What is a “food memoir”?

Browsing various online lists of the best food memoirs, one might think they must tell the tale of a chef’s life. Among almost every top-ten list: Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential; Jacque Pepin’s The Apprentice: My Life in the Kitchen; and, of course, Julia Child’s My Life in France.

And then there are the divine stories of the food critics and journalists—those who have immersed themselves in the sensuous world of gastronomy professionally—who write memoirs that center around their tables. Among my favorites: Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and, more recently, Save Me the Plums; Jeffrey Steingarten’s The Man Who Ate Everything; and Born Round by Frank Bruni.

All of the aforementioned memoirs are well worth getting lost in.

But what about the stories of those for whom food simply taps into deep-held memories? For whom the smell of a certain dish transports us back to our childhood kitchens? We needn’t be professional chefs or food writers to deliciously incorporate recipes and sense memories into our life story writing.

If you are looking for some inspiration for weaving food memories into your own memoir writing—or if you just want to read some incredible books that happen to include tasty morsels throughout—add these food-inspired memoirs to your reading list.

title no. 1

“Trail of Crumbs: Hunger, Love, and the Search for Home” by Kim Sunée

(Grand Central Publishing, 2008)

Hailed as “brave, emotional, and gorgeously written” by Frances Mayes, Kim Sunée’s memoir, Trail of Crumbs, struck me as simultaneously tender and bold as she detailed a decade-long period spent living and traveling through Europe. While the locations and foods are exotic (from Harry’s Bar in Venice to her lover’s various homes in Provence, France, and beyond), an undercurrent of sadness prevails as the young writer struggles to find her place in the world. After being abandoned in a marketplace by her Korean mother at the age of three, Sunée was adopted by an American couple and raised in New Orleans—and subsequently spends most of her twenties on a tremulous search for identity.

From Kirkus reviews: “From the crumbs in the fist of an abandoned three-year-old to bowls of richly sauced pasta, her text chronicles the entwining of food with security and love.”

Does the book include recipes?

Yes. Most chapters end with a handful of recipes that Sunée has cooked—and found some comfort in—including crab crawfish she learned to make from her grandfather; kimchi, the traditional fermented cabbage dish of her Korean heritage; and a variety of Provençal dishes including wild peaches poached in Lillet Blanc and lemon verbena, orange couscous, and gratin de salsify.

Author insight:

“…cooking, for me, became like language: another form of survival. It was probably the only thing that I thought I could do well. And, like with my grandfather, it was a gift. It was a way to give love to other people.” —Kim Sunée

Memorable quote:

“Somehow, I thought he’ll never realize that the everything he wants to give me will never take away the nothing that I’ve always had.” —Kim Sunée

title no. 2

“Finding Freedom: A Cook’s Story Remaking Life from Scratch” by Erin French

(Celadon Books, 2021)

Okay, so maybe you’re questioning why I would include a memoir by a successful restaurant owner on this list of food memoirs not by chefs. Maybe it’s a technicality, but while Erin French is now the owner and chef of The Lost Kitchen in Freedom, Maine (and a television personality, to boot), she says, “It makes me uncomfortable when people call me a chef. I’m like, nope! I’m just a girl who cooks.”

More than her lack of formal training, though, it’s that this book, Finding Freedom, recounts French’s life leading up to her role as celebrated restauranteur. She writes with exceeding vulnerability and openness about her strained relationship with her father; dropping out of college to give birth to her son; surviving an abusive marriage; and battling a pill addiction that eventually led to her losing custody of her son for a time. “Despite these hardships, French refreshingly avoids unnecessary self-pity or sentimentality, and the life-affirming details are just as strong,” reads a review from Kirkus.

Indeed, it is her return again and again to the comforts of food—and the joys of the community it can instill—that weave a thread of positivity through French’s story. “It was the power of good, simple food,” she writes. “It was the food I wanted to cook and the way I wanted to make people feel: nostalgic and loved…. It was food that, with one bite, swaddled you, reminding you of your childhood, of someone you loved, and of the one, the few, or the many sweet moments they gave you.”

I was rooting for her. I was wishing I could taste the foods that sustained her. And, to be honest, I was awed by her willingness to bare herself on the page in a way I would like to but have not yet felt brave enough to do.

Does the book include recipes?

While French mentions numerous favorite foods throughout the memoir (her father’s meatloaf, her grandfather’s garlic powder–rubbed steaks, Nanny’s molasses cookies, and her own beloved butter cake, for instance), there are no recipes included within its pages. But don’t fret: You can find an abundance of them in the cookbook she authored in 2017, The Lost Kitchen: Recipes and a Good Life Found in Freedom, Maine: A Cookbook (Penguin Random House). Find a few recipes here, as well.

Author insight:

“Scrubbing my arms in that sink reminds me of my dreams, once, to be a doctor, to chase a different life. But by the time I’ve dried my hands with a kitchen towel, I’ve already glanced around the open dining room, realized who I am, and the dream I did chase—the one I caught in my own backyard…. The road to this place was winding, but it led me home. I found a good life, my own slice of heaven, right here in Freedom, where they told me nothing was possible.” —Erin French

Memorable quote:

“By the meal’s end, the warmth of a home-cooked dinner had turned the cold silence into mild content. For dessert my mother made tapioca, and the soft and creamy vanilla pearls were a salve we all happily gobbled up, curing whatever was momentarily ailing us all.” —Erin French

title no. 3

“Kitchen Yarns: Notes on Life, Love, and Food” by Ann Hood

(W. W. Norton, 2019)

Renowned chef Jacques Pepin had this to say about Kitchen Yarns: “Ann Hood’s tender, witty, and funny voyage through a life of food reminds us that the visceral taste memories of our past are essential benchmarks of our life, and that the stories of a family are always best felt and expressed through those dishes.”

Hood tells us one captivating story after another, rendering slices of her life meaningful through stand-alone essays that overlap and jump back and forth in time and hone in on themes of resilience and love and comfort. Though not told chronologically, the stories grow from moments of transition in Hood’s life—moving to New York City as a single woman, getting divorced, becoming a parent, nurturing her father through cancer, and losing her five-year-old daughter. Through it all, food sustains her; cooking becomes her tether.

She sets aside a room in her new home for her grown son Sam, for when he visits. “He stands beside me in this new kitchen,” she writes, “all six feet, five inches of him, stirring polenta with a long wooden spoon. ‘It smells like home here,’” he tells her. And indeed it feels like home within the pages of this fierce book, one I initially borrowed from the library but decided halfway through to buy for myself—partly because there were so many specific food references that could serve as memory prompts for my own writing, and partly because its memoir-in-essays form and Hood’s writing are inspirational examples I know I’ll be sharing with my own memoir students.

Does the book include recipes?

Yes. Each of the 27 essays that compose this book is anchored by at least one recipe from the author’s experience. And they’re not fussy recipes, either—they’re hearty (“My Perfect Spaghetti Carbonara) and nostalgic (“Fancy-Lady Sandwiches”) and use ingredients such as store-bought pie crust and her dad’s secret flavoring, celery salt. (Of course, there’s also Matt Genus’s Cassoulet.) While Hood’s stories are her main course, the recipes are delicious and inviting accompaniments.

Author insight:

“…perhaps [my parents] would be satisfied that in their ordinary way, they taught me something extraordinary. That even in grief, we must take tentative steps back into the world. That even in grief, we must eat. And that when we share food with others, we are reclaiming those broken bits of our lives, holding them out as if to say, I am still here. Comfort me. As if with each bite, we remember how it is to live.” —Ann Hood

Memorable quote:

“My father’s pals and their wives loved my mother’s Italian cooking, the meatballs and eggplant Parmesan and veal scaloppine. But it was pie that my mother insisted on making. Looking back, I see now that those pies—so American, so contemporary—represented her own independence, her growing up and away from that big Italian family.” —Ann Hood