Food for Thought: Memoirs | Arlington Public Library

1) Blood, bones, & butter: the inadvertent education of a reluctant chef

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Before Gabrielle Hamilton opened her acclaimed New York restaurant Prune, she spent twenty hard-living years trying to find purpose and meaning in her life. Blood, Bones & Butter follows an unconventional journey through the many kitchens Hamilton has inhabited through the years: the rural kitchen of her childhood, where her adored mother stood over the six-burner with an oily wooden spoon in hand; the kitchens of France, Greece, and Turkey, where...

2) Climbing the mango trees: a memoir of a childhood in India

Author

Jaffrey, Madhur

3) The comfort food diaries: my quest for the perfect dish to mend a broken heart

Author

Nunn, Emily

Formats:

Book, Large Type

Description

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One life-changing night, reeling from her beloved brother's sudden death, a devastating breakup with her handsome engineer fiancé and eviction from the apartment they shared, Emily Nunn had lost all sense of family, home, and financial security. After a few glasses of wine, heartbroken and unmoored, Emily-an avid cook and professional food writer-poured her heart out on Facebook. The next morning she woke up with an awful hangover and a feeling she'd...

4) The cooking gene: a journey through African-American culinary history in the Old South

Author

Twitty, Michael

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Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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"A memoir of Southern cuisine and food culture that traces the paths of the author's ancestors (black and white) through the crucible of slavery to show its effects on our food today"--

5) Dinner with Edward: the story of a remarkable friendship

Author

Vincent, Isabel

Series

Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs

Formats:

Book, Large Type

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"When Isabel meets Edward, both are at a crossroads: he wants to follow his late wife to the grave, and she is ready to give up on love. Thinking she is merely helping out her friend, Edward's daughter--who lives far away and asked her to check in on her nonagenarian dad in New York--Isabel has no idea that the man in the kitchen baking the sublime roast chicken and light-as-air apricot soufflé will end up changing her life. As Edward and Isabel...

6) Eat a peach: a memoir

Author

Chang, David

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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"The chef behind Momofuku and star of Netflix's Ugly Delicious gets uncomfortably real in his debut memoir"-- "In 2004, Momofuku Noodle Bar opened in a tiny space in Manhattan's East Village. Chang, the chef-owner, worked the line, serving ramen and pork buns to a mix of fellow restaurant cooks and confused diners whose idea of ramen was instant noodles in Styrofoam cups. He was about to become one of the most influential chefs of his generation,...

7) From scratch : a memoir of love, Sicily, and finding home

Author

Locke, Tembi

Series

Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Type

Description

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It was love at first sight when Tembi met professional chef, Saro, on a street in Florence. There was just one problem: Saro's traditional Sicilian family did not approve of him marrying a black American woman, an actress no less. However, the couple, heartbroken but undeterred, forges on. They build a happy life in Los Angeles, with fulfilling careers, deep friendships and the love of their lives: a baby girl they adopt at birth. Eventually, they...

8) Girl on the block: a true story of coming of age behind the counter

Author

Wragg, Jessica

9) Julie and Julia: 365 days, 524 recipes, 1 tiny apartment kitchen

Author

Powell, Julie

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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The bestselling memoir that's "irresistible....A kind of Bridget Jones meets The French Chef" (Philadelphia Inquirer) that inspired Julie & Julia, the major motion picture directed by Nora Ephron, starring Amy Adams as Julie and Meryl Streep as Julia.
Nearing 30 and trapped in a dead-end secretarial job, Julie Powell reclaims her life by cooking every single recipe in Julia Child's legendary Mastering the Art of French...

10) The kitchen counter cooking school: how a few simple lessons transformed nine culinary novices into fearless home cooks

Author

Flinn, Kathleen

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

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" The author of The Sharper Your Knife tells the inspiring story of how she helped nine others find their inner cook. After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, writer Kathleen Flinn returned with no idea what to do next, until one day at a supermarket she watched a woman loading her cart with ultraprocessed foods. Flinn's "chefternal" instinct kicked in: she persuaded the stranger to reload with fresh foods, offering her simple recipes for healthy,...

11) The language of Baklava

Author

Abu-Jaber, Diana

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

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Diana Abu-Jaber’s vibrant, humorous memoir weaves together delicious food memories that illuminate the two cultures of her childhood—American and Jordanian. Here are stories of being raised by a food-obsessed Jordanian father and tales of Lake Ontario shish kabob cookouts and goat stew feasts under Bedouin tents in the desert. These sensuously evoked repasts, complete with recipes, paint a loving and complex portrait of Diana’s

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12) Mastering the art of Soviet cooking: a memoir of love and longing

Author

Von Bremzen, Anya

13) Medium raw: a bloody valentine to the world of food and the people who cook

Author

Bourdain, Anthony

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

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Tracking his own strange and unexpected voyage from journeyman cook to globe-traveling professional eater and drinker, and even to fatherhood, Bourdain takes no prisoners as he dissects what he's seen, pausing along the way for a series of confessions, rants, investigations, and interrogations of some of the most controversial figures in food.

14) My life in France

Author

Child, Julia

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Type

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Here is the captivating story of Julia Child's years in France, where she fell in love with French food and found "her true calling." From the moment she and her husband Paul, who worked for the USIS, arrived in the fall of 1948, Julia had an awakening that changed her life. Soon this tall, outspoken gal from Pasadena, California, who didn't speak a word of French and knew nothing about the country, was steeped in the language, chatting with purveyors...

15) Notes from a young Black chef: a memoir

Author

Onwuachi, Kwame

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, Large Type

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By the time he was twenty-seven years old, Kwame Onwuachi had opened-and closed-one of the most talked about restaurants in America. He had launched his own catering company with twenty thousand dollars that he made from selling candy on the subway, yet he'd been told he would never make it on television because his cooking wasn't "Southern" enough. In this inspiring memoir about the intersection of race, fame, and food, he shares the remarkable story...

16) On the noodle road: from Beijing to Rome, with love and pasta

Author

Lin-Liu, Jen

17) Save me the plums: my Gourmet memoir

Author

Reichl, Ruth

Series

Thorndike Press large print biographies and memoirs

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Type

Description

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When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone's boss. Yet Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no? This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became...

18) Stir: my broken brain and the meals that brought me home

Author

Fechtor, Jessica

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"M.F.K. Fisher meets Brain on Fire in this exquisite memoir of a 28-year-old food blogger who cooks her way back to health after a near-fatal aneurysm. Jessica Fechtor was on top of the world: a Harvard graduate student, happily married, and thinking about starting a family. Then, while attending an academic conference, she went for a run and an aneurysm burst in her brain. Multiple surgeries left her skull startlingly deformed. She lost her sense...

19) Yes, chef

Author

Samuelsson, Marcus

Formats:

Book, Audiobook on CD, eBook, Kindle

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"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. Marcus Samuelsson was only three years old when he, his...