Some of these stories are savory and some spicy, others as frothy as freshly-whipped meringue or as tart as a sour tangerine, but they have one thing in common--using food as a metaphor for life.

Mary Kay Andrews
Deep Dish. HarCol, 2008.
Thanks to the indiscreiton of her producer boyfriend, Gina Foxton's Georgia Public Televesion cooking show is cancelled (he's caught sleeping with the sponsor's wife). She's hoping for bigger fish to fry when the Cooking Channel comes calling, looking for its next national superstar. There's just one snag: they are also interested in chef Tate Donovan, and the network decides to turn their competition into a reality show.

Thomas Fox Averill
Secrets of the Tsil Café. BlueHen, 2001.
It’s New World versus Old World ingredients in this coming-of-age story narrated by Wes Hingler, who has grown up caught between dueling chefs—his father Robert, who owns the Tsil Cafe, serving Southwestern/Native American food in Kansas City, and his Italian mother Maria, who runs a successful catering business.

Nancy Verde Barr
Last Bite. Algonquin, 2006.
After her relationship with a two-timing dentist goes awry, Casey Costello executive chef at TV newsmagazine Morning in America in New York moves in with her food-loving Italian family and swears off romance even if it comes in the form of sexy, Irishman, Danny O'Shea, a chef from one of New York's hottest new restaurants. But how long can she resist?

Erica Bauermeister
The School of Essential Ingredients. GPPS, 2009.
Eight people from different backgrounds gather once a month at Lillian's restaurant for a cooking class, but it soon becomes clear that each seeks a recipe for something far beyond the walls of the kitchen.

Lynn Kiele Bonasia
Summer Shift. Touchstone, 2010.
While trying to run the Cape Cod clam bar she owns, 44-year-old widow Mary Hopkins, who is still laden with feelings of guilt surrounding her husband’s death in a car accident 10 years ago, must rely on her loyal staff when a young waitress is killed in a similar car accident, leaving behind an 18-month-old baby, and her own beloved great aunt struggles with Alzheimer's.

Anthony Capella
The Food of Love. Viking, 2004.
American Laura Patterson is enchanted by everything Italian, especially it’s rich culinary culture. And so she finds herself falling for the handsome and charming Tommaso, who tells her he’s a chef at the famed Templi restaurant. But in truth, he is just a waiter. Tommaso devises an elaborate scheme with his bashful roommate, Bruno (who is enamored with Laura) who cooks the delicious meals Tommaso passes off as his own. A modern version of the Cyrano de Bergerac story

Laura Esquirel
Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Installments, with Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies. Doubleday, 1992.
Set in turn-of-the-century Mexico, Tita De La Garza, the youngest of Mama Elena's three daughters, must according to family tradition, remain single so that she can take care of her mother in her old age. She has therefore learned all the family recipes and remedies. Tita falls in love with Pedro, but they are forbidden to marry. Instead, she finds herself forced to prepare the wedding cake for Pedro and older sister. She pours so much emotion into the cake that it somehow affects everyone who eats it.

Darien Gee
Friendhip Bread. Ballantine, 2011.
The sorrow felt by Julia & Mark Evarts over the death of their son six years ago has taken a toll on their marriage. Then Julia finds a starter batch of Amish friendship bread on her porch, and the surprise lifts her spirits. She shares the recipe starter with a few other people in her town, and pretty soon everyone is leraning how the smallest gifts can change entire lives.

Susan Gilbert-Collins
Starting from Scratch. Touchstone, 2010.
After the death of her mother, doctoral dissertation student Olivia Tschetter decides not to return to graduate school. Instead she haunts her mother’s kitchen, finding solace in their shared passion for cooking. To keep herself occupied, she takes a temporary position at the local Meals on Wheels, where she stumbles upon some unfinished business from her mother’s past—and a dark family secret.

Julia Glass
The Whole World Over. Pantheon, 2006.
Unhappy with the current state of her marriage, pastry chef Greenie Duquette, takes her son and leaves her husband, her cozy life in Greenwich Village, and her best friend, Walter, a gay man with his own problems, to accept a lucrative position as the personal chef of the Governor of New Mexico.

Joanne Harris
Chocolat. Penguin, 2000.
When the beautiful and mysterious Vianne Rocher moves to the sleepy French village of Lansquenet during Lent and opens a chocolate shop across from the church, the inhabitants of the tiny village are torn between the solemn law of religion and the delicious rewards of her confections, with which Vianne displays an uncanny ability to divine everyone's favorite taste. By the same author: Five Quarts of the Orange (2001).

M. A. Harper
The Year of Past Things. Harcourt, 2004.
When the ghost of his wife's first husband, a Cajun musician, begins appearing in their home, New Orleans chef Phil Randazzo turns for help to psychics and exorcists and becomes increasingly fearful when he narrowly escapes a deadly accident. Is the ghost threatening his wife's happiness or trying to warn of imminent danger?

Elin Hilderbrand
The Blue Bistro. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2010, 2005.
Although her background is in hotel management, not the food industry, Adrienne Dealey needs a job badly and is hired by Thatcher Smith, the co-owner of a popular, upscale Nantucket restaurant. They share an instant attraction, but his mysterious relationship with his reclusive chef/partner, Fiona Kemp, becomes just one stumbling block to romance.

Kate Jacobs
Comfort Food. GPPS, 2008.
Popular TV cooking host Augusta Gus Simpson is less than enthralled by her new co-host--former beauty queen Carmen Vega. On-the-set tensions led to a corporate team-building weekend. When the resort's head chef calls in sick, a team-building opportunity presents itself.

Kay-Marie James
Cooking for Harry. Shaye Areheart, 2004.
For years, Harry’s cooking has brought Francie and their four children together for awe-inspiring and mouthwatering meals. But Harry gets a rude wakeup call when his doctor tells him he must lose weight. The result is a younger-looking and leaner Harry who spends more time at his low-carb support group than he does with his wife, leaving Francie confused by both the changes in their relationship and the women who have suddenly begun to eye her newly attractive husband.

Laura Kalpakian
American Cookery. St. Martin’s, 2006.
Rebellious Eden Douglass leaves her Mormon roots behind to fulfill her need for adventure. She serves on the European Front, elopes to Mexico with a charismatic film maker, and become a producer in the golden age of television. Along the way she meets a wide array of people who touch her life and become associated with a recipe.

Bharti Kirchner
Pastries. St. Martin’s, 2003.
Sunya’s comfortable life as a Seattle pastry is chef compromised by the impending opening of a chain bakery down the street, the desertion of her boyfriend, and her mother's engagement to a man Sunya detests. Even worse, she seems to have lost her baker’s touch. In desperation, she enrolls in a baking school in Japan where she hopes to reconnect to her spiritual and culinary self.

Sarah-Kate Lynch
By Bread Alone. Warner, 2004.
Fifteen years after Louis Lapoine taught her the art of making bread and broke her heart, Esme Stack, a former London magazine editor and now stay-at-home mom, is still baking her signature bread and living with her family on the English coast, where they have retreated after an unnamed tragedy. Then an unexpected encounter in a London restaurant forces her to come to terms with her painful past. By the author of Blessed are the Cheesemakers (2002)

Ann Mah
Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family & Finding Yourself. Avon, 2010.
When her love-life (she gets dumped) career (she's fired) are derailed, Chinese-American Isabelle Lee decides it's time for a change, so she goes to Beijing to stay with her older sister, Claire, whom she's never really known, and to connect with her "roots." It turns out to be a real culture shock for Isabelle, but also a personal journey to find out who she really is.

Jo-Ann Mapson
The Owl and Moon Café. S&S, 2006.
After losing her teaching position at the local university, sociology professor Mariah Moon is determined to keep her gifted 12-year-old daughter in a prestigious private school, even if she has to move in with her ex-hippie mother, Allegra, and grandmother in an apartment above The Owl & Moon Café. When her mother is diagnosed with leukemia, everyone pitches in to run the eatery. Things seem to be looking up for Mariah when a handsome Scotsman sweeps her off her feet, and for Allegra, who runs into an old flame at the hospital.

A. Lee Martinez
Gil’s All Fright Diner. Tor, 2005.
And now for something completely different…Martinez tells the tale of a werewolf and a vampire hired by the owner of an all-night diner to eliminate the zombie problem that is costing her customers. But have the two bitten off more than they can chew?

Peter Mayle
A Good Year. Knopf, 2004.
Having lost his job at a London financial firm, investment banker Max Skinner journeys to Provence to inspect a vineyard he has inherited. To his surprise, he finds both the landscape and climate a delightful change, and the local women beguiling. But the wine produced on his new property is a disaster. Then a woman arrives from Californian who knows a lot more about wine than Max does, and who may have a better claim to the estate. The novel was subsequently made into a movie featuring Russell Crowe.

Hannah McCouch
Girl Cook. Villard, 2003.
Layla Mitchner, a 28-year-old graduate of Cordon Bleu, struggles to carve out a career for herself in the high-pressure world of Manhattan restaurants where men rule with an iron skillet. As her bank account dwindles, she resists begging to her self-absorbed actress mother. Her love-life has also been on the back burner. But Layla refuses to settle for anything short of true love and culinary success, and she ultimately finds both where she least expects them.

Jael McHenry
The Kitchen Daughter. Gallery, 2011.
26-year-old Ginny Selvaggio, who has Asperger's Syndrome, lives at home and spends her days surfing the Internet and perfecting recipes. After the deaths of her parents, Ginny's dominating sister wants to sell the family house. As they bicker about what to do with the house, Ginny comforts herself by cooking and soon learns that the dishes she prepares can conjure ghosts, including her grandmother, who gives her a cryptic message, and as she packs up her parents’ belongings, Ginny finds evidence of family secrets she isn’t sure how to unravel.

Marsha Mehran
Pomegranate Soup. RH, 2005
Having fled Iran with her younger sisters, Bahar and Layla, Marjan Aminpour hopes to forge a better life in Ballinacroagh, Ireland. They open the exotic Babylon Café and their food is a shock to a town that generally subsists on boiled cabbage and Guinness served at the local tavern. They also earn the enmity of town bully Thomas McGuire, who is enraged to find the property he had been trying to buy for years occupied by foreigners. But they also find supporters in stand-up-comedian-turned-priest Father Fergal Mahoney, lonely widow Estelle Delmonico, and headstrong hairdresser Fiona Athey. More complications arise when the lives they left behind in revolution-era Iran threatens the sisters once more. Followed by: Rosewater & Soda Bread (2008)

Nicole Mones
The Last Chinese Chef. HM, 2007.
Struggling to get back on her feet in the wake of her husband's premature death and stunned by a paternity suit against her husband's estate by a Chinese family, food writer Maggie McElroy combines a trip to China to investigate the claim with business—writing a profile of rising Chinese-American-Jewish chef, chef Sam Liang, who is in Beijing and about to enter a prestigious cooking competition. Once there, Maggie learns the true nature of Chinese cuisine, of forgiveness, acceptance, and even love.

Jenny Nelson
Georgia's Kitchen. Gallery, 2010.
After riding high as chef at one of Manhattan’s best restaurants, Georgia is hit with a double whammy: a scathing review that destroys her career and a change of heart by her fiance. So she flees to Italy to re-group, re-focus, and re-tool her dream of an eatery.

Barbara O'Neal
Lost Recipe for Happiness. Bantam, 2009.
Haunted by a car accident in which she was the lone survivor, Elena Alvarez arrives in Colorado with Alvin, her faithful dog, and her grandmother’s recipes in the hopes of making a fresh start as the executive chef at an upscale Aspen restaurant. Her dream job becomes a challenge as she deals with a kitchen staff of illegal immigrants, a vengeful predecessor and working for a boss to whom she is attracted. Followed by: How to bake a Perfect Life (2011).

Sharon Owens
The Tea House on Mulberry Street. GPPS, 2005.
In Belfast, the 17-year marriage of Penny and Daniel Stanley, has hit the skids. Penny longs for beautiful things, vacations, and children but Daniel pinches pennies and worries over a secret in his past. They are the proprietors of Muldoon’s, a local tea house where a variety of similarly unhappy locals gather—including a perpetually dieting housewife who comes to escape her husband's stick-thin mistress; a struggling artist who pens love letters to actor Nicolas Cage; the spinster sisters from down the road who hope one day to meet the Queen; and a magazine editor who has returned to search for a long-lost love. Only when a fire nearly destroys Muldoon’s do the Stanleys discover what truly matters in life. By the same author: The Tavern on Mulberry Street (2006) and The Ballroom on Mulberry Street (2005).

Gaile Parkin
Baking Cakes in Kigali. Delacorte, 2009.
In genocide-stricken Rwanda, baker Angel Tungaraza finds ways to transform lives, weave magic, and create hope amid the madness swirling all around her as she provides decadent confections and transforming counsel to a series of troubled customers.

Peter Pezzelli
Francesca’s Kitchen. Kensington, 2006.
Feeling that she is without a purpose now that her nest is empty of children, widow Francesca Campanile takes a job as a nanny for a young single mother of two, Loretta Simmons. Francesca lets her food and caring nature work their magic on the struggling family. Then her adult son Joey unexpectedly moves back home and when he meets Loretta, suddenly it’s more than garlic and tomatoes simmering in the kitchen.

Lily Prior
La Cucina: A Novel of Rapture. HarCol, 2000.
In her youth, Rosa Fiore’s infatuation with culinary arts was rivaled only by her passion for a young man, Bartolomeo, but their affair ended in tragedy and murder. Since then, she has lived in solitude as a librarian in Palermo, resigned to a loveless life. Then she meets a charismatic, mysterious English chef, and through their shared love of cooking, she rediscovers the meaning of passion.

Nancy Rawles
Crawfish Dreams. Doubleday, 2003.
Ambition, like love, needs the light of day to flourish. As a young bride Camille Broussard moved from Louisiana to Los Angeles to the thriving community of Watts, only to see many of her hopes and dreams go up in the flames of the 1965 riots. Twenty years later, she’s determined to revive her widely scattered family by opening a restaurant. By serving up recipes from her childhood, she hopes to rekindle her crawfish dreams.

Jay Rayner
Eating Crow. S&S, 2004.
After offering his apologies to the widow of a chef who committed suicide after receiving one of his trademark venomous reviews, restaurant critic Marc Basset finds the experience so liberating that he decides to apologize to everyone he has ever wronged in life. He becomes so good at it that he is eventually appointed Chief Apologist for the United Nations and tra vels the world apologizing for everything from colonialism to slavery.

Philibert Schogt
Daalder’s Chocolates. Thunder’s Mouth, 2005.
Raised in a family of intellectuals and musicians with an indifferent attitude towards for food, Joop Daadler finds fulfillment as a master-chocolatier’s apprentice. He eventually becomes a master in his own right, achieving a celebrated status in Toronto before a super-deli is built next to his shop, stealing his clients. Now deli's car park is to be expanded and his shop has to be destroyed and Joop has come to a cross-roads in his life.

Melissa Senate
The Love Goddess' Cooking School. Gallery, 2010.
Inheriting her late Milanese grandmother's home-based Italian cooking school in Maine (her cooking was rumored to save marriages), broken-hearted Holly Maguire strives to become a cooking teacher worthy of her grandmother's legacy (even though she can varely make spaghetti sauce) and struggles on with four remaining students who harbor their own private challenges.

Linda E. Shepherd
The Secret's in the Sauce. Revell, 2008.
The women of the Potluck Club launch their own a catering business, but a pantry full of personal secrets may cause the business to crumble before it gets off the ground? Followed by: A Taste of Fame (2009) and Bake Until Golden (2011). The ladies of the Potluck Club are introduced in the previous series, consisting of: The Potluck Club (2005), The Potluck Club: Trouble's Brewing (2006) and The Potluck Club Takes the Cake (2007).

Susan Waggoner
Better than Chocolate. HarCol. 2006.
Enlisted as the marketing spokesperson when her husband Tom invents a completely healthy and good-tasting chocolate, food writer Annie Wilkins believes she has embarked on a dream life until her husband becomes a national sex symbol, her children don’t handle being suddenly rich very well, and it is suggested to her that she lose 25 pounds or so.

Jane Ward
Hunger. Forge, 2001.
After the breakup of her marriage to her overworked, aloof lawyer husband, gifted cook Anna Rossi seeks to build a new life for herself and her young daughter working as a kitchen assistant in a friend's bustling New Hampshire restaurant, where, with the help of the sous chef, James, she begins to rediscover the simple joys of life. When Anna's mother suffers a stroke, she ponders the choices her parents made as she makes choices of her own.

Vinita Hampton Wright
Velma Still Cooks in Leeway. B&H, 2000.
Velma Brendle of Leeway, Kansas, is the part-time janitor at Jerusalem Baptist Church and owner of the town’s only diner. Somehow, everyone with a problem in their life ends up at her place. But some problems cannot be fixed by Velma’s home-style cooking. Sometimes it takes a little help from Above.

Created and maintained by: Lynne M. Kennedy.

© Copyright 2011, 2007 Sachem Public Library. All rights reserved.

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