The Baker’s Dozen: 13 Mouthwatering Food Memoirs to Devour

Molly Wizenberg, the voice behind the popular, James Beard Award winning food blog, ORANGETTE, recounts how opening a pizza restaurant sparked the first crisis of her young marriage. DELANCEY is a funny, frank, and tender memoir that explores the meaningful moments where food and life intersect.

This intimate portrait of life in the war-torn Middle East uses food and the rituals of eating to uncover a vibrancy that most Americans never see. From secret Baghdad book clubs to home cooking with her sardonic Lebanese mother-in-law, American journalist Annia Ciezadlo illuminates how civilians use food to feed the soul as well as the body.

From the first perfectly soigné meal that she and her husband savored en route to their new life in Paris, Julia Child had an awakening that changed her life. Soon this tall, outspoken California girl was chatting with purveyors in local markets and enrolling in Le Cordon Bleu. Filled with photographs and laced with the good spirit that made her such an extraordinary success, Julia’s memoir of falling in love with French food makes for the perfect winter escape.

Described as “brilliantly written” by THE NEW YORK TIMES and hailed by Anthony Bourdain as “simply the best memoir by a chef ever,” BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER is the crème de la crème. By turns epic and intimate, Gabrielle Hamilton, chef and owner of the acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, tells her story with uncommon honesty, grit, humor, and passion.

In this deliciously crafted memoir, esteemed restaurant critic Ruth Reichl introduces us to the fascinating characters and unforgettable tales that shaped her world and her tastes. Spiced with infectious humor and sprinkled with her favorite recipes, it is a witty and compelling coming-of-age story.

There are food memoirs, and then there is KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. Anthony Bourdain arguably kicked off the celebrity chef phenomenon with this wickedly funny memoir/expose that revealed the “sex, drugs, and bad behavior of haute cuisine.”

When bestselling novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family abandoned the industrial-food pipeline to embrace a rural life, they vowed that they’d only buy food raised by their neighbors or grown by themselves. With her characteristic poetry and pluck, Kingsolver opens your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: you are what you eat.

Anya Von Bremzen occupies two parallel food universes: one where she writes about four-star restaurants, and the other where humble kolbasa transports her back to her childhood in a communal Moscow apartment. This wildly inventive, tragicomic memoir tells the tale of feasts, famines, and three generations of her family’s life in the USSR.

Nearing thirty and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell resolved to reclaim her life by cooking every one of the 524 recipes in Julia Child’s legendary MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING in the span of a single year. Filled with humor and gusto, it is just as charming as the Meryl Streep and Amy Adams film adaptation that it inspired.

When Jeffrey Steingarten was appointed food critic for VOGUE, he set out to overcome his distaste for such things as kimchi, Greek cuisine, and blue colored food. In this impassioned, mouth-watering, and outrageously funny memoir, Steingarten devotes the same gluttonous curiosity to practically everything that anyone anywhere has ever called “dinner.”

Kristin Kimball knew nothing about growing vegetables when she abandoned her city life and moved to Lake Champlain to start a new farm with a dynamic young farmer. Her vivid descriptions of landscape, food, cooking, and their eventual marriage are irresistible.

This insightful, meditative collection of essays breathes life into the belief that we can start cooking from wherever we are, with whatever we have. It is an elegant testimony to the pleasures of home cooking.

World-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson chronicles his remarkable journey: from his childhood in an Ethiopian orphanage to his adoptive Swedish family who inspired his love of cooking to the opening of the beloved Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem, a restaurant where presidents and prime ministers rub elbows with jazz musicians, bus drivers, and nurses.