Food Fiction: 12 Books That Fed My Soul
Food fiction examines political turmoil, gender, grief, adolescent anguish. These are my top appetising reads.
I’m not sure why it took me this long to write a post about this, considering I’ve been talking about the joys of food fiction for five years. Maybe it’s because I do not identify as ‘a foodie’. It seems to me like this label is often claimed to mask gluttony. Gluttony is just a form of addiction, an escape from other things in life and doesn’t hold any appreciation for the substance (whether it’s food, sex or intoxicants). Gluttons like all addicts are also about me-versus-them, oppression olympics and judgement. And food after all, is so politicised as well as class-based. It feels quite poisonous.
This is why I surprised myself with how much I enjoyed the first book on my list.
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.

Jake also finds love, loses it, embraces new cultures and creates many culinary delights. Reading his journey made me realise what a vessel of culture and history, food is. What we eat is determined by what is available. And that forms the shape of what we find comfortable, the container of our memories of comfort and identity. This book will interest anyone who loves cooking because of its numerous descriptions of dishes ranging from the simple to the spectacular. It’s also a great look at European history via the lens of food.
2. Pomegranate Soup by Marsha Mehran

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.
Every chapter ends with a recipe and Iranian words find their place among the pages. Persian influences came the way of the languages of my country, which means I recognize the many layers of meaning in garm and sard. And I read this book in the throes of the first COVID-19 lockdown. It reminded me that we must all eat. I found succour in those hard times in reading about Marjan, Bahar and Layla Aminpour battling the odds all on their own.
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.

4. Sourdough by Robin Sloane

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.

6. Eating Women, Telling Tales by Bulbul Sharma

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).
7. Recipe for a Perfect Wife by Karma Brown
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.

8. The Chibineko Kitchen by Yuta Takahashi, translated by Cat Anderson

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.
While this other book is not food fiction at all, I found The Collected Regrets Of Clover thematically linked to The Chibineko Kitchen in how gently it dealt with grief and healing. It’s hard to deal with subjects like death, regret and loss. Food makes that transition a bit easier.
9. Recipe for Love by Kate Emberg
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.

10. Kitchens Of The Great Midwest by J Ryan Stradel

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.
11. Butter by Asako Yuzuki
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.

12. The Angelotti Chronicles by Prue Leith



This is only if like me, you’re ravanous for food fiction and will take whatever comes your way. For one, it’s a trilogy and those always seem self-indulgent to me. Secondly, this is set in Britain which no one in the world will call the place for great food. But it is a good look at how the history of Britain’s colonisation allowed it to add multicultural hues to an otherwise insipid, flavourless palatte as well as turn it into an organised, booming (if tasteless) industry.
The books span nearly a century as they trace the different generations of a single family, through the world wars, fall of the empire, influx of immigrants beginning with Italians all the way down to black people. And each of these events and immigrant populations add their flavours to the cuisine and culture. My reviews of the individual books are here: The Food of Love, The Prodigal Daughter, The Lost Son.
A friend I spoke to recently marvelled at how much I read. In case that’s you as well, I want to tell you that I’ve culled this list over a decade and a half. I have gone through years of readers’ block and I have books that brought me out of slumps. Sometimes they work, sometimes I just have to power through them. Remember always, reading should be fun. If your mind needs a rest, give it one. It’s just like your stomach, after all. Feed it but don’t stuff it. Drop a comment if you read any of these books and have thoughts.