What we eat in literature tells its own story. A pie? That’s the story of hard work, perseverance, dedication to craft. A ripe peach is the story of sunlight and sweetness and deep roots. A roast chicken, skin burnished a deep brown, might tell a story of home.
As I wrote about food–and my own complicated relationship with it and with restaurants–in my book, Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly, I spent a lot of time thinking not only about how food was cast in literature, but also about other women. About how women landed on the page, about how they fed and nurtured, about how they found themselves in proximity to food, cooking food, working in the food industry, serving food, falling in love with food, eating for survival and for pleasure, finding themselves through food and completing others through its preparation.
Some of the seven books compiled here include women who work in restaurants. Some include women who write about food, or who cook professionally. Others are simply books about women who exist in the domestic sphere, bound by food and its endless possibilities. Women who are guardians of the palate, women who understand this basic and innate instinct to feed. Women who love all of it.
My own book explores what it means to be a woman in the food space. I look, specifically, at the ways in which the food industry, in all its toxicity, shapes women like me, even as it provides a compelling backdrop for these stories. I hope to offer a place for readers–like these seven books do–to see food and the lives of those intertwined with it, in a new way.
Piglet by Lottie Hazell
Lottie Hazell’s Piglet is an observational masterpiece, leaning into the nuances of romance, body image, and womanhood all through the lens of food. The titular main character, Piglet, nicknamed, in youth, for her voracious appetite, works as a cookbook editor, precariously attempting to climb the ranks at work while simultaneously living out her dream at home: wealthy fiancé, lovely home, kitchen well-equipped with the trappings necessary to host a nice dinner party. It is only when her life goes haywire–a secret unveiled, a life unraveling–that Piglet comes into her own, cooking less for performance and more for the curative and meditative value. It’s an astute look at what it means for women to eat, to feed, and, finally, to feel full.
This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub
Alice Stern, the admissions officer protagonist of Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, doesn’t work in the food industry, but food and memory permeates this book, which is about choices, and love, and how women root themselves in both home and work. Untethered from the traditional confines of time, Stern is free to repeat familiar meals with her father–Gray’s Papaya, for instance, for an iconic hot dog–before flitting back to her current life, where she is 40. In a world where Stern’s churning confusion unlocks the mystery of both present and past, food is a grounding present. Hot dogs, lentil and veggie pie, a pear and radish salad: these are concrete reminders of the very real and very tangible moments shared with the people we love.
Homeseeking by Karissa Chen
GMA Book Club Pick Homeseeking, by Karissa Chen, spans generations and countries, uniting–then separating–then reuniting young lovers in twists of fate and circumstance. The book, which splits time between mainland China, Taiwan, California, and Hong Kong, is not ostensibly about food, but some of Chen’s most interesting characters find identity through the service and preparation of delicious things. In noodle shops, cloaked in steam, the protagonist lovers, Suchi and Haiwen, try to piece their lives back together. In war-torn China, Haiwen’s mother makes an indisputably crisp turnip cake. Women and mothers are the engines of this book, the characters who feed and nurture and propel the carefully crafted and smart narrative forward.
Heartburn by Nora Ephron
A barely concealed Roman à clef, Heartburn chronicles the doomed union of food writer Rachel Samstat and political journalist Mark Feldman. Most of Samstat’s major life events, as told through Nora Ephron’s witty and perceptive voice, are punctuated by important foods (and, accordingly, recipes), perhaps the most famous of which is the key lime pie, a Chekovian element that does, in fact, detonate, right in the face of a lothario. Samstat, a stand-in for Ephron herself, is comforted, perplexed, and invigorated by food, and the narrative takes shape in the context of the network of ways that she, a food professional, feeds both herself and others.
Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Rufi Thorpe’s latest novel–juicy, relatable, and simultaneously over-the-top–follows financially strapped Margo, a young woman with (you guessed it) no cash but plenty of other problems. One such problem: she’s pregnant, unexpectedly, with a child from an ill-advised romance with her professor. Like many young women with diminished options and an overdrawn bank account, Margo ends up in restaurant work. The rest is a story of wit and whimsy and a bit of exaggeration. Restaurant work fails Margo, but there is more out there for her, an arc of redemption for both her and for the people who have caused her harm.
All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker
Chris Whitaker’s winding, multi-generational saga, All the Colors of the Dark, follows the lives of Patch, a captive-turned-artist-turned-fugitive, and Saint, a young girl-turned-home cook-turned police officer. Saint’s unlikely legacy becomes her domestic calling: the biscuits she makes, the painstaking attention she pays to the craft of cooking. She is a woman thrown into the man’s world of law enforcement, but, back at home, she is more than a sufficient cook. She feeds. She nurtures, passing down legacy–and the legacy of friendship and love and home and searching and even hope–through food.
Same As It Ever Was by Clare Lombardo
New York Times-bestselling author Clare Lombardo opens her fresh novel, Same As It Ever Was, in a grocery store; there, protagonist Julia Ames runs into an old friend, Helen Russo, while shopping for the ingredients to make crab cakes for her husband’s birthday. Russo, an older woman who had been, for a time, a motherly figure to Ames, comes alive in later chapters, and through acts of cooking. Food, in fact, punctuates the book’s main events. Crab cakes: celebratory for a 60th birthday. Later, an apricot galette will set an affair in motion. Both Ames and Russo have entrenched domestic roles, and their work in the kitchen is at once ancillary and important. They are making something, feeding someone, memorializing something. For these characters, who exist in a world where limits are drawn and bound by the more powerful people around them, there is a certain freedom here, in a place where the rules are theirs and theirs alone.