In honour of LitFest and Radio Active, here are three of my favourite food memoirs

The first is a New York Times bestseller, written by Ruth Reichl, called Tender at the Bone. Ruth was for many years the editor of Gourmet magazine, which ceased publishing a couple of years back. She was also a food reviewer for the New York Times and I had read her account of those years in her book, Garlic and Sapphires. I really enjoyed it, so I went back to look for others she had written and found Tender at the Bone. The book is a coming-of-age story that examines Ruth's roots, and shows the reader how she came to be a food writer.

Ruth (at right in this 2006 photo by John Mahoney of the Montreal Gazette) was strongly influenced by her relationship with her mother, Miriam, who had bipolar disorder, and was very difficult to live with. She was also a frighteningly bad cook, who liked to work with leftovers that had gone off. She frequently poisoned her guests. Ruth says one of her early life lessons was that food could be dangerous, and she would sometimes stand guard during her mother's dinner parties to make sure that one of Ruth's favourite people wouldn't actually eat a certain casserole made from a two-week-old turkey carcass. Here's a great quote from the book:

“Like a hearing child born to deaf parents, I was shaped by my mother's handicap, discovering that food could be a way of making sense of the world. At first I paid attention only to taste, storing away the knowledge that my father preferred salt to sugar and my mother had a sweet tooth. Later, I also began to note how people ate, and where. My brother liked fancy food in fine surroundings, my father only cared about the company, and Mom would eat anything so long as the location was exotic. I was slowly discovering that if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were.”

Tender at the Bone also contains recipes and it ends when Ruth is in her early twenties. Her story is picked up later in Comfort Me With Apples. She recently released another book called Not Becoming my Mother.

My second choice is a book of straight-up essays (no recipes) written by one of the iconic American food writers, M.F.K. Fisher (MFK stands for Mary Frances Kennedy). She was born in 1908 and died in 1992 at the age of 83. She wrote more than 20 books in her lifetime, most about food and travel. I have only read one of her books, The Gastronomical Me, written in 1943. She had a really exciting life, lived in France, was married several times and had other tumultuous love relationships with men and women alike. Some say Fisher practically invented the American food memoir genre. She has a unique style, she uses words that don't seem to fit until you think about it, and you really get to know her personality through her writing.

In one chapter of The Gastronomical Me, she writes about being at away at a girl's boarding school and seeing one of her teachers, Mrs. Cheevers, feed fresh oysters to the school nurse in a way that suggests Mrs. Cheevers was in love with the nurse. Listen to what she says about in this chapter, called The First Oyster:

“As she watched the old woman eat steadily, voluptuously, of the fat cold, mollusks, she looked so tender that I turned anxiously toward the sureness and stability of such small passions as lay in the dining room.”

So like Ruth Reichl, Fisher (at right in this Journal file photo) examines the way life is played out through food.

My third choice is a more light-hearted read, and is called Cooking for Mr. Latte, A Food Lover's Courtship. It's by Amanda Hesser. She has been a food reporter and columnist for the New York Times since 1997. She's also written an award-winning cookbook called The Cook and the Gardener, and is a trained chef.

This book is a love story. It traces the relationship between Amanda and her husband-to-be. She talks about things like how they staked out their own culinary territory in the relationship. He was kind of a burger guy, and she ate at New York's high-end restaurants. These are relationship issues we all encounter in one form or another.

My favourite chapter is the one in which she cooks for Mr. Latte for the first time. Here's what she says:

"The first meal you cook, for someone is intimate. Not just if it's for a date. And not just because no one cooks anymore – it really has nothing to do with whether you are a good cook or not. It's an entry into the way you think, what you've seen and know, the way you treat others, how you perceive pleasure. Dinner guests can see by how you compose a meal if you are an ungenerous hothead or a nurturer, stingy or clever, fussy or stylish.”

And then she gives you a number of recipes for dinner dates (and other occasions), including Salmon and Crème Fraiche on Black Bread Toasts and a Roasted Guinea Hen. I don't think a roasted guinea hen sounds very romantic. I think a man likes a nice steak, to be honest, but that's my book. All of the chapters in Cooking for Mr. Latte have recipes you'll want to try. It's a fun book.

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