100 Books Like Mastering the Art of French Eating

Who could resist this first line? “I slept with my French husband halfway through our first date.”  Not me!  Elizabeth Bard, in Paris for the weekend, sits down to lunch with a handsome Frenchman and falls in love.  

Bard reveals how, despite her dreams of success, she was able to reinvent herself after marrying a Frenchman and moving to France. The included recipes run the gamut from what he cooked for her after they first made love to French dinner party food and traditional favorites from her American-Jewish family. 

This memoir of finding a new life in the City of Lights is well-written, humorous, and personal. If you, like me, have ever fantasized that Paris could change your life, this book is a must-read.

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!

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.” 

Jennifer 8 Lee looks at the history of Chinese American food, but with an emphasis on restaurants and food production. For instance, I learned one of the leading fortune cookie manufacturers has a factory just a few blocks from where I live in Brooklyn, and the differences in low cost and fermented of soy sauce. Lee looks at modern Chinese American cuisine through a global lens showing the impact across continents, including exporting Chinese American favorites like fortune cookies back to China. 

If The Gastronomical Me was a kind of first course or appetizer into the world of food writing (and French cuisine in particular), this book is the elaborate, ornately baroque, show-stopping main.

Written by an 18th-century French judge and gourmand, the book is a fascinating compendium of meditations on a dizzying array of topics related to eating and drinking, or what Savarin calls “the pleasures of the table.”

Another reason that I love this book so much is that it’s translated by none other than M.F.K. Fisher, who provides “glosses” and witty commentaries on Savarin’s text. It’s like watching two of the most intelligent and literary gourmands to ever live have a dinner conversation hundreds of years apart. 

Better known by his pen-name Curnonsky, Maurice Edmond Sailland, was called the Prince of Gastronomy and was the most celebrated writer on gastronomy in France in the 20th century. Notice I say writer on gastronomy and not most famous chef or most famous cookbook author. What Curnonsky did was write about the whys and wherefores of the great provincial cuisines of France. If you think you know something about provincial French cuisine, Curnonsky will enlighten you with his explorations into the culture and geography of these various regions. The recipes in some cases will be unfamiliar and archaic, although no less delicious. The book is a gem.

It was hard finding just one book out of the many that have been written about Chinese food’s fortune’s abroad, but Liu ably chronicles a love-affair that is as old as the United States themselves, which begins with would-be rebels throwing chests of Fujian tea into Boston harbor. Liu points to the long history of Chinese in America, and the impact they have had as laborers, miners and cooks, particularly for low-income groups who welcomed the rarity of the warm hash dishes that came to be known as chop suey. This is a book that allows the reader the chance to appreciate the degree to which “Chinese” food in America is in a world, and a class, all of its own.

I love how this book examines white male cultural appropriation of Chinese Literature and does it to such an extreme extent that it becomes wonderfully absurd. Chou skillfully depicts the discomfort of being Ingrid Yang, a first-generation Taiwanese American woman and Ph.D candidate who is attempting to navigate the elite halls of academia where white men still have all the power.

But what I also appreciated was how Chou examines the main character’s own complicity in the fetishization of Asian women through her relationship with her subtly sketchy boyfriend. 

I loved reading this recently released wonderful book. It’s not a parenting book–and Jon would be surprised that I list it with my favorite parenting books—but it’s a fabulous book about his life and how the child of immigrants who ran a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto became one of the top movie directors in the US with Crazy Rich Asians and the upcoming Wicked.

But I’m including it in this list because he talks about his incredible parents and how they protected, supported, and believed in him. He also describes how he is now using what he learned to raise his four children. My book includes a very brief version of his story, but I loved learning the rest of it.