Food Fiction: 12 Books That Fed My Soul

1. A Pinch of Nutmeg by Christine Ambrosius

I read an English translation of this German book. It was an advanced reader copy (ARC) and when I select those, I am more exploratory. This book was treasure at the end of one of those adventures. It’s part historical fiction, part travelogue and now that I realise this is a genre, a whole lot of food fiction.

Jake’s adventurous life has humble beginnings, as a young helper to his grandmother who assists in the kitchen of a duke in medieval England. He learns about vegetables and meats and cooking as he grows up in the kitchen. His talent attracts several mentors and friends but even more enemies and he finds himself thrown into new situation after foreign kitchen.

Jake moves from England to Italy to Turkey to France. Every journey, every place brings him new learnings about flavours, vegetables and cooking techniques. He earns to haggle with traders, fend off thieving merchants, avoid politicking courtiers and manipulative mentors.

This is the book that made me really connect to food in a way that felt safe and nourishing. Perhaps it’s because it contains history through the lens of a colonised brown culture like mine.

Three young Iranian girls, the Aminpour sisters, flee the fall of Iran and find themselves in the rural Irish Ballinacroagh in the 1980s. They find their way to belonging and identity via the foods of their native land.

3. Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel

This is the book that features on many lists – those written by women of colour, great translations and of course, food fiction. It checks off all the boxes for a good food fiction novel.

Every chapter has a recipe. The plot weaves beautifully through and around kitchens, dining rooms and pantries. It is Mexican so the food is sumptuous and the world is appointed with magic and faith as much as rustic victuals and farming implements. There is grave hardship as well as patriarchy, all of which seem surmountable or at least, diminished by the magnificence of the hands that cook.

Tita De La Garza is the dutiful daughter but also the source of profound passions, which find outlet only in her cooking. I think I enjoyed this one a little less than Pomegranate Soup only because the foods were so foreign to me. But this book is masterfully written and I can only imagine how appetising it would be to someone more food-loving than myself.

This book is an anomaly on this list. It’s one of only two novels on this list to be written by a male author. Food is so gendered, isn’t it? And in keeping with that aspect, this book approaches food very differently from the others on this list.

Most of the other books have a female protagonist falling back on a longtime habit of cooking, to overcome her life problems. Sourdough’s Lois Clary could almost be a man in that she doesn’t cook and has no connection to the kitchen or food other than in the most functional of ways. She’s a workaholic software engineer and true to the stereotype of many males of that profession, has no social skills and orders her food from the same place which she has never visited, every day.

Something changes one day when her source of food shuts shop and propels her into the world of baking and sourdough. This book features on this list because it is the only one to touch that looming aspect of our food future – genetically modified seeds and the evils Big Food capitalism. It also traverses its way through the (frankly toxic) fashionable food and hipster food cultures that are pervading urban lives.

This is an exciting read rather than a comforting one.

5. With the Fire On High by Elizabeth Acevedo

What a lovely story and beautifully written too! You can tell that the author is also a poet because what would normally be prosaic, mundane descriptions carry little aesthetic flourishes. 

Emoni Santiago has a hard life but the book never sops over into gruesome or morose. It’s also wonderfully sympathetic to all characters, regardless of their misdeeds – the deadbeat dads, the jealous rival and others.

This book made me realise how much richer are the cultures of colour, in their food tastes, their relationships and their world view on humanity. Food transcends all and may be the bridge for those of us who can’t travel and struggle with translations.

I came looking for food fiction and this might qualify by a stretch. Every section is headed up by a recipe and there are some descriptions of food which is an important part of the protagonist’s life. But this is really more about a strong teenage girl of colour and her coming of age. I didn’t miss the paucity of food descriptions or recipes though because it was that wonderfully written.

I’ve already written about this book in detail before. It tickled me in the darkest of ways to have an Indian perspective on the bitterness and poison festering in women’s hearts that we have to turn into food that nourishes the world. There’s a funeral, women gather to clean, to cook, to watch over, to nurture and to continue the threads of life itself (even after they themselves pass).

Are you noticing a pattern here? Food fiction is usually written by women authors and features female protagonists. It often contains things that men don’t like to associate with womenhood like libido, vindictiveness, manipulation and cynicism. And yet, the sparsest of kitchens must contain things that could hurt us if used imprudently – red chilli, poppy seeds, peppers, asafoetida, bitter orange peel, oil and flame.

Here’s a book that embraces the dualities that happen within women the more we are forced into limited social constructs for the pleasures of men. Two women implode in two different ways across two timezones.

Alice Hale is a modern woman trying on a tradwife role and silently crumbling under the pressure. In the basement of her suburban house, she finds a vintage cookbook. Through its recipes and notes, she pieces together the life of its original owner, 1950s housewife Nellie Murdoch.

Both Alice and Nellie navigate gruesome realities while maintaining perfect facades appropriate to their times. Food as code for secrets between women is an interesting flavour, after all.

This is the second book on this list by a male author. Maybe it’s because it’s Asian that the writing feels gentle in a way that I only usually sense with women authors. There are inveitable comparisons with the more popular Before The Coffee Goes Cold. But I did not enjoy that book and one of the reasons was that was not food fiction.

The Chibineko kitchen prepares ‘rememberance meals’ that allow the recently bereaved to process their grief with the gentle personal touch of a final meal with their lost one. Every chapter has a recipe as well as a short description of some ingredient or aspect of what makes that meal special to the person.

Okay, so this may have been the actual first food fiction that I read. But I was much younger when I read it, as is the protagonist. It sits squarely under teen fiction of the Sweet Valley High ilk. But the main characters are black people (which already sets it apart from the white breadness of that genre).

The protagonist Tai is a smart-mouthed basketball player and definitely not a cook. This despite her being the daughter of a famous chef mother and sister of a cooking contest prize-winner. On a lark and some teenage hormones, Tai enters the cooking contest and finds things heating up beyond her usual comfort zone. One of my favorite scenes is when Tai realises how many different types of salads there are beyond the garden salad. Egg salad! Macaroni salad!

The book doesn’t exactly have a lot of recipes but food is at the center of the plot and of the very young main characters discovering themselves and each other. Does Tai win the prize of her dreams? And what is the nature of that prize?

This was a very fun read and I still go back to it, blackened ends notwithstanding.

This is less a novel and more a series of vignettes of people related to one character, all in the context of food – the preparation of it, appreciation of it and memories of it. It isn’t a bad way to focus on the role of food in people’s lives. 

It just about hides the fact that all characters (including the main one) are extremely cardboard. Men are pretty much useless. Women are either irresponsible & flighty or holier-than-thou saints or bitchy & petty. The main character has no real personality except being unrealistically great at vegetable gardening and cooking. I was also uncomfortable with the blase look at neglect, underage assault, bullying, cheating and exploitation, not to mention the extreme white-washing and blatant racism. 

These problems sat like that one unappetising dish one must ignore, on a table of otherwise delectable food. The descriptions of the food were delightful, right from the humble chocolate bars to divisive lutefisk to exotic experiments. The two times, even the food descriptions couldn’t save the book were when the plot went into the realms of pretentious food appreciation – first the chef dinners and then the exhorbitant experiential events by the main character. For this reason, the ending was really unpleasant and left a bad taste in the mouth. 

It would have been nice to see more recipes in a book of this structure. I really think that would have saved the bad bits and taken it to another level.

This appears so low on the list because I didn’t really think of it as food fiction. I greatly enjoyed this book as you’ll know if you’re read my gushing post about it. But it felt like Butter was more a cutting expose of patriarchy, body standards and unrealistic appetites accorded to women. Still, most people I know who have liked the book gush about the food descriptions.