It’s almost the best time of year: the season to lay out a picnic blanket and read outside in the sunshine. The season’s new food-related releases are ready to deliver on this experience. This spring sees the launch of a few exciting memoirs: There are compelling stories of women finding their way through food, including a moody reflection about pushing through hardship to taste sweetness; an engaging narrative about life after being a “girl-king” and what it means to rewrite long-held appetites; an endearing story about embodying the spirit of “extra sauce”; and an unexpected entree into culinary school, with all its challenges and rewards. Plus, there’s a gossipy look into a formative era of French cuisine and a thought-provoking analysis of food and power. Happy reading.
Tell Me How You Eat: Food, Power, and the Will to Live
Amber Husain
Washington Square Press, out now
In a world fixated on eating — how to do it “correctly,” what our groceries say about us, and so on — Amber Husain, author of Meat Love: An Ideology of the Flesh, found herself in a “standoff” with food in 2020. In Tell Me How You Eat, Husain writes about food in the context of political radicals, from the breakfast projects of the Black Panthers to food bloggers in modern-day Gaza, angling each chapter around a reason to eat. The book’s intense focus on anorexia and its dense, historical approach might not make it the right choice for every reader. But for those willing to engage difficult topics and interested in delving deeper into the political nature of food, Tell Me How You Eat will challenge you to think about food less as something insular and more as a meaningful resource that can shape the world at large.
The Secret History of French Cooking: The Outlaw Chefs Who Made Food Modern
Luke Barr
After writing about juggernauts like M.F.K. Fisher (the author’s great-aunt) and Auguste Escoffier, Luke Barr shifts his focus to other imposing presences in the culinary world. His newest book is a lush, gossipy history of 1960s and 1970s France during the rise of nouvelle cuisine. At the time, chefs like Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and Pierre Troisgros “upended” the culinary establishment’s “ossified” haute cuisine, Barr writes. But these men have cast long enough shadows; Barr also writes about the women chefs outside the macho establishment, and a curmudgeonly food critic who hated — among many things — travel, modern hotels, and Americanization. It’s a history book with the page-turning qualities of a good novel.
On Eating: The Making and Unmaking of My Appetites
Alicia Kennedy
Alicia Kennedy’s follow-up to 2023’s No Meat Required shows the prolific culture writer at the top of her game. While Kennedy’s debut was an overarching history of plant-based eating in the United States, On Eating turns the author’s lens inward as it traces her trajectory from a little girl who loved to eat lamb in Long Island to a vegetarian living in Puerto Rico who sees no less joy in food. “As a girl, I ate like a king,” she writes. Kennedy proves she’s honed her craft, with an extremely engaging and appetizing analysis of her love of food, as well as the forces that have reshaped her own desires. Even in the face of loss, grief, and changing personal ethics, Kennedy makes the case for finding new forms of excitement, abundance, and pleasure in food.
Extra Sauce: The Good, the Bad, and the Onions
Zahra Tangorra
For more than five years, Zahra Tangorra ran the beloved and “irreverent” Brooklyn restaurant Brucie. Later, during the pandemic, she gained a similarly devoted following with her Italian American comfort-food pop-up Zaza Lasagna. What brought her there, she writes in the first paragraphs of Extra Sauce, was a bus crash — one that sent her hurtling toward “a completely different story, a blessed second chance.” Tangorra’s prose is fizzy, conversational, and perceptive, and Extra Sauce is an endearing tale of food, family, and finding your own place in the world. Of course, there’s some good restaurant behind-the-scenes stuff, too, even if the thought of Brucie now makes Tangorra cringe. As she writes, “We need a certain amount of feral gaucheness at points in our lives to find our way to grace.” Extra Sauce follows that path and it’s a pleasure to read.
Salt, Sweat & Steam: The Fiery Education of an Accidental Chef
Brigid Washington
St. Martin’s Press, April 28
Billed as “The Devil Wears Prada for the ‘yes, chef’ generation,” Brigid Washington’s memoir follows the author in the grueling days of culinary school at The Culinary Institute of America — where she reluctantly chose to enroll after a breakup pushes her to get out of New York City. There are injuries, flirtations, squabbles, name-drops, and dishes gone awry. Washington reconstructs vivid scenes and recalls characters from her school years with a sense of ease. Her fast-moving coming-of-age memoir will appeal to anyone who’s been curious about culinary school but hasn’t made the commitment themself. You might even learn a few things.
Eat Bitter: A Story About Guts, and Food
Lydia Pang
The season’s moodiest new memoir comes from Lydia Pang, the “misfit” creative director and self-described “aging goth” behind the studio Mørning. Eat Bitter, which is an extension of Pang’s 2020 zine of the same name, owes its name to a Chinese idiom that means to “endure hardship before tasting sweetness.” Anchored by dishes like “radiator char siu” and “scruffy sacred salad,” Pang traces her upbringing in Wales, where she was raised by a Hakka father and a Welsh mother, and into her adulthood in the United States, where she risked burnout for the sake of corporate success before “rewilding” in Portland, Oregon, and returning to Wales. There’s a sulky, snarling swagger to Pang’s writing: She encourages readers to “embrac[e] our shadows” in order to create “ideas that are so substantive and potent, so full of guts that they scream even after we’ve exited the room.” There’s bitterness in Pang’s story, but sweetness, too.
