food books

Top Ten Tuesday: Fiction Books Involving Food (That Are Not Cookbooks)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 13 Comments

|| Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. ||

Today’s prompt: Books Involving Food (That are Not Cookbooks) (Submitted by Cathy @ WhatCathyReadNext and Hopewell’s Public Library of Life)


I read a lot of cozy mysteries and many of them focus on food in one way or another – the main character owns a bake or tea shop or restaurant, for example – so this list was a little easier for me than it might be for some. I also added a non-fiction book in there because I believe these prompts are about books in general, not only fiction books.

  1. Meet the Baker by Ellie Alexander

This is the first book in an entire series about a woman who owns a bakery with her mother.

Description: After graduating from culinary school, Juliet Capshaw returns to her quaint hometown of Ashland, Oregon, to heal a broken heart and help her mom at the family bakery. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is bringing in lots of tourists looking for some crumpets to go with their heroic couplets. But when one of Torte’s customers turns up dead, there’s much ado about murder.

The victim is Nancy Hudson, the festival’s newest board member. A modern-day Lady Macbeth, Nancy has given more than a few actors and artists enough reasons to kill her, but still. The silver lining? Jules’ high school sweetheart, Thomas, is the investigator on the case. His flirtations are as delicious as ever, and Jules can’t help but want to have her cake and eat it, too. But will she have her just desserts?

Murder might be bad for business, but love is the sweetest treat of all.

2. Murder in an Irish Village by Carlene O’Connor

This family owns a small bistro in an Irish Village so there is definitely food but it’s not as prominent as some of the others I’ll mention.

Description: In the small village of Kilbane, County Cork, Ireland, Natalie’s Bistro has always been warm and welcoming. Nowadays twenty-two-year-old Siobhan O’Sullivan runs the family bistro named for her mother, along with her five siblings, after the death of their parents in a car crash almost a year ago. It’s been a rough year for the O’Sullivans, but it’s about to get rougher.

One morning, as they’re opening the bistro, they discover a man seated at a table with a pair of hot pink barber scissors protruding from his chest. With the local garda suspecting the O’Sullivans, and their business in danger of being shunned. It’s up to feisty redheaded Siobhán to solve the crime and save her beloved brood.

3. Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson

This is a middle grade book and one of the bigger parts of the book is the making of Maple syrup in rural Pennsylvania.

Description:

A father’s wounded heart. A mother’s patient love. An eager boy, an impetuous girl, and, above all, the healing power of nature. These are the classic ingredients that fill Virginia Sorensen’s Newbery Award-winning novel with a tender power and lift it to classic status.

First published in 1956, Miracles on Maple Hill is almost uncanny in its appeal for today’s young listeners. For here is the story of a father returned from war in a distant land, wounded in body but even more in spirit, and a family desperate for him to be returned to wholeness, a wholeness they hope can be found on Maple Hill.

With language that is tender, precise, evocative, and yet fiercely powerful, Sorensen draws listeners into a year in the family’s life, a year filled with small miracles that yield great reward.

4. A Troubling Case of Murder on the Menu by Donna Doyle

This is a cute little mystery book about an elderly woman who has retired and decides to start writing a food blog. It’s on her first trip out to learn more about a local restaurant that a murder happens and she is pulled into the mystery. She also tests several recipes to prepare for the blog.

Description: Emily Cherry may be retired, but she’s not about to roll over and die!

Defying the doubts of her three adult children this plucky computer-shy grandma embarks on a unique path by launching her very own food blog. The only problem is that during her inaugural restaurant review, she stumbles upon a lifeless body.

In an instant, Emily’s envisioned future as a food blogger plunges into uncertainty – and a brand-new amateur sleuth is born!

Cozy up in your favorite chair and prepare for a thrilling first adventure in this brand-new senior sleuthing series.

You are guaranteed to fall in love with retiree Emily Cherry and giggle at her uncanny ability to stumble into one head-scratching mystery after another.“

5. The Divine Proverb of Streusel by Sara Brunsvold

Description: Shaken by her parents’ divorce and discouraged by the growing chasm between herself and her serious boyfriend, Nikki Werner seeks solace at her uncle’s farm in a small Missouri hamlet. She’ll spend the summer there, picking up the pieces of her shattered present so she can plan a better future. But what awaits her at the ancestral farm is the past—one she barely knows.

Among her late grandmother’s belongings, Nikki finds an old notebook filled with handwritten German recipes and wise sayings pulled from the book of Proverbs.

With each recipe she makes, she invites locals to the family table to hear their stories about the town’s history, her ancestors, and her estranged father. What started as a cathartic way to connect to her heritage soon becomes the means through which she learns how the women before her endured—with the help of their cooking prowess and a healthy dollop of faith.

6. Apple Cider Slaying by Julie Anne Lindsey

Description:
Blossom Valley, West Virginia, is home to Smythe Orchards, Winnie and her Granny’s beloved twenty-five-acre farm and family business. But any way you slice it, it’s struggling. That’s why they’re trying to drum up business with the “First Annual Christmas at the Orchard,” a good old-fashioned holiday festival with enough delicious draw to satisfy apple-picking locals and cider-loving tourists alike—until the whole endeavor takes a sour turn when the body of Nadine Cooper, Granny’s long-time, grudge-holding nemesis, is found lodged in the apple press. Now, with Granny the number one suspect, Winnie is hard-pressed to prove her innocence before the real killer delivers another murder . . .

7. Live and Let Chai by Bree Baker (who is actually Julie Anne Lindsey so this book and the one above have a lot of similarities – trying to get a business going, falling for the investigating officer, etc. Still enjoyed both books.)

Description:

Life hasn’t been so sweet for Everly Swan over the past couple of years, but now she’s back in her seaside hometown of Charm, North Carolina. The proud new owner of Sun, Sand,

and Tea—a café right on the beach—Everly thinks that things are finally starting to look up.

Until a grouchy customer turns up dead on the boardwalk with a jar of one of her specialty

teas lying right next to him! When an autopsy reports poison in his system, things don’t look

good for Everly or her tea shop.

As the townspeople of Charm, formerly so welcoming and homey, turn their back on Everly, she fights to dig up clues about who could have had it in for the former town councilman.

With the maddeningly handsome Detective Grady Hays discouraging her from uncovering leads and a series of anonymous attacks on Everly and her tea shop, it will take everything she’s got to keep this murder mystery from boiling over.

8. Clueless At The Coffee Station by Bee Littlefield

Description: Betti Bryant knows she’s not supposed to be a barista five years after graduating from college, but her life is actually super adorable—except for the part where she has to endure her ex-boyfriend’s musical rendition of their breakup at the coffee shop’s Open Mic Night every Friday.

When an entire local art collection is stolen from the cafe during his performance, Betti sees her chance to persuade her panicked boss to cancel Open Mic Night, at least until the crime is solved. Instead, he announces plans to sell the beloved cafe to a real estate developer, who will demolish it. Betti believes her boss will change his mind once justice is served. So, armed with a list of drink orders from the night of the crime and the sleuthiest outfit she can find at the thrift store, she sets out to investigate the theft herself.

If she fails, she’s promised her sister she’ll accept whatever non-adorable entry-level corporate job she can get, abandoning her ideals about finding her own path in life. The Coffee Station will close forever.

9. Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murders by Jesse Q. Sutanto

(Disclaimer: If you don’t like swearing in your books, this does have some.)

Description: Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady—ah, lady of a certain age—who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to.

Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing—a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn’t know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer.

What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?

10. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain

This one is all about food and all about the restaurant business and I was completely enthralled. I was swept up in Anthony’s passion for food and flavor and what knife to use for the everyday cook. I was not as enthralled some of the language, sexual innuendos and references to male genitalia made throughout the book when Anthony was talking about some of his co-workers, but I still couldn’t put the book down, which is unusual for me when it comes to non-fiction. I’m not a big non-fiction reader but really enjoyed this one and have other Bourdain books on my Kindle to read soon.
Description:

Almost two decades ago, the New Yorker published a now infamous article, “Don’t Eat before You Read This,” by then little-known chef Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain spared no one’s appetite as he revealed what happens behind the kitchen door. The article was a sensation, and the book it spawned, the now classic Kitchen Confidential, became an even bigger sensation, a megabestseller with over one million copies in print. Frankly confessional, addictively acerbic, and utterly unsparing, Bourdain pulls no punches in this memoir of his years in the restaurant business.

Fans will love to return to this deliciously funny, delectably shocking banquet of wild-but-true tales of life in the culinary trade from Chef Anthony Bourdain, laying out his more than a quarter-century of drugs, sex, and haute cuisine—this time with never-before-published material.

What books have you read that had something to do with food but weren’t cookbooks?

Book recommendation: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. A story of loving food, working in restaurants, and traveling the world.

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 1 Comment

Reading Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain was bittersweet because no matter what the ending of the book was, I already knew the ultimate ending of Bourdain’s story was not happy. The ending of his life, unlike the ending of this book, was not a look into what the future might hold for him. Instead, Bourdain’s future, sadly, stopped being something for him to look forward to when he committed suicide in 2018.

Maybe this is why I felt such sadness when I hit the end of the book. Not only were the fun stories now over, but I had to remember that Bourdain’s life is too. While reading the book, I could easily forget that he was no longer here to create more adventures for us to read about or watch on one of his many travel shows. He was alive in those pages, in his early days of cooking, in those first restaurants he worked in and learned his craft and fell in love with food in.  

This was Bourdain’s first non-fiction book and broke his career wide open. I read it in sections with a lot of breaks in between, not because it was boring, but because it was full of technical restaurant and foodie jargon that was sometimes a bit overwhelming but also very interesting. I was also distracted by a couple of other books during that time because sometimes I have book ADD and because there were times while I was reading it that I was in the mood for fiction rather than non-fiction.

If you are looking for a clean, polished view of the restaurant industry then this is not the book for you. This is a book that details sordid behind-the-scenes looks at what happens in the kitchens of some of the best, and worst, restaurants in the United States. It is not clean by any means, with plenty of swear words (but not so many your head spins, with the exception of one chapter, which I skipped because it was simply a liturgy of all the horrible things chefs and their staff say to, and call, each other, complete with all the four-letter words they use), several stories of eye widening debauchery, and plenty of references to drug use by Bourdain and many others. Thankfully, Bourdain had his drug abuse under control, other than alcohol, before this book was published and maybe before it was even written.

In Kitchen Confidential Bourdain writes about the many characters he worked with in the industry over the years, including those who eventually would serve as his sous chef (assistants), as well as the ins and outs of running a fine-dining, high-end restaurant. The book isn’t all memoir, however. He also has a section for those who want to know how to cook better at home and what tools they need to do so. Equally interesting is an entire section on why he loves food and what eating it and cooking it means to him. To him food itself, not only the act of creating with it, was (is) art.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book include:  

“Only one in four has a chance at making it…. And right there, I knew that if one of us was getting off dope, and staying off dope, it was going to be me. I was going to live. I was the guy.”

“Eric Ripert won’t be calling me for ideas on tomorrow’s fish special. But I’m simply not going to deceive anybody about the life as I’ve seen it.” (I like this quote because in the end Eric and he became very close friends. So close, it was Eric who found him in his hotel room after he hung himself.)

“We are, after all, citizens of the world – a world filled with bacteria, some friendly, some not so friendly. Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want. I want it all. I want to try everything once. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Senor Tamale Stand Owner, Sushi-chef-san, Monsieur Bucket-head. What’s that feathered game bird, hanging on the porch, getting riper by the day, the body nearly ready to drop off? I want some.”

From his list of restaurant tips for consumers: “I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms. This isn’t a hard call. They let you see the bathrooms. If the restaurant can’t be bothered to replace the puck in the urinals or keep the toilets and floors clean, then just imagine what their refrigeration and work spaces look like. Bathrooms are relatively easy to clean. Kitchens are not.”

And: “If the restaurant is clean, the cooks and the waiters well groomed, the dining room busy, everyone seems to actually care about what they’re doing — not just trying to pick up a few extra bucks between headshots and auditions for Days of Our Lives, chances are you are in for a decent meal. The owner, chef, and a bored-looking waiter sitting at the front table chatting about soccer scores? Plumber walking through the dining room with a toilet snake? Bad signs.”

I loved this part about vegans: “Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn. To me, life without veal stock, pork fat, sausage, organ meat, demi-glace, or even stinky cheese is a life not worth living.  Vegetarians are the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit, an affront to all I stand for, the pure enjoyment of food. The body, these waterheads imagine, is a temple that should not be polluted by animal protein. It’s healthier, they insist, though every vegetarian waiter I’ve worked with is brought down by any rumor of a cold. Oh, I’ll accommodate them, I’ll rummage around for something to feed them, for a ‘vegetarian plate’, if called on to do so. Fourteen dollars for a few slices of grilled eggplant and zucchini suits my food cost fine.”

“Lying in bed and smoking my sixth or seventh cigarette of the morning, I’m wondering what the hell I’m going to do today. Oh yeah, I gotta write this thing. But that’s not work, really, is it? It feels somehow shifty and . . . dishonest, making a buck writing.”

The book ends with final words that choked me up, because life came at Bourdain fast after this book thanks to his wit, great writing, and talent at inspiring people to want to know more about food and culture.

“I’ll be right here. Until they drag me off the line. I’m not going anywhere. I hope. It’s been an adventure. We took some casualties over the years. Things got broken. Things got lost. But I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

Where Bourdain thought he’d be when all was said and done wasn’t where he ended up when it really was all said and done. When he wrote the end of that book, he thought he’d be still on the line at the restaurant, still happy being there and maybe he would have been happy if he’d never left. Maybe he wouldn’t have been consumed by loneliness, depression, and a sense of detachment from those he loved. If he’d been home more, grounded either in his work or his family, maybe  . . . But who knows really.

Maybe his end still would have come the way it did, not with a bang like the kicking off of a career where he wrote about the culinary arts like in Kitchen Confidential but with a sad, heartbroken whimper not worthy of the full life he’d lived.