As we head into the holidays our thoughts of course turn to what we’ll be eating. Food’s ability to conjure memories and shape who we are has made it a rich mine for writers. Here are some new ones as well as some of my old favorites. Bon Appetit!
Memoirs
“Extra Sauce: The Good, The Bad, and the Onions” (2026) by Zahra Tamora. After a serious bus accident in her twenties, Tamora took her settlement and opened famed Brooklyn restaurant Brucie. She lives with abandon (often one thinks “she crazy”), but you can’t help but be carried along by her gusto for food and cooking. This book reminded me of Gabrielle Hamilton’s “Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef” (2011) as well as the book that kicked it all off “Kitchen Confidential” (2007) by Anthony Bourdain.
Although not a chef, Keith McNally’s recent memoir “I Regret Almost Everything” (2025) about starting Balthazar and any other number of famed New York restaurants captures the drug-like rush of the high end restaurant business.
A different but enjoyable memoir is “Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant” (2023) Curtis Chin’s memoir of growing up gay in his family’s Chinese restaurant in Detroit.
Mystery
Food/cooking murder mysteries (aka “culinary cozies”) are popular and fun to read but often like eating caramel corn – good at the moment but just too sweet. For something a little different in this genre try the “Aunty Lee” (2013) mystery series by acclaimed Singapore writer Olivia Yu (currently 3 books in the series). “To Kill a Cook” (2026) by W. M. Akers has some real bite to it with the story of a restaurant critic who solves the murder of a famous chef in gritty crime ridden 1970s Manhattan. Hearkening back to the classics read Agatha Christie’s “Appointment with Death” (1938), Roald Dahl’s short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” (1953) or Rex Stout’s “Too Many Cooks” (1938).
Fiction
I recently discovered and absolutely loved “Kitchens of the Great Midwest” (2015) by J. Ryan Stradel. This book tracks the rise of a young woman with a unique palate and remarkable talent for cooking who overcomes a lot to become a celebrated chef. “The Kamagawa Food Detectives” (2023) series (currently 4 books) by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood, follows a father daughter cooking duo in Kyoto who attempt to recreate a dish from a customer’s memories that often results in showing the path forward. This series reminded me a bit of “Chocolat” (1999) by Joanne Harris, a tale of a mysterious French woman whose chocolate confections seem to cure whatever is tormenting her customers.
Cookbooks
David Lebovitz blogged recently about “Cookie Queen: 80+ Irresistible, Doable, Giftable Recipes” (2026) by Susan Spungen, praising her “truly original collection” of recipes and noting that there are gluten free alternatives for all recipes. I flipped through “Daily Dessert: Treats on Repeat” (2026) by Caroline Schiff after a friend recommended it and I have to say it hits the sweet spot. Check out “The New Cafe Beaujolais Cookbook: Recipes from the Iconic Mendocino Restaurant” (2026) by Julian Lopez , Daniela S. Tallman, et al. from the people who brought you the best coffee cake recipe ever. My favorite cookbook of the past few years has been “Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables” (2017) by chef Joshua McFadden (with writer Martha Holmberg). It’s truly original and the recipes are winners. They also published “Six Seasons of Pasta: A New Way with Everyone’s Favorite Food” in 2025, another good one.
Edna Lewis is a Piedmont resident and former longtime reference librarian at the UC Berkeley Law Library