Here are 99 books that The Chicago Food Encyclopedia fans have personally recommended if you like
The Chicago Food Encyclopedia.
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I’m a longtime food writer, magazine editor, cookbook author, and certified chef (through Kendall College, also in Chicago of course!). I was born in Chicago, raised in the Northern suburbs, and came back right after graduating from the University of Michigan in the early 2000s. For two decades, I lived in various parts of the city and wrote about the food scene for local and national outlets. The first edition of The Chicago Chef’s Table came out in 2012. Even though I moved to the suburbs a few years ago with my growing family, we still get down to the city often to enjoy the hottest new spots. My love for Chicago will never subside!
David is a fellow food writer and friend of mine and we’ve enjoyed many dinners and events out at local restaurants.
Many years ago he started an online forum for the food-obsessed in Chicago, and that was before “blogs” and Substacks and even social media. Monica is a longtime local food writer and NPR contributor. They both are true authorities on the dining scene here so their stories about the history and lore of various beloved Chicago/Midwestern dishes (beyond deep dish and Italian beef sandwiches) are really exciting to read.
Italian beef and hot dogs get the headlines. Cutting-edge cuisine and big-name chefs get the Michelin stars. But Chicago food shows its true depth in classic dishes conceived in the kitchens of immigrant innovators, neighborhood entrepreneurs, and mom-and-pop visionaries.
Monica Eng and David Hammond draw on decades of exploring the city's food landscape to serve up thirty can't-miss eats found in all corners of Chicago. From Mild Sauce to the Jibarito and from Taffy Grapes to Steak and Lemonade, Eng and Hammond present stories of the people and places behind each dish…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
I’m a longtime food writer, magazine editor, cookbook author, and certified chef (through Kendall College, also in Chicago of course!). I was born in Chicago, raised in the Northern suburbs, and came back right after graduating from the University of Michigan in the early 2000s. For two decades, I lived in various parts of the city and wrote about the food scene for local and national outlets. The first edition of The Chicago Chef’s Table came out in 2012. Even though I moved to the suburbs a few years ago with my growing family, we still get down to the city often to enjoy the hottest new spots. My love for Chicago will never subside!
This is another book edited by Carol Haddix, a project with the aforementioned Les Dames d’Escoffier.
It has a really nice introduction about the history of the food scene here as well as must-have recipes from all the women in our group, which includes James Beard-winning chefs, famed restaurateurs, and well-known food artisans and sommeliers.
The past 25 years has seen Chicago transformed from a heartland stronghold of meat and potatoes into a major culinary center. Chicago Cooks chronicles this story through the eyes of the Chicago chapter of Les Dames d'Escoffier, female leaders in the food and dining world. They tell how the Chicago food scene grew and evolved, touching on landmark restaurants like Charlie Trotter's and Frontera Grill, the rise of ethnic cuisines imported from around the world, and the proliferation of shops, markets, and classes serving the ever more sophisticated home cook. The book also includes a bounty of 75 recipes for…
I’m a longtime food writer, magazine editor, cookbook author, and certified chef (through Kendall College, also in Chicago of course!). I was born in Chicago, raised in the Northern suburbs, and came back right after graduating from the University of Michigan in the early 2000s. For two decades, I lived in various parts of the city and wrote about the food scene for local and national outlets. The first edition of The Chicago Chef’s Table came out in 2012. Even though I moved to the suburbs a few years ago with my growing family, we still get down to the city often to enjoy the hottest new spots. My love for Chicago will never subside!
Steve’s headshot is still hanging in both off-the-beaten path and famous restaurants in Chicago having been known as the “Hungry Hound” when he was the premier food reporter for ABC/Channel 7.
He’s now with Channel 5, and he continues to report on lesser-known restaurants and chefs in the city. In fact, he’s made people famous just by his endorsements! That’s why I love his focus on tavern-style pizza. That’s much less talked about than deep dish so there’s lots to learn by this book!
There are few things that Chicagoans feel more passionately about than pizza. It is the most identifiable food of the city, and neighbors can argue endlessly about who makes the best pie, whether thin crust or deep dish takes the cake, and which essential ingredients are the most important to make up the ideal pizza. With such a broad range of Chicagoland pizzerias, how could anyone ever decide the best of the best, once and for all? Enter Steve Dolinsky, Chicago's very own eminent food journalist and impartial pizza judge extraordinaire. Dolinsky has embarked on a self-described "Pizza Quest," methodically…
Jake Sledge, a rugged ex-cop turned private eye, teams up with his colossal partner Bobo to navigate the gritty streets of River City.
A murdered lawyer drags them into a web of political intrigue, neo-Nazi thugs, and bloody showdowns. With sharp wit and hard-hitting action, Jake tackles scumbags the only…
I’m a longtime food writer, magazine editor, cookbook author, and certified chef (through Kendall College, also in Chicago of course!). I was born in Chicago, raised in the Northern suburbs, and came back right after graduating from the University of Michigan in the early 2000s. For two decades, I lived in various parts of the city and wrote about the food scene for local and national outlets. The first edition of The Chicago Chef’s Table came out in 2012. Even though I moved to the suburbs a few years ago with my growing family, we still get down to the city often to enjoy the hottest new spots. My love for Chicago will never subside!
This is just an awesome cookbook that I recommend regardless of its Chicago roots.
Stephanie Izard was the winner of Bravo TV’s Top Chef Season 4, is a two-time James Beard Best Chef: Midwest winner and longtime restaurateur in Chicago with Boka Restaurant Group, which owns a ton of popular restaurants around town.
I really like her sweet and sour eggplant and pork ragu recipes. All the recipes are great and easy to make, though.
Stephanie Izard knows how to inspire, captivate, and cook up a storm. Fan favorite and the first and only woman to win on TV s Top Chef, she s also the chef and owner of the acclaimed Girl & the Goat restaurant in Chicago. The Girl in the Kitchen collects more than 100 of Izard s best recipes, from innovative appetizers like Asian-Spiced English Peas to luscious desserts like Quince and Fig Cobbler with Vanilla Mascarpone. Beautifully photographed and bursting with flavor, personality, and insights into the top chef s process including where she finds her cooking muses, how she…
I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a neighborhood that was stable, safe, and stimulating. After my freshman year in college, I signed up for an “urban experience” in Detroit. It turned out to be the summer of the Detroit riots. I woke up to U.S. Army vehicles rumbling into the park across from my apartment. Over the next month, I witnessed the looting and burning of whole neighborhoods. I remember thinking: what a waste! Why are we throwing away neighborhoods like Kleenex? I have been trying to answer that question ever since.
In an age of global warming, Klinenberg’s study of how Chicago did (and did not) cope with a horrible heat wave that hit the city in 1995, killing 739 residents, is more relevant than ever.
He shows how death rates varied hugely across neighborhoods, not so much based on socioeconomic status but on the cohesiveness of the community. In places where neighbors looked in on each other the death rate was lower.
Strong neighborhoods do not just enhance our lives, they can save lives.
On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day on which the temperature would eventually climb to 106 degrees. It was the start of an unprecedented heat wave that would last a full week - and leave more than seven hundred people dead. Rather than view these deaths as the inevitable consequence of natural disaster, sociologist Eric Klinenberg decided to figure out why so many people - and, specifically, so many elderly, poor, and isolated people - died, and to identify the social and political failures that together made the heat wave so deadly. Published to coincide with…
So look, I’m going to admit something: I’ve been casting myself as the heroine in historical adventures and mysteries since the age of six. I’ve been Sherlock Holmes’s daughter, Elizabeth Bennett’s slightly disreputable sleuthing cousin, the lone lady Pinkerton hunting down Butch and Sundance. These youthful fantasies combined three things I adored: puzzles, adventure, and geeking out on history. When I got a little older, I left off imagining myself in the starring role in favour of something even more immersive: becoming someone else entirely. Whether I’m writing them or reading them, books like the ones on this list transport me, and I hope they’ll transport you, too.
I have a thing for Pinkertons. They’re so often portrayed as villains, but this one is a hero: Kate Warne, the (real-life) first female Pinkerton detective. Kate’s story is fascinating and tense, full of surprising twists—some real and some fictional. At times Girl in Disguise reads more like a spy novel than a detective story, especially when it comes to a certain real-life assassination attempt I’d never heard about, and which literally dropped my jaw. Readers interested in fascinating women largely forgotten by history will devour this one.
"Electrifying...a rollicking nineteenth-century thrill ride." -Amy Stewart, New York Times bestselling author of Girl Waits with Gun Inspired by the real story of investigator Kate Warne, this spirited novel follows the detective's rise during one of the nation's times of crisis, bringing to life a fiercely independent woman whose forgotten triumphs helped sway the fate of the country. With no money and no husband, Kate Warne finds herself with few choices. The streets of 1856 Chicago offer a desperate widow mostly trouble and ruin-unless that widow has a knack for manipulation and an unusually quick mind. In a bold move…
Caroline Herschel has always lived in the shadows. Beholden to her wildly popular older brother, William, who rescued her from servitude, she's worked hard to build a life for herself – one where she can go unnoticed and repay the debt she believes she owes him. But when her brother…
When I was nine, I watched the Air Force dig a giant hole outside of my hometown to install a Minuteman Two nuclear missile to protect us from Soviet attack. I wanted to know what the Communists had against me personally, and the childhood question turned into a lifelong quest. I have lived in post-communist countries, consulted the Party files in the Comintern Archives in Moscow, interviewed dozens of former and current members of the Communist Party, and earned a PhD in the history of Communism from Georgetown University. On the way, I met memorable people, uncovered secrets, and experienced an amazing journey. I invite you to join me.
Extensively researched in both Chicago and Moscow, Storch’s book tells the story of the ordinary people who joined the Communist Party.
I like this book because it firmly refutes the myth that American Communists were a semi-criminal conspiracy of disturbed individuals. As Storch demonstrates, they were just ordinary people looking for answers to the Great Depression crisis. Attracted by specific Party campaigns, such as racial equality or workers’ rights, they rarely stayed more than a few years before finding Party life too demanding.
Focusing only on the Party’s leadership leaves most people out of history. I like this book because it puts the rank and file at the heart of the story.
Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists.
Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better…
I've been writing for decades, as one genre evolved into another. Local Colorado history led to the identification of "Boulder Jane Doe," a murder victim. During that journey I learned a lot about criminal investigations and forensics. I devoured old movies (especially film noir), and I focused on social history including mysterious and intriguing women. Midwest Book Review (see author book links) credits In Search of the Blonde Tigress as "rescuing" Eleanor Jarman "from obscurity." So true! Despite Eleanor's notoriety as "the most dangerous woman alive," she actually was a very ordinary woman. I've now found my niche pulling mysterious and intriguing women out of the shadows.
Using photo and newspaper archives from the Chicago Tribune, the authors ofHe Had It Comingtell the stories of four Chicago female murderers from the 1920s.
The documentation (both primary and secondary sources) and, especially, the newspaper's original high-quality historical photographs inspired me to dig deeply into similar archives when researching and writing my book.
Beulah Annan. Belva Gaertner. Kitty Malm. Sabella Nitti. These are the real women of Chicago.
You probably know Roxie and Velma, the good-time gals of the 1926 satirical play Chicago and its wildly successful musical and movie adaptations. You might not know that Roxie, Velma, and the rest of the colorful characters of the play were inspired by real prisoners held in "Murderess Row" in 1920s Chicago-or that the reporter who covered their trials for the Chicago Tribune went on to write the play Chicago.
Now, more than 90 years later, the Chicago Tribune has uncovered photographs and newspaper clippings…
I write memoir. I didn’t set out to write memoir. But I’ve become convinced by the power of personal narrative, both on its own merits, and as a frame and lens through which to view the world—a way to take a reader by the hand before slipping into whatever other subject matter sings its siren call. And the memoirs I love best are always in conversation with something bigger, or beyond the self. As Annie Dillard wrote, “there’s nothing you can’t do with [literary nonfiction]. No subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own form every time.” I like to see these works as doing just that.
Margo Jefferson is one of the smartest humans on the planet and her memoir reflects that. She tells her story as intertwined with the story of her first cultural context—the Black elite of the 1950s, and the crisis of identity she experienced with the rise of the Black Power movement of the 1960s. She brings her critic’s sharp intelligence and wit to bear in every paragraph, but doesn’t hold back any of her heart. It’s a terrifically moving book anda masterpiece of personal/cultural criticism, full of elegance and nuance.
The daughter of a successful paediatrician and a fashionable socialite, Margo Jefferson spent her childhood among Chicago's black elite. She calls this society 'Negroland': 'a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty'. With privilege came expectation. Reckoning with the strictures and demands of Negroland at crucial historical moments - the civil rights movement, the dawn of feminism, the fallacy of post-racial America - Jefferson brilliantly charts the twists and turns of a life informed by psychological and moral contradictions.
Rodney Bradford comes into Lindsay's restaurant, offers to buy her small house for double its value, eats her brownies, and drops dead on the sidewalk in front. Next, her almost-ex-husband offers to sign the divorce papers, but only if she'll give him her small,…
Paul Bass is the co-author with Douglas W. Rae of Murder in the Model City: The Black Panthers, Yale, and the Redemption of A Killer. Paul has been a reporter and editor in New Haven, Conn., for over 40 years. He is the founder and editor of the online New Haven Independent.
The era of COINTELPRO and Black Power is filled with stories that can become muddier to tease out as more gets revealed. Not Fred Hampton’s story — this was clear-cut, brutal FBI and Chicago police overreach to silence dissent. Haas’s book offers a firsthand account by an attorney who helped dig out the facts, and preserved the poignancy of what it felt like to experience the events.
Read the story behind the award-winning film Judas and the Black Messiah
On December 4, 1969, attorney Jeff Haas was in a police lockup in Chicago, interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancée. Deborah Johnson described how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed.
She heard one officer say, “He’s still alive.” She then heard two shots. A second officer said, “He’s good and dead now.” She looked at Jeff and asked, “What can you do?” The Assassination of Fred Hampton remains Haas’s personal account of how he and People’s Law Office partner Flint Taylor pursued…
