Food-centric (or food related) fiction novels?

Mimmetta Lo Monte’s recipe looks like what I had, though you have to know to substitute Zante currants for real currants, which would be bitter and wrong.

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Egads - somewhere I have Fannie Flagg’s Original Whistle Stop Cafe Cookbook - haven’t cooked from it from years, though.

I also have the Nero Wolfe Cookbook, though I’ve not cooked from it. And one of my first cookbooks, as a kid, was The Little House Cookbook. Apparently I was destined to be a reader and an eater and a cook!

Good stuff. I like peas. But it’s one of the few foods he’s not crazy about. So the Zante currents should work well.

I love AbeBooks btw. One of the cookbook junkies on CH turned me onto the site a while back.

Thanks!

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Awesome!

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Chapter 94 of Moby Dick

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The Latke Who Couldn’t Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story by Lemony Snicket. It’s a sweet (but slightly twisted) short story for kids and adults. It’s about a latke who’s frustrated by Christmas. Whenever I’m invited to a Hanukkah party I bring it as a hostess gift.

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Oh… My… God! I just read that chapter. LMFAO! Herman Melville!!!

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I’ve read the first three, so far. Love this guy. One of the customer reviews was “He eats a lot of fish”. :grin: He does!

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Yay! It’s a fun series - learned much about the culture/politics, plus all the food!

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Seeing this thread for the first time! I really liked Kitchens of the Great Midwest. Super fun, and J. Ryan is sort of a fixture on the local LA lit circuit.

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780143109419?aff=penguinrandom

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Adding this to the library queue; thank you!

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sadly, camilleri (who i’ve followed extensively) passed away a few years back, but he wrote novels that have yet to be translated.

a fellow food fanatic who hails from northern italy turned me on to inspector salvo montalbano who eats huge meals daily. unfortunately as the original work is in italian and dedicated to an italian audience, the names of the dishes are listed with relatively little description of preparation/ingredients in contrast to the series of detective novels penned by qiu xiaolong about a shanghai based chief inspector/poet/gourmet chen cao. the point is that these novels were written in english and target a non-chinese reading audience, so more effort is dedicated to describing these meals. and since the character is based in shanghai (where the author was born and raised before emigrating to st louis where he’s now a member of the faculty at washington u (where one of nieces matriculated BTW, but she never had any classes with him) it concentrates primarily on shangahi street cuisine, as he’s a relatively poorly compensated policeman. and so his meals are more about when a typical shanghai-ese would get from street vendors during the 90’s (the time period when the author was still more familiar with shanghai), but some of the descriptions do IMO provide insight into the chinese view of yin/yang & balance even when making relatively simple dishes.

sadly, the series eventually (IMO) devolves from the main character and his meals and becomes a mouthpiece for somewhat heavy handed denunciations of the chinese government.

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Hah! I almost wrote that. The food talker in me wants more description!

I’m currently motoring thru, The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang. So Good! :hearts:

“Family drama, murder mystery, love story, The Family Chao is an oftentimes funny and sometimes sad portrait of a Chinese American family who runs that most ubiquitous of institutions: the Chinese restaurant. With nuance and slyness, wit and empathy, Chang turns the desires and deceits of one unhappy family into a moving and compelling saga of that classic American illness: ambition.”
Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Committed

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then you might consider starting with qiu’s 1st book death of a red heroine. it starts off with the murder victim being discovered by people fishing for a special carp to make a simple soup they savor made with just the fish, some jinhua ham/bacon, black pepper and green onion. and having to wait for the police after discovering the body, they lament that the soup will be ruined because the fish will no longer be fresh. then inspector chen’s immediate dilemma is preparing food for the house warming party for his new apartment, with one of his guests being a gourmet restaurant owner. it carries on like this for most of the novel IIRC.

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Sounds like my kinda book.

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