Savor Life: Top 10 Must-Read Cooking Memoirs
Posted on June 24, 2025
by Amy H
Great food is wonderful. Great food combined with fascinating life stories creates a whole new level of delightfulness. Check out these fantastic cooking-centered memoirs for some zest in your life.
kitchen yarns by Ann Hood
From her Italian American childhood through raising and feeding a growing family, divorce, and a new marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Hood tracks her lifelong journey in the kitchen with twenty-seven heartfelt essays, each accompanied by a recipe (or a few). In "Carbonara Quest," searching for the perfect spaghetti helped her cope with lonely nights as a flight attendant. In the award-winning essay "The Golden Silver Palate," she recounts the history of her fail-safe dinner party recipe for Chicken Marbella--and how it did fail her when she was falling in love. Hood's simple, comforting recipes also include her mother's famous meatballs, hearty Italian Beef Stew, classic Indiana Fried Chicken, the perfect grilled cheese, and a deliciously summery peach pie. With Hood's signature humor and tenderness, Kitchen Yarns spills tales of loss and starting from scratch, family love and feasts with friends, and how the perfect meal is one that tastes like home.
notes from a young black chef by Kwame Onwuachi
By the time he was twenty-seven years old, Kwame Onwuachi (winner of the 2019 James Beard Foundation Award for Rising Star Chef of the Year) had opened--and closed--one of the most talked about restaurants in America. Growing up in the Bronx, as a boy Onwuachi was sent to rural Nigeria by his mother to "learn respect." However, the hard-won knowledge gained in Africa was not enough to keep him from the easy money of the streets when he returned home. But through food, he broke out of a dangerous downward spiral, embarking on a new beginning at the bottom of the culinary food chain as a chef on board a Deepwater Horizon cleanup ship, before going on to train in the kitchens of some of the most acclaimed restaurants in the country and appearing as a contestant on Top Chef. As a young chef, he was forced to grapple with just how unwelcoming the world of fine dining can be for people of color, and his first restaurant, the culmination of years of planning, shuttered just months after opening. A powerful, heartfelt, and shockingly honest story of chasing your dreams--even when they don't turn out as you expected.
spoon fed by Kim Severson
From the prominent "New York Times" food writer, a memoir recounting the tough life lessons she learned from a generation of female cooks-including Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachael Ray, and Marcella Hazan. Somewhere between the lessons her mother taught her as a child and the ones she was now trying to teach her own daughter, Kim Severson lost sight of what mattered and how she wanted to live her life. It took a series of women cooks to reteach her the life lessons she forgot-and some she had never learned in the first place. Told in Severson's frank, often funny, always perceptive style, "Spoon Fed" weaves together the stories of eight important cooks with the lessons they taught her that seemed to come right when she needed them most. An emotionally rich, multilayered memoir and an inspirational, illuminating series of profiles of the most influential women in the world of food, " Spoon Fed " is Severson's story and the story of the women who came before her-and ultimately, a testament to the wisdom that can be found in the kitchen.
tender at the bone by Ruth Reichl
Reichl shares her story of a life enhanced and defined by unforgettable people, the love of tales well told, and a passion for food. The journey begins with Reichl's mother, the notorious food-poisoner known forevermore as the Queen of Mold, and moves on to the fabled Mrs. Peavey, onetime Baltimore socialite millionairess, who, for a brief but poignant moment, was retained as the Reichls' maid. Then we are introduced to Monsieur du Croix, the gourmand, who so understood and yet was awed by this prodigious child at his dinner table that when he introduced Ruth to the souffle, he could only exclaim, "What a pleasure to watch a child eat her first souffle!" Then, fast-forward to the politically correct table set in Berkeley in the 1970s, and the food revolution that Ruth watched and participated in as organic became the norm. But this sampling doesn't do this character-rich book justice. After all, this is just a taste.
the bread and the knife by Dawn Drzal
There is a chapter for every letter of the alphabet in this wonderful cooking memoir. Highlights include: A is for Al Dente, B is for Béarnaise, C is for Crab, D is for Dinner Party, K is for Kielbasa, L is for Lobster Roll, P is for Passion Fruit, Q is for Quail, T is for Tarte Tatin, V is for "Vegetarian, W is for White Truffles, Z is for Zucchini Blossoms. Ranging from her grandmother's suburban kitchen to an elegant New York restaurant, a longhouse in Borneo, and a palace in Rajasthan, Drzal charts the vicissitudes of a woman forced to swallow some hard truths about herself while discovering that the universe can dispense surprising second chances.
climbing the mango trees by Madhur Jaffrey
Jaffrey's enchanting memoir of her childhood in India is a delight. Her description of growing up a in a very large, wealthy family (half a train was booked to transport the family from Delhi to the mountains for the summer) conjures up the spirit of a long-lost age. Whether climbing the mango trees in her grandparents' orchard, armed with a mixture of salt, pepper, red chilies and roasted cumin, or enjoying picnics in the foothills of the Himalayas, reached by foot, rickshaw, palanquin or horse, where meatballs stuffed with sultanas and mint leaves and cauliflower flavored with ginger and coriander were devoured, food forms a major connecting theme of this beautifully written memoir. With recipes drawn from memory moving effortlessly from the lamb meatballs of Moghul emperors to the tamarind chutneys of the streets, this book will appeal to keen armchair cooks, as well as fans of Indian food the world over.
dirt by Bill Buford
What does it take to master French cooking? This is the question that drives Bill Buford to abandon his perfectly happy life in New York City and pack up and (with a wife and three-year-old twin sons in tow) move to Lyon, the so-called gastronomic capital of France. But what was meant to be six months in a new and very foreign city turns into a wild five-year digression from normal life, as Buford apprentices at Lyon's best boulangerie, studies at a legendary culinary school, and cooks at a storied Michelin-starred restaurant, where he discovers the exacting (and incomprehensibly punishing) rigueur of the professional kitchen. With his signature humor, sense of adventure, and masterful ability to bring an exotic and unknown world to life, Buford has written the definitive insider story of a city and its great culinary culture.
zabar's by Lori Zabar
When Louis and Lilly Zabar rented a counter in a dairy store on 80th Street and Broadway in 1934 to sell smoked fish, they could not have imagined that their store would eventually occupy half a city block and become a beloved mecca for quality food of all kinds. A passion for perfection, a keen business sense, and devotion to their customers led four generations of Zabars to create the Upper West Side store that heralded the twentieth-century revolution in food production and consumption. Lori Zabar--Louis's granddaughter--begins with her grandfather's escape from Ukraine in 1921, following a deadly pogrom. She describes Zabar's gradual expansion, Louis's untimely death in 1950, and the passing of the torch to Saul, Stanley, and partner Murray Klein, who added top-tier housewares and appliances in the store. She paints a delectable portrait of Zabar's as it is today--the intoxicating aromas, the crowds, the devoted staff--and shares behind-the-scenes anecdotes of the long-time employees, family members, eccentric customers, and celebrity fans who have created a uniquely American institution that honors its immigrant roots, revels in its New York history, and is relentless in its devotion to the art and science of selling gourmet food.
a homemade life by Molly Wizenberg
Devastated after her father died of cancer, Molly Wizenberg tried going back to her apartment in Seattle and returning to graduate school, but soon realized it wasn't possible to resume life as though nothing had happened. So she went to Paris, a city that held vivid memories of a childhood trip with her father, of early morning walks on the cobbled streets of the Latin Quarter and the taste of her first pain au chocolat. She was supposed to be doing research for her dissertation, but more often, she found herself peering through the windows of chocolate shops, trekking across town to try a new pâtisserie, or tasting cheeses at outdoor markets, until one evening when she sat in the Luxembourg Gardens reading cookbooks until it was too dark to see, she realized that her heart was in the kitchen and she began a food blog, Orangette, and soon her writing and recipes developed a passionate international following. One reader in particular, a food-loving composer from New York, found himself enchanted by the redhead in Seattle, and their email correspondence blossomed into a long-distance romance. Wizenberg recounts a life with the kitchen at its center. From her mother's pound cake, a staple of summer picnics during her childhood in Oklahoma, to the eggs she cooked for her father during the weeks before his death, food and memories are intimately entwined.
yes, chef by Marcus Samuelsson
It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. It follows Samuelsson's journey from his grandmother's kitchen to his arrival in New York City, where his outsize talent and ambition finally come together at Aquavit, earning him a New York Times three-star rating at the age of twenty-four. But Samuelsson's career of chasing flavors had only just begun--in the intervening years, there have been White House state dinners, career crises, reality show triumphs, and, most important, the opening of Red Rooster in Harlem. At Red Rooster, Samuelsson has fulfilled his dream of creating a truly diverse dining room--a place where presidents rub elbows with jazz musicians, aspiring artists, and bus drivers. It is a place where an orphan from Ethiopia, raised in Sweden, living in America, can feel at home.
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