing more recommendations!

I loved “Cooking for Mr. Latte” by Amanda Hesser. She also wrote one about her year working as a chef at a French chateau called “The Cook and the Gardener”, which is a memoir/cookbook mashup. Other cookbooks that are part memoirs that I love are “How to Celebrate Everything” and “Screen Doors and Sweet Tea”.

Also loved Amanda Hesser’s Cook and Gardener – reread it with the seasons and cook from it often!

I love Ruth Reichl books! A brand new food memoir is Almost Home by Fanny Singer about growing up with her mother, a chef and restaurant owner in Berkeley.

Bread and Wine by Shauna Niequist!

Bread and Wine is my recommendation as well! I love that book.

Yes, I LOVE this one!

Yes! Bread and Wine is my favorite too! I have two quotes from this book painted on canvas hanging in my dining room. And the bacon wrapped dates recipe is a go to appetizer.

I love this one, too!

The Feast Nearby is my favorite. It is the book that enticed me to read food memoirs. Now, I’m hooked! I’ve read most of the above, but can’t wait to try a few I haven’t.

Give a Girl A Knife: A memoir by Amy Thielen

Thank you for this list. I love this genre , have read most , discovered new ones and more again from the comment section. Am currently reading Dirt by Bill Burford.

Yay for food memoirs! Love, love some on this list, and the others are being added to my to-read pile post-haste!

David Lebovitz’s Drinking French is my new favorite. It shares his experience of the French café culture that he loves, combining stories of his trips to various spirit makers to learn their histories with delicious cocktail and other café drink recipes. In addition, during recent weeks, David has been sharing his time on Instagram demonstrating the recipes and interviewing the spirit makers live. A real bonus!

I adore David Lebovitz and didn’t know he had a new one! Thanks for sharing it here.

I suggest More Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin; Voracious by Cara Nicoletti; Take Big Bites by Linda Ellerbee. I have read most of the ones you list, but not all and I am also a big fan of food memoirs.

I love Shauna Niequist’s Bread and Wine! Her style of writing and recipes are incredible. This book makes me want to sit at her table and just soak up her wisdom with a plate of Blueberry crisp and a glass of wine.

This is one of my favorite genres! I actually did a roundup post on it a few years ago, which I’ll link to below if anyone is interested.

Some recent favorites or new releases that I want to read soon include Always Home (written by the daughter of Alice Waters), Let Them Eat Pancakes, Everything Is Under Control. I also enjoyed Shauna Niequist’s Bread and Wine, though that has a definite religious slant to it.

So excited to add some of these titles to my list! I had heard of or already read many of them, but I’m really excited about the others!

https://www.toloveandtolearn.com/2018/03/07/14-books-for-the-foodie/

I love this genre and had read many of the books, but found some I haven’t. One to add from my list is Iliana Regan’s Burn the Place. The more modern version of Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones and Butter.

There are a lot of good fiction books set around food. How about that list next?

Additional books that could be added to the list are: Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes – This book includes recipes. Let Them Eat Cake and Bon Appetit by Sandra Byrd – fun afternoon reads The Baker’s Secret by Stephen P. Kiernan – novel set during WWII

I read another book where a NY journalist went to live in Paris and she made note and map of the patisseries around where she lived. She included the addresses and her favorite pastries at each. I can’t remember the title and I can’t find the book on my bookshelf. I must have loaned it out some time ago.

I read this book, too. It’s called “Paris My Sweet” by Amy Thomas. So mouth-watering!

I love this genre! One that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Kitchen Yarns by Ann Good. Another favorite is Burnt Toast Makes You Sing Good by Kathleen Flynn.

I’ve heard great things about the MFK Fischer books. I need to look into them. Does anyone here enjoy them?

They are delightful.

I love Peter Mayle’s books – besides A Year in Provence, He’s written a memoir of traveling to food festivals throughout France and a book on bread baking. For mostly fiction, I love A Literary Feast, Which contains short fiction and memoirs.

I read Ruth Reichl’s Save Me the Plums – and it was phenomenal!!

Love by the Glass by Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher is a must for wine lovers. My favorites listed above are Yes, Chef; Kitchen Confidential; and My Paris Life. I want to read more by Anthony Gourds in, and I have Ruth Reichl in my Kindle sue. Books, wine, and food–my favorites!

Love by the Glass by Dorothy Gaiter and John Brecher is a must for wine lovers. My favorites listed above are Yes, Chef; Kitchen Confidential; and The Sweet Life in Paris. I want to read more by Anthony Gourds in, and I have Ruth Reichl in my Kindle sue. Books, wine, and food–my favorites!

I’m not so interested in food and recipes as I am in good, enjoyable writing and a sense of place (read: France). Which of these 20 would you say fits the bill? I have enjoyed My Life in France, Julie and Julia, The Sweet Life in Paris, and savored every well-written word of Animal, Vegetable and Miracle, but did not relish Garlic and Sapphires or The Sharper Your Knife, they both fell flat for me. One set of books I would add to this list is from the delicious Elizabeth Bard, with her Lunch in Paris and Picnic in Provence. I went out and bought them after reading from the library.

Yes! I second Lunch in Paris and Picnic in Provence. Love this list!

I bought both of the Elizabeth Bard books, too. I’m not normally a rereader, but her books are exceptions.

Mastering the Art of French Eating would be a great one for you! Ann Mah is a great writer and I really enjoyed how she took me all over France in that book. Try it, you’ll like it!

I LOVED the Tembe Locke book! So beautifully written as both a memoir and a recipe book.

Me too! I just read it last week, and found it very thoughtful and hopeful, despite how sad the story is.

One of my favorite food memoirs is Anya von Bremzen’s Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking.

Yes! It’s one of the very best! It’s subtitle: A Memoir of Food and Longing — says it all.

Omigosh this list is amazing. I read while simultaneously searched my local library online catalogue to place holds on all the titles that jumped out to me. Looks like it is going to be a tasty summer!

Bread and Wine by Shauna Neiquest. One of my all time favorite reads. It made me want to gather friends around our table and cook delicious meals as we share life together. Recipes included!

Make the Bread, Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese

Seconding this! This book is the antidote to the folks who read Animal Vegetable Miracle and get grand plans that they too shall grow all their own food and butcher their own meat. I was literally laughing out loud at the turkey and goat bits in Jennifer’s book.

The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater is a wonderful memoir of food and his life within a year. His food is wonderful but his writing is exquisite, volume one is my favourite. Also The Christmas Chronicles by Nigel Slater is his celebration of Christmas starting some months early in preparation for the event. Beautiful reading, this is my bedtime reading every winter.

Oh yes Nigel Slater! Also re read Christmas Chronicles every year – beautiful book physically too, with gorgeous photos. His memoir Toast – a story of one boy’s hunger is wonderful too – was made into a lovely movie a few years ago. Another British wonder is Nigella Lawson – her books are mainly recipes but with lovely contextual asides and warm witty family anecdotes. I have all her books and she’s been beside me as I learned to cook over 20 years.

I’m so glad you suggested Nigel Slater’s writings; I love his Kitchen Chronicles and have read the first two multiple times! His Seville orange marmalade recipe IS THE BEST!

Thanks for a great list! I love cooking and just wrote a blog post featuring some of these, including Save Me the Plums & The Sweet Life in Paris! Now, the question is, which of these on your list to read first?

I would add Michael Ruhlman. Soul of a Chef got me started in this genre. Enjoyed a couple of his other books, too and the rest are on my TBR. Thanks for the list! Adding a few that I haven’t read to my TBR!

I love Ruth Reichl’s books. I am sad that I never had a chance to read Gourmet Magazine when she was still the editor (and it still existed). I read two at the start of the pandemic and they were both great reads. The way that she writes has my mouth watering (and I am NOT an adventurous eater in real life), she just describes food SO well. I’m excited to check out more books in this genre!

I, too, am a big Ruth Reichl fan. Her Tender At the Bone is a classic! The first chapter really sucks you in.

Possibly my favorite genre! I’ve read about half the books on this list and Kitchen Confidential was one of my favorites because I actually listened to it on audiobook, which was narrated by Anthony Bourdain. Another favorite that isn’t on the list is Spiced: A Pastry Chef’s True Stories of Trials by Fire, After-Hours Exploits, and What Really Goes on in the Kitchen by Dalia Jurgensen. That title is a huge mouthful!

I’m a huge fan of audiobooks because I can often do other things while I listen. My favorite thing is listening to books about food while I cook! Recently listened to Ruth Reichl’s Delicious! and that was such a fun one.

Dinner: A Love Story by Jenny Rosenstrach. Love it!

What a fabulous list! I’ve read four of these listed and just added several to my WTR list. Memoirs are one of my favorite genres, and in the subcategory of food- a double win.

Two older books, but still well worth reading: Under the Tuscan Sun, by Frances Mayes (turned into the 2003 movie starring Diane Lane), and a year in Provence, by Peter Mayle.

I love food memoirs & have a number of them on this list, and have had a couple others on my TBR list. Now I have more to add! Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver is one of my absolute favorite books of all time. I also enjoy the writings of MK Fisher, especially when she writes about France.

GIVE A GIRL A KNIFE by Amy Thielen is super fascinating. It talks about her and her husband’s early years working in restaurants in NYC and then traveling around North America to eventually moving back to Northern Minnesota. She used to have a Food Network show called Heartland Table.

I have Thielen’s memoir on my shelves waiting to be read. I actually got it signed at an event she had in NE Mpls. Her cookbook The New Midwestern Table is a favorite of mine!

I am trying to figure out how to read all of these food memoirs without going broke.

Love this list! I would add Kitchen Yarns by Ann Hood – excellent risotto recipe! Lucy Knisley’s Relish is a great memoir graphic novel style

Library? My library has most of them.

What a great list! One of my favorites was Bill Buford’s first book, Heat.

How about Blue Plate Special by Kate Christensen and Provence, 1970 by Luke Barr.

I would add On Rue Tatin by Susan Hermann Loomis. It is memoir of a young American couple who moved to Normandy France, bought and restored an old monastery to create a home and a cooking school. It is the story of learning French ways in the kitchen and in life, of rearing young children in a different culture, of making friends and finding one’s way. Recipes intersperse this lovely story.

I love On Rue Tatin – time for me to read it again

Bread and Wine by Shauna Niequist is one of my favorite books. Remembering meals throughout her life that have made an impact on her. Really thought provoking!

I can’t express how much I loved this book!

Thank you for this list! I see some old favorites along with several new to me titles that look interesting.

All of Ruth Reichl’s books are fantastic. “My Kitchen Year” is filled with gorgeous pictures and recipes.

In the vein of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is “Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food” by Megan Kimble. Very interesting about how our food is processed. Spoiler alert: in one chapter, Megan decides to process her own meat, from the live animal to her table.

I loved Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and the title of the second book you mention sounded fascinating…until I saw your alert. I may be too squeamish to read it, but good to know of it, thanks!

If you want something substantially less graphic, try Make the Bread Buy the Butter by Jennifer Reese! She decided to try and make everything by scratch, then calculate whether the storebought version or homemade version was cheaper, tasted better, and whether from scratch was worth the effort. She has a really funny bit about it being a rite of passage for food writers nowadays to stare down their future chicken dinner and take it’s own life to meditate on the responsibility of being a meat eater…and she just kinda butchers a chicken and thinks “yep, nothing profound here, I am eating a bird like I ate thousands of birds before.” Really funny! And the recipes in it are great!

This is one of my favorite genres. I’ve read several of these, but I see quite a few I need to get to. Not exactly food memoir, but I think Peter Mayle’s books about living in Provence are excellent. His descriptions of food and wine there always makes me hungry.

What a great subject – especially when we are all cooking more than before. My favorites are: Laurie Colwin’s “Home in the Kitchen”, “The Pleasures of Cooking for One” by Judith Jones with recipes that can always be expanded and “Potluck at Midnight Farm” by Tamara Weiss – full of fun and recipes.

Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard is my absolute favourite food memoir. And it has a sequel… Picnic in Provence.

Have any of you read The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Farrar Capon? I bought it upon several friends’ recommendations, but I haven’t read it yet.

My Nepenthe by Romney Steele – she put out an updated anniversary edition this last year.

Love this list! Food memoirs are one of my favorite things to read. They’re older books, but I recommend anything by M.F.K. Fisher–everything she writes is about eating and cooking and all our hungers. The Gastronomical Me charts her development as an eater and as a cook, and is so good. The Art of Eating collects a number of books of hers in one volume. Every time I read her I want to share good food with people I love.

This is from a review of The Gastronomical Me: “Because The Gastronomical Me is autobiographical, following Mrs. Fisher from childhood to widowhood in different countries, we are able to see its food not only as a matter of personal taste, but as a perpetual emotional and social force within a life. Here are meals as seductions, educations, diplomacies, communions. Unique among the classics of gastronomic writing, with its glamorous but not glamorized settings, its wartime drama and its powerful love story, The Gastronomical Me is a book about adult loss, survival, and love.” ―Patricia Storace, The New York Review of Books

The preface to The Gastronomical Me is one of the prettiest pieces of writing I have ever read. (Well, the whole small book is one of the prettiest pieces of writing I’ve ever read.) So good.

I’ve only read a few M.F.K. Fisher essays and I’ve been meaning to read one of her longer works for years! Thanks for sharing this rec.

I loved A Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo. She’s an American woman who married a Lebanese man and moved to the Middle East with him. They live in Iraq and travel around other parts of the Middle East, and she describes the culture around food so vividly you can practically smell it. The tone suits 2020 well too, because she’s describing all this uncertainty with the war, but all that high emotion and drama is juxtaposed with the the everyday activity of needing to eat.

Oh, Anne, you did it again…expanded my TBR yet again! This is definitely one of my favorite genres! I’ve read several of these (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is one of my favorite books of all time and one of my very rare rereads), but now, thanks to this, I have my work cut out for me. Thanks, Anne!!

Any and all Ruth Reichl and Laurie Colwin books. Molly o’Neill’s Mostly True, Lucy Knisley’s graphic book French Milk, Born Round by Frank Bruni are all wonderful.

The Measure of My Powers by Jackie Kai Ellis is an absolute favorite of mine. Also, Dinner with Edward by Isabel Vincent. While it’s not quite ‘memoir’, it’s a touching non-fiction read that revolves around food, cooking and connection.

LOVED Dinner with Edward…listened to the audio twice

This is my favorite genre and I have been looking for more to add to my list. Thanks everyone! I have read many of these, but now have many more to read. I couple others I’ve enjoyed are My Life From Scratch by Gesine Bullock-Prado and 52 Loaves by William Alexander.

So many books, so little time! I second (third?) the recs for “Cooking for Mr. Latte” by Amanda Hesser and also for A Year in Provence and Under the Tuscan Sun. Kitchen Confidential and My Life in France are two of my favorite books of all time. As a chef now food blogger who moved to Paris last year, I feel like I need to write a memoir–so many of these wonderful books are about France, and Paris. I’m a big David Lebovitz fan as well and got to go to his book signing for Drinking French before the lockdowns hit. Awesome guy, and I highly recommend all his books.

This has been my favorite genre! I have read all of Ruth Reichl books and most on this list and have just purchased others on this list for a summer read so thank you. I would recommend 32 Yolks by Eric Ripert, Clementine in the Kitchen by Samuel Chamberlain, Shucked: Like on a New England Oyster Farm and loved The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin

I am reading My Life In France right now for a Vicarious Travel book task. It is wonderful!

First of all, thank you Anne so much. I needed this post right now. This is my favorite genre and just about every other book (in between MMD Book Club) I read is now a chef memoir or a book written about culinary travel. I have read many on Anne’s list, but started a new list because of all the great suggestions! Thank you one and all!

Here are two that I don’t think were in the comments: 1. It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time By Moira Hodgson – The author grew up as a child of a foreign diplomat and lived all over the world. You can’t believe her life is real. It’s a page-turner. 2. Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy by Michael Tucker – Do you remember LA Law? Michael Tucker and his wife Jill Eikenberry bought a home in Italy and all of the details about their life in Italy and Italian cooking are divine!

Can we just talk about your comment “bookstore devoted exclusively to cookbooks and cooking”….why aren’t there more bookstores like this!

Maman’s Homesick Pie:a Persian heart in an American Kitchen by Donia Bijan is really well done! A memoir of growing up in Iran pre-Revolution, exile, life in SF and France. Moving tribute to her mother.

I’m amazed at how many of these memoirs intertwine grief and tragedy!

This is one of my favorite genres! Thanks for this list – I’ve read a handful – Animal,Vegetable, Miracle and Blood Bones & Butter are two of my favs – always recommending them. I can’t wait to read more from this list! Also on my list to read is (new I think) the memoir Rebel Chef – by Dominique Crenn. Thank you!! Also, a bookststore dedicated to cookbooks and books about cooking- heaven!!

Food memoirs is one of my favorite genres. I’ve read a few of these, will happily try some of the others. I loved “The Best Cook In the World,” by Rick Bragg, about his mother’s Southern cooking in good times but mostly hard times (combined with Bragg’s hilarious and occasionally very sad family stories). Also, “Miriam’s Kitchen,” by Elizabeth Ehrlich, was very interesting and emotional for me. It’s the story of a young secular Jewish woman who enriches her faith and understanding of her culture as she cooks with her mother-in-law Miriam, a Holocaust survivor.

Still one of my favorites ‘Cooking for Mr Latte’ Amanda Hesser

Lunch in Paris and Picnic in Provence by Elizabeth Bard

We read Chef Greg Atkinson’s At the Kitchen Table for our Preheated Baking Podcast book club in Episode 121: Hope Into Spring with Hot Cross Buns. Great story about building community and cooking your own food.

Here are 3 foodie reads that are worth the time and calories: My Life from Scratch by Gesine Bullock-Prado, Kitchen Gypsy by Joanne Weir, and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat. Both Weir and Nosrat began their culinary careers at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse.

Elizabeth Luard hasn’t been mentioned – perhaps less known in the US (tho her praise is on the front cover of Ruth Reich’s To the Bone). Wonderful writer- lived in various parts of Europe bringing up four children – often alone as her husband traveled (prominent British journalists both of them). Very un squeamish, willing to learn from all around her – whether able to speak their language or not – often very funny, atmospheric, warm stories: Squirrel Pie, Flavours of Andalusia, A Cooks Year in a Welsh Farmhouse – my favourite. Luard is also a talented artist and these grace the pages of many of her books – the three mentioned. She also has a book of beautiful strip cartoon recipes coming out soon (ish?) She showed some at a book event – gorgeous!

Thank you so much for introducing me to Molly Wizenberg!

Has anyone read M.F.K. Fisher? Her books (too many to list here) about food are delightful. The book “A Life in Letters” of her Correspondence 1929-1991 is also a good read.

I really enjoyed the fun, dark novel “Recipe for a Perfect Wife” by Karma Brown, complete with recipes, where a present-day wife discovers a cookbook and eventually the secrets of the 1950s housewife who once lived in her home.

Missing from this wonderful list is Give a Girl a Knife, by Amy Thielen who writes masterfully about her strong midwestern roots, her life and times cooking in NY, and her decision to come home again.

Midnight Chicken hasn’t been mentioned. I’m in love with this author. It is very moving and has the most gorgeous cover and illustrations.

I’ve read many of these, but what an awesome list! I’ve just added a few from here to my TBR–thank you!!

Great list! Anything by Ruth Reichl for sure and The Cooking Gene is a gem. I loved The Best Cook in the World by Rick Bragg.

Coming into this discussion on 6/16/23 since it was mentioned in today’s Links I Love: Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl My Cooking Year, Ruth Reichl Comfort Me with Apples, Ruth Reichl

Not a memoir, but if you are a fan of Julia Child: Dearie, The Remarkable Life of Julia Child, Bob Spitz is a must read. The only book in the last 10 years I have re-read. It is delightful.

What a great list! Lots on here that I hadn’t heard of and added to my TBR.

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Learn to write delectable words about tasty cuisine in this food writing course, designed by award-winning writer Jennifer Billock. Food writing is a foodie’s paradise, an opportunity to not only read, write, and share your thoughts and methods for food, but also to spend your time eating delicious meals and reviewing restaurants.

Food is also a revealing cultural and historical exploration. What does one country’s eating style reveal about the population, the climate, the local ingredients, the history? With the interviewing and food writing skills learned in this course, you can find out.

This six-week class combines weekly food writing workshops with readings. You’ll learn the basics of several different styles of food writing. We’ll cover writing effective restaurant reviews, food history stories and memoirs, recipe writing and food blogging. Each week includes a writing assignment. Class members are encouraged to participate in critiques of one another’s work.

Food Writing Course Outline

Each week includes suggested readings, all of which will be available on the web. This course does not meet on Zoom.

Week 1. Restaurant Reviews

I will introduce the class and how it works and go over discussion participation guidelines and best practices. Then we will read a standard restaurant review and discuss the basics of writing your own.

Assignment: Post your bio in the discussion section. Go to a local restaurant and write a review, post it in the discussion section, then critique other students’ reviews.

Weeks 2 & 3.  Food History

First we will have a short discussion about the last assignment and critiques, and any comments on the suggested reading. We will then read a piece about food history and discuss why it was successful, and talk about the basics of writing these pieces.

Assignment: Week 2: Investigate a food-related topic and write an article about the history. Week 3: Revise according to workshop feedback.

Weeks 4 & 5.  Food Memoir

First we will have a short discussion about the last assignment and critiques, and any comments on the suggested reading. We will then discuss writing a memoir through the lens of food, including impactful food experiences, descriptive food wording, characters, scenes, and plot.

Assignment: Week 4: Write a short memoir piece about a pivotal food moment in your life. Week 5: Revise according to workshop feedback.

Week 6.  Blogging and Recipe Writing

First we will have a short discussion about the last assignment and critiques, and any comments on the suggested reading. We will then discuss recipe writing and the proper way to document and record the things you cook at home.

Assignment: Cook something at home and write down the recipe as you make it, post the recipe.

Why Take a Food Writing Course With Writers.com?

• We welcome writers of all backgrounds and experience levels, and we are here for one reason: to support you on your writing journey.
• Small groups keep our online writing classes lively and intimate.
• Work through your weekly written lectures, course materials, and writing assignments at your own pace.
• Share and discuss your work with classmates in a supportive class environment.
• Award-winning instructor Jennifer Billock will offer you direct, personal feedback and suggestions on every assignment you submit.

Your table awaits: Join our online food writing class!

Student feedback for jennifer billock:.

I could not be happier with Jen’s commitment both to my personal development and the class as a whole. Jen went above and beyond in creating a supportive workshop environment. Not only did she provide thoughtful criticism of our weekly assignments, she helped me build the confidence to pitch and land my first food writing piece, with a second on the way! Jen is kind, enthusiastic, and a smart reader—basically, she’s the whole package as an instructor and writer.   Jenn Hall

This course was incredibly valuable to me - both in terms of developing the quality of my writing and learning about the business side of food writing. Jennifer's feedback on our submissions was thoughtful and very useful. The guidance she provided, and the specific feedback on my writing, helped develop both the quality of my writing and my ability to self-criticize.  Steve Paris

Jennifer was great!! She truly cares about what she's teaching and she is very open and responsive. Will highly recommend Jennifer and if she offers another course I'd be very interested in taking it.   Sequoia Armstrong

I enjoyed the class, content and dynamism of Jen throughout the class. My writing has improved considerably since I started doing these courses. I would (and have), recommend the classes.   Patricia Lopez

Jennifer Billock was incredibly helpful, fast to reply to questions, present with discussions and assignments and a wealth of useful information and tips. The organization of the course and lessons was very well done, easy to follow, and engaging. She provided lots of rich examples of the styles of writing being explored and her teaching style was very friendly, respectful and approachable. I was really impressed with the course and thankful for her guidance and expertise. Claire Keeler

I loved this class. I though the lessons and assignments were varied enough to cover multiple aspects of food writing. I enjoyed exploring sides of food writing that I would not have ventured into on my own, like writing recipes and covering a science-related food story. - I really enjoyed working with Jennifer. Her feedback was very useful, and I liked that she got to know the three of us in the class individually. Plus, although she is a successful and busy writer, she wasn't condescending to us newbies. Pamela Hunt

The content was relevant, engaging, and challenging. Jennifer was great! I've never used Writers.com before, and after my experience with Jennifer, I will def try another course. Katherine Levey

“I could not be happier with Jen’s commitment both to my personal development and the class as a whole. Jen went above and beyond in creating a supportive workshop environment. Jen is kind, enthusiastic, and a smart reader—basically, she’s the whole package as an instructor and writer.” —Jenn Hall

About Jennifer Billock

Jennifer Billock is the author of two cookbooks and five history books. She is an award-winning writer, bestselling author, and editor. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Playboy, mental_floss, Lucky Peach, National Geographic Traveler, and Conde Nast Traveler. She has taught writing courses for local colleges and mentors young writers on a regular basis. Jennifer also co-hosts the podcast Macabre Traveler and edits the Kitchen Witch Newsletter.

Jennifer's Courses

*Private Class | Food Writing: Meals And Manuscripts Food Writing: Meals And Manuscripts Fundamentals of Travel Writing Food Writing: Food-Focused Memoir

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In Defense of Food Memory in Immigrant Fiction

Jessica yu on the power of an oft-maligned trope.

When I was having a particularly difficult time last year, I brought out the huge AMC steamer my mother had brought over to Australia when she immigrated. She had given it to me when I moved out of home along with a slow cooker, a rice cooker and jars of cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, star anise and cloves from Malaysia because she didn’t want me to “waste money” buying them in Australia.

I didn’t know how to cook when I moved out but I had watched my mother do it for years, never being allowed to touch anything, never being allowed to do anything but stand there, just as she had never been allowed to “get involved” when her mother and older sisters were cooking in the kitchen of my grandfather’s longhouse. It was a running family joke that I—the spoiled youngest child, the baby of the family, the princess—was completely useless and clueless in that way.

But I moved away from home and eventually I craved the food I had grown up with. The first time I tried to make curry chicken, I found that my hands knew exactly what to do—blending garlic and onion but not too much, not to the point that “the water came out,” frying it with lots of oil and all of the spices mother had given me until “the oil split.” Once the oil had split, it was time to brown the meat, to steam the potatoes in the microwave a little and then add them in at the end—you didn’t want them to soak up all the gravy by putting them in too early. It tasted perfect.

Seven years on, I had almost gotten through all the jars of spices and I had often used the slow cooker for lamb shanks and the rice cooker for not just rice but soups and congees, but the steamer still sat in the highest cabinet collecting dust. It was too big, too heavy, too hard to clean in the tiny sink in my tiny flat. Last year, I remembered it. I googled steamed egg and pork chinese and read through the recipes.

I called my mother who said that “all the recipes will say you need to add this or that but you don’t really need anything but the water, the soy sauce, the egg, the sugar and the pork” she told me. After waiting for the water to boil for a good half an hour and another twenty minutes of steaming, I had a plate of salty-sweet pork topped by a smooth layer of jiggling egg custard. The rice cooker clicked and then I had a bowl of hot rice too.

I ate my food on the couch. Then I went upstairs and lay in bed and cried. I couldn’t even explain the significance of this dish to myself. How tangy and gritty that pork was. Soft and firm like my childhood. I feel like a fool for writing this down even now. I hate people who talk about the significance of food to their childhood, who describe every mouthful like it matters to anyone but them. But I also hate that this has become a trope of so-called immigrant literatures, that in an age of what Yen Le Espiritu calls, “panethnic entrepreneurs,” that we’re considered sellouts for talking about things that might matter to us because they mattered to too many other people before us. It mattered to me. And sometimes I just want that to be enough.

My family was a lot of adults by the time I arrived. I was a kid, my brother was in university, my mother and father were middle aged, my grandma was old, as grandmas tend to be. They all loved good Malaysian food with lots of spice. Curry, achar achar, deep fried little fish, slit down the middle and filled with sambal, bitter gourd with fresh chili. I was too young for all of that so my mother and my grandmother made little bowls of steamed egg custard and pork for me.

I sat at the head of the table, a shocked dinner guest once said to my father (the youngest sits at the head of your table!), waiting for everyone to serve me, waiting for my own special dish to come out of the rice cooker. My mother would always say it was good we didn’t live in Malaysia where her sisters would tease her for spoiling me, tell her that I needed to grow up and learn to like spicy food sooner rather than later. My grandma didn’t say anything to me unless she was scolding me alongside my mother and father (a chorus of adults that seemed to go on and on), but she loved me and that dish was how I knew she loved me.

Can we even talk about immigrant families and food memory anymore? These memories feel wrung out and wrinkled on the page. They read like cliches, these wholesome immigrant family moments, ones that white people hunger for because as Diane Negra writes, “intense consumption of images of ethnic food betrays nostalgia for those kinds of familial and social relations…we now think of as “lost.” They read like concessions because as Sneja Gunew says: “Food as we know, has long been the acceptable face of multiculturalism.”

I don’t know how to write about these tiny little things that matter to me anymore because it feels like the appetite for them has passed. I am like the Yum Cha server with the metal trolley and the cold, unwanted siu mai coming round again and again, essentially begging for someone to eat it. The same old things again , my mother would complain when she came back to our table.

That night, I lay in bed and thought about my grandma. She had died four years ago and it still stung even though everyone’s grandma dies and everyone moves on. I thought about how she wouldn’t have wanted me to feel as sad as I do now. She wouldn’t have wanted me to end up half the places I had ended up. She wouldn’t have wanted me to hurt. She would have despised and dismissed out of hand the people who had hurt me.

She had taught me what a good person was and they weren’t good people. Boh Hoh. Pai See. The two things I didn’t want to be. That was that. She also wouldn’t have really understood—the truth is that we didn’t speak much. I wasn’t fluent in Hokkien and she wasn’t fluent in English. And she spent most of her time scolding me and beating me and cooking and cleaning for me and complaining about always cooking and cleaning for me instead of telling me what she thought about things. But I hold onto the few times that she did.

When I was a student in a writing workshop, I remember a white student complimenting me on being able to write food in my fiction without participating in the exoticism of so much immigrant writing. And yes, the tropes of immigrant fiction: food memories, foreign words left in Roman, the hush of banana leaves, hot weather, difficult families are tropes and these tropes can become commodities. I know that. But what happens when what writing about what genuinely moves you has a stigma, a sense of shame attached to it?

What if all I have of my grandmother now is a gold bracelet in a box that she reluctantly gave me on the eve of my wedding (and often asked for it back) and a handful of memories, some of which I can viscerally taste when I prepare and eat the same food she made for me as a child. Should I never speak of it, feel it, write it. Writing that tries to elude the shadow of other writing can start to feel so Levitican: do not eat, do not touch—clean and unclean. If a million other people have written about their bitter and loving and angry grandmothers, I hope my book sits within that genealogy.

I get the sense that immigrant fiction as a genre already felt dated by the time I started writing. But if I love the endless domestic fiction of bored, lustful white people who hate their suburban hells and their Subarus and their families, why can’t they love my domestic fiction back? I want to write about my life in the suburbs, too, being raised mostly by my grandma while my parents worked. Talking back to her, being beaten by her, hating her, loving her, being with her.

Writing food as an immigrant body is always fraught. Food memory in so-called immigrant fiction has its own constellation of cliches all of which can and have been commodified, translated into English, sentimentalized on the internet (do you remember the jokes around cut fruit that haunted Asian diaspora Twitter a few years back?), used to sell cookbooks and TV shows. Food is the salve of the immigrant child brought to them by their otherwise stoic, silent immigrant family in the popular imagination.

Have you eaten yet instead of I love you. Here’s some meticulously boiled, cut and peeled chestnuts instead of how are you. Your grandma might have been the one to constantly threaten and beat you with a bamboo stick as a kid but she was also the one to bring you deep fried ikan billis and sliced spam in a little purple dish that once held fruit on a Singapore Airlines flight. Your mother might struggle to tell you she’s proud of you but will always save the best bits of the whole chicken she just boiled for you.

Mothers and grandmothers, the authentic and the exotic other, the fashionably female genealogy of the homemade. I have other memories that fit into the colour palette of the immigrant family narrative—boiled yams wrapped up in Glad-Wrap to have as a snack at school that of course, I got teased for (another cliché)—and some memories that don’t. The plastic 101 Dalmatians plate I would eat toasted sandwiches with oozy cheese and blurry tomatoes on. The way my grandma warmed up peanut butter on crumpets in the microwave because it approximated the ban chung kueh she would have bought on the street in Malaysia. The bittersweet smell of Moccona coffee in her black cup (her favourite because “black is easy to clean, you can’t see any dirt”) which she had with her morning meds. Her love of raisin toast.

The father who made two-minute noodles boiled in a saucepan, drained and covered in a thick, caramel soy sauce for my breakfast and sliced up extra mushrooms to add to the tin of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken and Mushroom soup he made for my lunch. The ritual we used to have together—drive thirty minutes to the Coles in Moonee Ponds where they have a cafe and buy a single shepherd’s pie and a cappuccino and share them. I’d have the froth and the chocolate powder, he’d drink the coffee. I’d have the whipped potato on the shepherd’s pie and he’d have the meat.

The older brother who had a car and took me into the city to have the most decadent hot chocolate I’d ever had—the kind they make out of a bar of melted dark chocolate. The grandmother who always bought me a potato cake and a dim sim to eat while we walked back home from the shops.

These are real parts of me but when I write them down, I am afraid of them. They feel deceptive or self-deceptive somehow. Benign or sentimental descriptions which obscure the genuine struggles of immigration and immigrant family life. I don’t know who they’re for or how they’ll be read. Writing food as an immigrant feels naïve as if you have no idea what you’re doing, who you’re selling yourself too because this, too, is a part of the contract between you and the imagined white audience.

As Ghassan Hage writes about cosmopolitan consumers of ethnic food, “it appears as narcissistically available to itself … they want it to seduce them by appearing as if it is not trying to seduce them.” Like a boy who wants to feel that he is the one pursuing a girl, they want to feel that they are the discoverers of virgin territory. The girl, who is all the more seductive when she modestly lowers her eyes and doesn’t seem too forward, is like the ethnic Other who is ready to be discovered by a some worldly explorer. I don’t want my writing to feel like that.

But even resisting tropes and expectations of immigrant food and immigrant writing have begun to feel like a trope to me—like what Viet Thanh Nguyen writes about as the resistance/assimilation binary in Race and Resistance . Resistance = good. Assimilation = bad. Sometimes, I just feel tired from resisting, from working so hard to make sure that my writing isn’t for the white gaze that it distracts me from what I need to really write. And sometimes it feels like resisting that gaze is just commodifying my work for another kind of gaze—the kind of white gaze that gets off on that resistance.

I want to surrender sometimes to my desire to write about the things that hurt me and heal me even if they’ve been written about before, even if they’re expected of me, even if they’ll be bitten and devoured by someone who doesn’t really understand it. I want to remember what it was like to return in mind to the place I had at the end of the dinner table, being coddled by my family with the crispiest parts of the fish and the softest part of the chicken. From that vantage point, I want to write about the world just like that spoiled, useless, completely clueless kid would have. Is this too sentimental an image to end an essay on?

_______________________________________

But the Girl   by Jessica Zhan Mei Yu is available now via Unnamed Press.

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MEMORABLE MEALS

MEMORABLE MEALS; MOSCOW MEMOIR

By Christopher Wren

• May 5, 1985

Current and former correspondents recall times that illustrate the meaning of hospitality.

Their second-floor apartment off Moscow's busy Lenin Prospekt was drab and sparsely furnished. Visitors were noted by the K.G.B. But Veniamin and Tanya Levich offered the most memorable hospitality in my dozen years as a foreign correspondent.

Professor Levich was the highest-ranking Russian scientist to apply to emigrate to Israel, and for the better part of a decade, the Kremlin refused to let him go. He lost his post as a leading physical chemist, his wife developed heart trouble and his son was drafted into an army penal battalion in the Soviet Arctic. But the Leviches never neglected to celebrate the abiding joys of life.

Dissidents and refuseniks kept crossing the worn threshold to bask in the family warmth. One evening, our dinner companions included a woman whose husband was in one labor camp and a man who was just out of another, but they told their stories without self-pity.

The Leviches lived modestly on Ben's stipend from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, but Tanya insisted on providing a proper table, even when it meant clustering all the chairs in the apartment around Ben's desk. Dinner began with zakuski, a selection of cold appetizers, from sliced salmon and salted herring to small meat-filled pastries called pirogi, piled high on the chipped plates.

The Leviches shared my love of the spicy Caucasian dishes of Soviet Georgia, like chicken tabaka. This was chicken seasoned with pepper, which Tanya pressed flat on a sizzling griddle with a clothes-iron. Sometimes she served chicken cold in a walnut sauce. The chewy Georgian bread was washed down with vodka or robust wine from Moldavia.

Where she found it all in a city of shopping queues like Moscow I never understood, but Tanya was prescient about the arrival of fresh mushrooms or radishes at some modest shop.

Tanya Levich died a few years after the Leviches were allowed to emigrate, and Ben now divides his time between teaching in Israel and in New York. I have eaten more elegantly in grander settings, but dinner at the Leviches' home taught me that it is the host and hostess who make any evening special.

Chief of the Ottawa bureau of The Times

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Former Florida food critic takes aim at 'mango shooter' mom in new book 'The Mango Tree'

She didn't plan to write about her infamous "mango shooter" mom. At least not entirely.

Instead, Annabelle Tometich started out writing what she thought was a cookbook ― an obvious move for the former food writer and restaurant critic for The News-Press and Naples Daily News.

But her mom ― a dominant force in Tometich's life ― ended up dominating the book, too. And instead of a cookbook interspersed with family stories, it became a full-on memoir about Tometich's chaotic childhood and her love/hate relationship with her fiery, whip-smart, complicated Filipina mother.

The resulting book, "The Mango Tree," hit store shelves April 2 and has been racking up positive reviews and mentions in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.

Tometich says there were lots of tears, laughter and soul-searching while writing "The Mango Tree." And along the way, she came to appreciate how Josefina Tometich's hot-tempered personality shaped her own.

"It was understanding that the parts of her that are good are OK to hold onto," says Tometich, sitting at the kitchen bar in her Fort Myers house. "I think a big part of me was like, 'No, we don't want to be anything like her ... '

"But then it's like, 'Well, no. There's actually these really brilliant things she did. And these really life-saving things she did.' It was trying to accept parts of her. And all of her."

'The Mango Tree' tells a tale of fruit, Florida and felony

"The Mango Tree" − subtitled "A Memoir of Fruit, Florida, and Felony" − revolves around her mom's 2015 arrest for shooting a BB gun at a couple she claimed was stealing her mangoes. But it also examines Tometich's life growing up in a volatile, sometimes violent Fort Myers household; the racism she encountered as a mixed-race Filipino-American in Southwest Florida (including from her own grandmother); her mom's beloved mango tree; and her journey to eventually accept her mother ― warts and all.

"She's like this great enigma," Tometich says. "Why does she do the things she does? Why is she the way she is?"

Tometich launched a book tour for "The Mango Tree" this first week of April with stops in California, Georgia and several Florida cities, including Fort Myers, St. Petersburg, Tallahassee, Coral Gables and Gainesville. She already has two more books in the works: A children's book and a follow-up memoir about her years as The News-Press food critic Jean Le Boeuf.

Here’s what else Tometich had to say about "The Mango Tree." This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

News-Press/Naples Daily News: I love the book. It's beautifully written. Why did you write it?

Tometich: I joke ― I half-joke ― that it's like a mid-life crisis for me ( laughs ). But in 2019, I had a job offer to go to the Tampa Bay Times. Their restaurant critic had just left to go to the Washington Post. And I couldn't take it, because my family's here and my husband's here and my life is here. And it didn't make sense to uproot everything and move.

So I turned down that job offer and, like, spiraled into this hole of, "Are you ever going to leave your home town? Are you ever going to do anything beyond Fort Myers?" And it was like, "If you can't be in journalism, then how else can you do something with your career that's different?" And I was like, 'Oh, I'll write a book. Easy! ( laughs)

When was this?

This was 2019. … It actually started as a cookbook. I always had this idea of all these quirky things that happened to myself and my family. I was not thinking of it as a memoir ― just these little essays and recipes.

But for a long time when ( former News-Press breaking-news reporter) Mike Braun's story came out in The News-Press , if you Googled "mango shooter," the very first result was my mom. Her mugshot and everything in The News-Press.

Yeah, of course ( laughs )

And the second result was this Absolut Vodka cocktail that was a mango shooter cocktail. And I was like, "That's hilarious. That's just funny."

Your two worlds converging…

Yeah! And so, in my head, I thought that was fodder for something.

It's not a cookbook: It's a memoir

How long ago was this?

2015 was the arrest, and her trial and everything. And this is four years later. She was still on probation, and it still felt very fresh. And I wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

So I started this cookbook/essay collection that was a mess ( laughs ). To get a book deal, you have to have an agent. So I queried a couple of agents, and they were just like, "We don't understand what this is." And I was like, "I don't really understand what it is, either."

And I was talking to my friend Artis Henderson (a Southwest Florida writer who's also featured in "The Mango Tree"). And she was like, "The recipes are interesting, but if you can take these essays and fit them together, then you have a really strong memoir."

And I was like, "I'm not writing a memoir. I'm writing a cookbook." And she said, "No you're not."

Good advice, Artis!

Yeah. Then it was like, "Well, I have to admit it's a memoir now." For forever, I called it a cookbook.

Then I figured out the mango tree component: The fact that this tree was planted a year before our dad died and it fruited right when we were about to pick up everything and move to the Philippines, and the shooting and then Hurricane Irma. It became this very convenient structure: These are all these major plot points of my life coinciding with this tree.

And then it just came pouring out. I think the vast majority of it I wrote between June and September of 2020 (while on furlough from The News-Press).

What was it like going back and revisiting all those memories? You had a chaotic childhood. And then your dad died. And there's the racism you encountered in school. Was it hard to go back and focus on some of those painful memories?

It almost felt indulgent. Because I don't like to sit with those memories, you know? But then to think about it and put yourself back in your little kid head was weird and interesting.

And there were plenty of tears. There was lots of grief in my childhood. And it was almost nice to kind of sit with that little kid for a bit and be like, "But look: Here we are now. It's all fine now, and it worked out."

Focusing on her 'mango shooter' mom

The book is as much about your mom as it is about you. Why did you decide to make her the focus?

It's funny, because I think it was more about her. Because I'm very comfortable writing about other people ( laughs ). But I couldn't not write about her. She's such a dominating figure in my childhood. And there was a conscious decision as an adult: "I'm not talking to her anymore. I'm not dealing with her anymore."

But that was just a compartmentalization. She's still looming there in my head. And I was kind of like, if I'm ever going to figure myself out, I've got to figure out why I can't stop coming back to her. Why I can't stop trying to figure her out.

Would you be who you are today without her?

Oh no. 100 percent not. And I feel like so much of my personality was developed in reaction to her, you know? ( laughs ) Because she was hot-tempered. And she was always yelling at the Publix cashiers. And I was always trailing in her wake ― "sorry, sorry" ― apologizing and making amends.

You still talk to her, right?

And I'm sure everyone's going to ask you this question: What does she think of the book?

That's the sad part. She has vascular dementia, and it's gotten pretty bad in the last two years. She doesn't drive anymore. And it's not like Alzheimer's: She knows who everybody is. She's OK, day to day, for the most part. But she really struggles with processes and procedures.

So the act of getting into the car and buckling your seatbelt and driving to wherever you need to go and then remembering how to get home ― that became a struggle for her. And she was constantly getting lost.

So one, she's never been a reader. And two, I don't know if she could get through a book right now.

Is the rest of the family OK with the book?

Yeah. My biggest worry was that they would think I was taking it too easy on our mom, honestly. So I think it's a very honest portrayal of my childhood in that house. It's not their childhood. It's not my mom's perspective, obviously. I think it's a very honest portrayal of my point of view.

You live near her, right?

She's just down the street.

It sounds like she needs a lot of care. How often do you see her?

Every day. She's here most days (at Tometich's house).

One of the things that amazes me is your recall of details in "The Mango Tree." That's something you have in common with your mother. She had a photographic memory. Do you have a photographic memory?

I used to in high school. But I was never as good as her. She had the Periodic Table memorized, down to atomic numbers and weights and whatnot.

It was weird: That summer was very odd (when she wrote that book). Certain memories played out like a film in my mind. It was like watching this film of my life and hitting pause and being like "What's over there? And what's over there?"

From News-Press food critic to memoirist: Annabelle Tometich's new career

You worked for years at The News-Press. Do you miss it?

I miss the 2015 newsroom. Or the 2010 newsroom. I miss when there were lots of people and police scanners going off and televisions on. I miss that version of the newsroom, which we're never gonna get back (thanks to layoffs over the years and most of the newsroom working from home now).

Yeah, I miss that camaraderie, too. I think everyone would rather work at home now. But you miss being around people.

But yeah, I do (miss it). The review stuff (as food critic Jean Le Boeuf), I do think I was getting ― well, not tired of it. I still loved it. There's no complaining about going out and eating and writing about it ( laughs ). I think I was ready for something different.

So you're a published author now. Or maybe I should say published memoirist. How do you feel about that?

Yeah, it’s wild. That was like the goal, right? And five years later, here we are.

Do you feel like this is where you'll be from now on?

I hope so. I like the pace of this life a lot ― where it's like, write a book every couple years ( laughs) . Versus writing five stories a week, or 10 stories a week (at The News-Press and Naples Daily News).

Well I'm glad you're going to keep doing this. The book is beautiful.

I can't wait to read whatever you do next.

Hopefully more ( laughs )!

BOOK TOUR FOR 'THE MANGO TREE'

Tometich has the following stops scheduled for her "The Mango Tree" book tour:

April 4, 7 p.m. at Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Florida

April 7, 4 p.m. at Books & Books in Coral Gables, Florida

April 10, 6:30 p.m. at Midtown Reader in Tallahassee, Florida

April 11, a virtual event at 6 p.m. with New Orleans' Blue Cypress Books

April 12, 6 p.m. at Third House Books in Gainesville , Florida

April 16, 2 p.m. at South County Regional Library in Estero, Florida

April 18, 7 p.m. (Pacific Time) at North Figueroa Books in Los Angeles

April 19, 6 p.m. (Pacific Time) at Bel Canto Books in Long Beach, California

April 21, 3 p.m. (Pacific Time) at the L.A. Times Festival of Books in Los Angeles

April 25, 7 p.m. at Barnes & Noble in Fort Myers, Florida

May 4, 3 p.m. at A Capella Books in Atlanta

May 18 at the Orlando Book Festival (details to be announced)

Learn more about Annabelle Tometich, "The Mango Tree" and her book tour at annabelletometich.com .

Charles Runnells is an arts and entertainment reporter for The News-Press and the Naples Daily News. To reach him, call 239-335-0368 (for tickets to shows, call the venue) or email him at [email protected] . Follow or message him on social media: Facebook ( facebook.com/charles.runnells.7 ), X (formerly Twitter) ( @charlesrunnells ), Threads (@crunnells1) and Instagram ( @crunnells1 ).

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: The Mango Tree: Memoir from former JLB food critic Annabelle Tometich

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In 1936, John Gunther predicted the next nine years’ darkness.

A few days after war was declared in September 1939, Winston Churchill sat listening with interest to the much-traveled American journalist John Gunther. Hitler was on the march and Churchill must have had a lot on his mind, but Gunther’s book Inside Europe , first published in 1936, had made him an instant authority on European affairs. Since he had been in Moscow on the very day the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, August 24, 1939, Churchill was keen to get Gunther’s impression of how this stunning, globe-shaking maneuver had been received on the streets of Moscow.

What exactly Gunther told Churchill is not known, but what Churchill said to Gunther was memorable. “Russia”, he declared, brooding aloud about the Soviet Union, and rehearsing lines that would later become famous in a more polished form, was “a mystery in a mystery in a mystery.”

Gunther’s audience with Churchill was no fluke, no one-off. During the 1930s and 1940s John Gunther, reporter extraordinary, was probably the most famous American newsman of them all. He was proud to be numbered on the death list kept by Hitler’s Gestapo in Germany, and even more proud of the illustrious company he kept back in the United States. Gunther was a friend of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower.

Gunther made his name with Inside Europe , the huge eve-of-war success that won him his talk with Churchill. But he followed it by assiduously anatomizing the globe, continent by continent, with Inside Asia (1939), Inside Latin America (1941), Inside Africa (1955) and Inside Russia Today (1957). While the later works show signs of being rushed when set beside Inside Europe , they were packed with information and good writing, if not with comparable insight. Gunther remained at least a minor celebrity up until his death at age 68 in May 1970.

Gunther was, after all, one of modern America’s first journalist stars. In his heyday in New York he threw parties at his home for the likes of John Steinbeck, Salvador Dali, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Inside Russia was dedicated to his good friend Greta Garbo. He spent perhaps more time than was sensible with gossip columnists Walter Winchell and Elsa Maxwell in places like the Stork Club and 21. Even so, his books were translated into ninety languages and sold millions of copies around the world.

F or all his continuing fame, nothing Gunther wrote after World War II (except perhaps Death Be Not Proud , a memoir about his teenage son’s struggle with a fatal cancer) achieved the success of Inside Europe , a remarkably prescient early warning of what the Nazis had in store for Germany, Europe and the world. Just as a writer like Robert D. Kaplan has in our own day played the role of a modern Cassandra by pointing to the tribalization of politics and the descent of entire Third World regions into anarchy, in his day Gunther warned of the ugly European forces that were leading step by perilous step to World War II.

April 14, 1958 [credit: Getty Images]

Inside Europe wasn’t a paperback, but it sold briskly all the same. It was particularly popular in Great Britain, especially when it first appeared in 1936. At the cheaper end of the British market in the 1930s books were selling for sixpence, but this was a thumping 500-page hardback retailing at thirty shillings, or sixty times that price. That didn’t slow sales one bit. According to a recent account of its history, in its first year Inside Europe sold 65,000 copies at about a thousand copies per week and continued to sell during 1937 at the same rate. By 1939 it had sold nearly 120,000 copies and continued to turn over throughout World War II. John Gunther was the best-selling American author of non-fiction in Britain since Mark Twain.

There were three reasons for this success. The first was timing. Appearing in January 1936 in London published by Hamish Hamilton, and later by Harper & Brothers in the United States, Inside Europe provided a close literary echo, scene by scene and act by fateful act, of the international drama of the times. Running steadily through thirty regularly updated impressions and several editions, its publishing history climaxed in the “Peace Edition” of October 1938—the month when German troops marched into Czechoslovakia.

In the words of historian John Lukacs, “1938 was Hitler’s year.” It saw the annexation of Austria, Neville Chamberlain’s capitulation at Munich and the occupation of Czechoslovakia. Readers of the October 1938 “Peace Edition” were able to follow these developments almost as they happened. Not only were they given brilliant thumbnail sketches of the Nazis in Germany (along with a matchless photograph of Herman Göring at a reception, an enormous thug draped with braids and medals confronting a demurely gowned lady from Japan), but there were also incisive studies, accompanied by two dozen photographs, of the whole tragicomic gallery in Austria, Czechoslovakia, France, Spain, Italy, the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Gunther managed also to nail the United Kingdom itself, where, through May 1940, the struggle between Churchill and his domestic opponents had yet to play out.

As far as the photographs are concerned, the one striking exception to their high illustrative quality overall is the shot of Josef Stalin. This is a typical blurry Soviet retouch job, where the crude hand of some studio helot can be seen brushing the hair, brightening the eyes and putting a smile on the despot’s face. All too lamentably, this pictorial failing extends to the text in Gunther’s last chapters about Stalin and the USSR—a fact to which we will return in due course.

The second reason for the book’s success was that its content had real depth. Though Gunther’s later work was often based on visits of only days or weeks, Inside Europe drew on a dozen years of research and reporting from every European capital; on personally investigating Hitler’s Austrian background and personally witnessing events like the Reichstag fire trial; on continually sharing information with journalist colleagues such as Dorothy Thompson, Vincent Sheean, H.R. Knickerbocker and William Shirer; and on meetings with literary acquaintances like Sinclair Lewis and Rebecca West.

The third reason for the book’s success was its style and tone. Gunther was a master of muckraking American journalism, having grown up in Chicago and having cut his journalistic teeth at the old Chicago Daily News before going off to Europe in 1924. At the end of the 1920s, during a brief visit home to America, he collaborated with James Mulroy at the News on an article titled “The High Cost of Hoodlums”, which appeared in the October 1929 issue of Harper’s . It described how on the streets of Chicago you could have an enemy “bumped off” for as little as $50, though the rate for a newspaper man like himself might be as high as $1,000. In Inside: The Biography of John Gunther (1992), Ken Cuthbertson wrote:

Despite the fact that “The High Cost of Hoodlums” was written sixty years ago, it retains its vitality as a superb historical snapshot of the Chicago of 1929. . . . It provided a highly readable behind-the-scenes look at how 600 hoodlums had succeeded in terrorizing Chicago’s three million citizens.

The era of Chicago gangsterism turned out to be perfect preparation for understanding European fascism. Indeed, one way to look at Inside Europe is to see it as “a highly readable behind-the-scenes look” at how another, somewhat larger—but not proportionally larger—bunch of hoodlums was terrorizing Germany and, before long, the entire continent of Europe. As BBC producer Brian Miller described it in 2001, the “racy mixture of politics and Capitol Hill gossip” put together by Drew Pearson and Robert Allen in 1931 for their book, Washington Merry Go Round , successfully pioneered muckraking book journalism in the United States. Cass Canfield, president of Harper & Brothers in New York, thought the same approach might usefully be tried on Europe’s dictators. He chose Gunther to write the book, and a fortunate choice it was. Gunther’s powerful style ensured that Inside Europe broke through the suffocating British climate of active censorship and intimidation—“this fog of untruth, or else of censorship, which was really a kind of self-censorship”, as Miller put it—that was depriving British readers of the facts about Hitler and the drift toward war.

Gunther had been in Vienna since 1930 and had several things going for him. In the first place, he was fast and could meet deadlines. Second, according to Miller, “he was not subject to conservative proprietorial censorship because both his publishers . . . were liberally minded and inclined to let him write whatever he liked, provided it ‘took the lid off’ something .” Third, “he was not subject to censorship and intimidation by dictators themselves because he made quick raids into their territories and only wrote when safely back in England or the USA.”

Inside Europe was both a huge commercial success, finally selling more than half a million copies, and a book that gave him political access everywhere. Not only Churchill welcomed him. In 1941, after returning from Latin America, Gunther was called in by Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles to brief President Roosevelt on the region. Welles had provided Gunther letters of introduction to a dozen national leaders, and now Gunther was supposed to report what he had found: Hitler had boasted of building “a new Germany” in Brazil, and Nazi sympathizers were everywhere.

As it happened, Roosevelt was less receptive than Churchill, and Gunther hardly got a word in edgewise. Instead he was treated to a rambling 45-minute lecture on foreign affairs during which, Gunther later wrote, “I kept thinking that FDR looked like a caricature of himself, with the long jaw tilting upward, the V-shaped opening of the mouth when he laughed, the two long deep parentheses that closed the ends of his lips.” Seizing his chance when the President paused for breath, Gunther reminded FDR that he was just back from a visit to every country south of the border. “What?” said Roosevelt with a laugh “Even Paraguay?” Gunther had indeed been to Paraguay and had an entertaining tale to tell, but neither Roosevelt nor Welles took much interest in it.

Then Came Duranty

W hen John Gunther headed for Europe in 1924, it was after a two-year spell with the Chicago Daily News working alongside Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg. In London, Gunther met Dorothy Thompson, a strong influence and lifelong friend, and had an affair with Rebecca West, nine years his senior, who opened both his mind and doors into British literary circles. In London, too, Gunther married his first wife, Frances—the beginning of a stressful relationship that ended in 1944. During those years he reported from Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul and Moscow. It was in Moscow in 1928 that Gunther first met the New York Times representative Walter Duranty, an influence on him, unlike that of Hecht, Sandburg, Thompson and West, that proved less than entirely helpful.

Every American who went to Moscow in those days, it seems, met Walter Duranty. Visiting Duranty’s apartment Gunther reported,

When one dines with him in Moscow, an extremely pretty girl, smart in semi-evening frock, opens the door, shaking hands. She then disappears again, and late in the evening, asks Walter if he wants to get to work, she has finished the Izvestia proofs. Then they go to bed together. In the morning, she shines the shoes. Mistress, secretary, servant. An unholy trinity for you! Of course, by Moscow law, since they share the same residence, she’s his wife, too.

The pretty girl’s name was Katya, by whom Duranty later had a son. The mild irregularity of this arrangement he witnessed was merely the tip of an iceberg. In Paris in the years before 1914, Duranty was a close friend of Aleister Crowley, a genuine madman fascinated by excretory functions, sexually aroused by blood and torture, and a “master” of the occult. Duranty and Crowley shared the same woman, Jane Cheron, and all three of them were heavily into opium, sex and black magic. Indeed, when Duranty was escorting Gunther around Moscow in 1928, he remained in some sort of marital relation with Cheron, who was still in France. Did Gunther know any of this?

Perhaps he did, and perhaps he didn’t care, for Duranty was a famous raconteur, and the pleasure of his company seems to have swept all doubts aside. In Stalin’s Apologist (1990), Sally J. Taylor tells how forty years later Gunther and his second wife Jane visited Duranty where he was living in Orlando, Florida. He came over to the motel where the Gunthers were staying, and, according to Jane, Duranty was “enchanting, in his very best form.” They all stayed up until four o’clock in the morning, with Walter being “terribly funny, and very very wicked.” After Duranty left their motel, John turned to his wife and said, “Walter is just a scamp !”

But Duranty was not, alas, just a scamp. He was also a man many regarded then and now as a scoundrel. Not for nothing did Malcolm Muggeridge call him “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in fifty years of journalism”, or Joseph Alsop describe him as a “fashionable prostitute”, or Robert Conquest, later, call for every word he ever wrote about the Soviets and collectivization to be challenged again and again. It’s possible that Duranty was in the pay of the Soviets, though another long-term New York Times correspondent, Harrison Salisbury, who looked into such things during his own stay in Moscow, denied that Duranty was ever in the pay of anybody except the New York Times .

Perhaps. Yet it is inescapable that Duranty’s immediate reward for faithfully covering up mass murder in the Ukraine was the indulgence of the regime, the tumultuous applause he received in the Waldorf-Astoria in 1933 for assisting the process of American diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union, and a call from Stalin himself four weeks after Duranty’s return to Moscow offering the unprecedented privilege of a second interview. Stalin’s words at the time, however accurately or inaccurately rendered by Duranty afterwards, were something Duranty quoted with pride for the rest of his life:

You have done a good job in your reporting the USSR, though you are not a Marxist, because you try to tell the truth about our country and to understand it and to explain it to your readers. I might say that you bet on our horse to win when others thought it had no chance and I am sure you have not lost by it.

All of this raises questions about the journalistic and literary culture of the time. How did it come to be that someone from the world of Aleister Crowley and the Parisian bohemian demimonde was the New York Times’ resident commentator in Moscow on Russia under Bolshevik rule? How did such a man become the best-read authority in the United States on how Stalin was implementing a planned economy? Why was such a man invited to Washington in July 1932 to advise Roosevelt about Soviet gold production?

W hatever the answers to those questions, it is plain that Duranty rubbed off on Gunther. The reason seems to have had something to do with the fact that both Gunther and Duranty were the sort of men who would rather write anything than not write at all. More, I suspect, than is the case today, many journalists of Gunther’s time were novelists manqué . Only fiction was prestigious, and readable fiction was not about economic trends, voting patterns or industrial production. Duranty tried to write both novels and short stories, and in Hollywood, in the years of his decline in the 1940s, he teamed up with Mary Loos, a niece of the screenwriter Anita Loos, to crank out stories and scripts.

The same literary interests drove Gunther. He never stopped writing novels— The Red Pavilion (1926), The Golden Fleece (1963), The Lost City (1964). Most of them sank without trace. Through Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson, he knew dozens of novelists and yearned for literary recognition. When success first came to him, however, it was not for fiction but for his reportorial colossus Inside Europe (though he must have enjoyed a Popular Front gathering of the League of American Writers in 1938 when he was invited on stage and dined beforehand with Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald).

Indeed, when Cass Canfield approached him in 1935 to write Inside Europe , Gunther turned him down—twice. “In those days I was more interested in fiction than in journalism and my dreams were tied up in a long novel about Vienna that I hoped to write.” Only when offered the then huge sum of $5,000 did Gunther reluctantly accept. Yet when he finally sat down to write, his approach was personal and novelistic almost as much as analytic and interpretive. Events in Europe were being shaped by a cast of extraordinary characters, Gunther believed, and Inside Europe was to be about their beliefs, motives and charisma.

To get under way, he agreed to produce three articles, and “the three articles”, wrote Gunther years later, “turned out to be the three chief personality chapters in the book—Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.” What drove him was the need to show the force of their personalities and how they wielded power over other men. In a letter to Canfield he said that this approach “derives from something deeper in me than political conviction; it comes from the fact, for good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist.”

Such an honest man. We have still today, particularly in America, journalists who aspire to be literary stars, who write books ostensibly of reporting but without the sources required of the journalists’ canon. Gunther admitted his penchant for fiction. Not everyone does.

I nside Europe is still riveting more than seventy years after it was published. His descriptions of Hitler, Léon Blum and so many others strike us today, perhaps, as elegant and as of unerring fidelity. But at the time these descriptions were close to a form of prophecy.

Beyond getting the essence of the major players in the coming war, Gunther had also spent time in Bucharest and knew the ominous mixture of Ruritanian farce and fascist menace to be found in what was then usually spelled Rumania. Only two streets away from King Carol’s palace, one could see well-dressed members of the Iron Guard lounging in a café, sipping Turkish coffee and talking about revolution. Founded in 1927, the program of the Iron Guard, as Gunther perfectly described it, “was a fanatic, obstreperous sub-Fascism on a strong nationalist and anti-Semitic basis. Its members trooped through the countryside, wore white costumes, carried burning crosses, impressed the ignorant peasantry, aroused the students in the towns.”

So far so good, and it continues like that for hundreds of pages. But then one comes to Stalin—and it’s pure, undiluted Walter Duranty. Stalin has, we are told,

Guts. Durability. Physique. Patience. Tenacity. Concentration. If he has nerves, they are veins in rock. His perseverance, as Walter Duranty says, is ‘inhuman.’ When candour suits his purpose, no man can be more candid. He has the courage to admit his errors, something few other dictators dare do. In his article ‘Dizzy from Success’ he was quite frank to admit that the collectivization of the peasants had progressed too quickly.

Now this is a gem. The magnanimity of Stalin is shown by his “frankness” in “admitting” that collectivization had “progressed too quickly.” Gunther sums up the desperate suicidal resistance of the peasants in the following four sentences: “The peasants tried to revolt. The revolt might have brought the Soviet Union down. But it collapsed on the iron will of Stalin. The peasants killed their animals, then they killed themselves.”

Yes, John Gunther actually wrote that it wasn’t Stalin, or the Communist Party, or the NKVD, or the Red Army troops who seized their grain, herded them without food or water onto railway wagons, and shot them if they resisted; they “killed themselves.”

Even so, Inside Europe was a major achievement. It brought to public notice the Empire of Evil that was about to expand and take over the whole of central Europe. It powerfully confirmed the Nazi menace Churchill had toiled for years to publicize. And Gunther’s Inside Europe played no small part in bringing American elite opinion out of the dangerous miasma of isolationism into which much of it had fallen. That such a perceptive—and persuasive—journalistic observer could be drawn into Duranty’s deceptions about Stalin admits of no simple explanation. It may however be because one of Gunther’s greatest personal virtues, loyalty, here became also a vice. He could never bring himself to believe (or even imagine) that, however entertaining Duranty may have been down through the years, and however firmly supportive during the painfully protracted death of Gunther’s son, his old friend from the 1920s was also a thorough scoundrel whose writings about Stalin were full of lies.

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On the Midnight Train: Moscow to Leningrad: Memoir, Essays, Psychology, Poetry, Theater - About profoundly deep--rooted conflict and an even more fundamental yearning for peace Kindle Edition

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2024 Creative Nonfiction (Up to 2,500 Words)

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