Books like Lunch in Paris — picked by fans

Disclosure: This memoir is by a high school classmate. Georgeanne Brennan is an award-winning cookbook author (James Beard award), writer, and teacher who specializes in food with a Mediterranean slant. Her delightful memoir tells the fascinating true story of her move to Provence, France, in the 1970s with her husband and a toddler. 

Brennan writes about changing one’s life, raising goats, learning to make cheese, hunting for truffles, and eating luscious meals with neighbors. She makes me want to move to the French countryside. If only I could speak French!

I loved the descriptions of food and the traditional ways of preparing and eating it in a French village. Each chapter ends with one of Georgeanne’s delicious recipes for a Provencal dish. What a bonus!

The subtitle, Lessons in Food and Love from a Year in Paris, drew me to this memoir of a woman stranded in the city of her dreams without her husband. She fills her lonely days learning about French food. I enjoyed the memoir’s structure. Each chapter studies an iconic local dish: the history of the dish, the way it is made, her travels to find it, and tasting...lots of tasting. Her recipes, adjusted for American kitchens, are the bonus de resistance.  

But Mah doesn’t write only about food. She also shares her struggles with loneliness, missing her husband, and finding her way around France on her own. I totally recommend this personal and informative memoir by a Chinese American Francophile. 

While my previous three recommended memoirs feature French cooking, this one is about the Caribbean. In the early 1990s, the author and her husband rented their home and moved onto a 42-foot sailboat for a two-year sailing escapade.  

I loved this memoir for its descriptions of high adventure and the dangers of a sailing life. Vanderhoof’s wonderful selection of recipes stem from her experiences cooking in a tiny, sea-going kitchen. Starting with Chesapeake Bay crabcakes, Ann progresses to curried lobster, stewed conch, and Piῆa Colada cheesecake. 

Storms, friends, danger, repairs, the search for local food, and cooking combine to create a page-turning and delicious story—for me, a memoir similar to my own life-changing experience and resulting memoir.

As an artist, I simply fell in love with this book about the author’s journey from a stressed advertising executive to a strolling artist. And yes, it is another memoir about falling in love in Paris. This one offers a different bonus: black and white illustrations that only hint at the vibrant, colorful watercolors featured in MacLeod’s next two books

Written with humor and intimacy, it offers a look at simplifying a fast-track life to allow for a year of travel. Besides being an uplifting read, this memoir features practical advice to make the dream of living abroad a reality–plus an additional bonus at the end–a list of tips on how to save/make $100 a day to set aside for a “break year.” 

Eating, one of my favorite daily rituals, is contiguous with my love of smelling and cooking.  Most of what we consider to be the flavor of food arises from retronasal olfaction (the olfactory pathway from the back of the nose). And a great deal of our gustatory experiences are created from a confluence of multiple sensory channels within our headspace.

This piece of knowledge and many others are wonderfully covered in this book. Bringing to bear his cutting-edge research on mutli-modal perception, Spence provides what is to my mind the most enjoyable scientific introduction of gustatory perception and in particular an in depth explanation of why eating and drinking, when done well, are on of life’s greatest (multi-modal) pleasures.

This book starts with an unforgettable vignette from a silent film produced in 1900: an alligator swallows an unsuspecting Black child while he is fishing by the river. A man comes to the rescue, slitting the gator open and lifting the child out of its stomach. From there, Tompkins shows how eating culture became a part of racist ideology in the United States. I gobbled this fascinating book up in just a few sittings.   

I read this book shortly before I started writing my book called Slow Sex.

I was especially struck by how David highlights elements like relaxation, pleasure, awareness, and rhythm as essential to metabolism. I also discovered the existence of Yoga’s universal metabolic enhancers, which I knew nothing about!

All this fascinated me because it is precisely these metabolic enhancers that are completely parallel with the qualities I incorporated into my sexual exploration four decades ago. These qualities then became the principles of Slow Sex that I propose, because they profoundly shape and impact the quality of intimacy.

This book was also a reminder to avoid distractions while eating, to eat more consciously, to chew more thoroughly so as to liberate the flavors, and to savor them. A great book!

Food in History is a pioneer work on the deceptively simple theme. Its purpose is to examine the forces which have shaped the nature of man’s diet throughout the course of thirty thousand years and to show, without special pleading, something of the way in which the pursuit of more and better food has helped to direct – sometimes decisively, more often subtly – the movement of history itself. To demonstrate, in effect, that in some senses, at least food is history.

This book literally walks the reader through the history of food, how we evolved from foraging to an agrarian community, and how supermarkets evolved from farmers markets. Weaving food into politics, religion, and economics Food in History is an expose on humanity's complex relationship with food and our reliance on both produce and meat as the basis of the human omnivore diet.   

The family stories in this book bring history to life on a personal level. The five families are connected by their immigrant experience, but they approached food in different ways, from family-oriented German biergartens to kosher delis to imported olive oil. Each new wave of immigrants brought their own unique traditions to America, and the neighborhood evolved as each successive group brought something new to the metaphorical table.

I find the tension between maintaining food traditions and adapting them to a new nation fascinating. It also made me think about how much each group contributed to the American diet. 

I like this book because it adapts Eric Schlosser’s best-selling Fast Food Nation for young adult readers. It is a superb and readable overview of the fast-food industry, from its history to its deceptive advertising, to its mistreatment of workers in its factory farms, slaughterhouses, and restaurants, to the harm it does to the environment, animals, and our health.

But it doesn’t just decry the industry’s many problems. It also describes restaurant chains that are offering healthy alternatives and what young and old alike can do to improve our food choices and influence government policies that have benefited the rise of fast food and its exploitation of workers and eaters alike.