Our Favorite Food Books of 2024, From Ina Garten’s Memoir to Ruth Reichl’s Food-Filled Novel

Be Ready When the Luck Happens

Be Ready When the Luck Happens

$34 $17 at Amazon

Long-awaited and much anticipated, Ina Garten’s memoir was bound to deliver. The book, an instant bestseller, could easily have been the “store bought is fine” equivalent of a celebrity memoir: make some jokes, drop some names, throw in some childhood photos. But Garten does the work — how great is that? Perhaps the biggest revelation is the violence Garten experienced at home at the hands of her charismatic but abusive father.

Equally moving is the long thread of her love for her husband Jeffrey, a pop culture icon in his own right. The power dynamics in their early relationship are clear, and very traditional; when they start to shift as Garten takes on a new project, a specialty food store in the Hamptons called The Barefoot Contessa (you may have heard of it) that goes on to succeed wildly, the couple pulls apart for a time. It’s their coming together again on new terms that forms the basis for the warm partnership viewers have admired since Garten first appeared on screen. Pour yourself a very large Cosmo and enjoy.

Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

Bite by Bite

$27 $17 at Amazon

In her followup to the bestselling World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments, poet and nonfiction writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil gathers a collection of 40 short essays about food. Lumpia, Concord grapes, waffles, mint, and halo-balo all have a place here. Nezhukumatathil has a poet’s sense of time and intertextuality. “The obelio is a version of waffle that can be traced to ancient Greece,” she writes, before connecting the dish to the honeycombed and star patterned wafels of medieval France and Germany, “waffle-frolic” parties of the 18th century, and a long-handled waffle iron Thomas Jefferson brought home from Paris.

If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism and Fury

If You Can't Take the Heat

$29 $18 at Amazon

Since launching her blog The Everywhereist in 2009, writer Geraldine DeRuiter has regularly found herself in the cultural conversation. She is perhaps most well-known for her searing essay in response to Mario Batali’s “apology” following revelations of his workplace sexual misconduct, in which Batali also included a recipe for cinnamon buns. DeRuiter made the buns: the recipe, like the statement itself, left much to be desired.

Now, in her second book (following All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft), the James Beard Award winner takes on the complicated knot of making food, eating it, and being a woman at the same time in short, sharp, and funny essays. You can hear her voice on the page, shouting. This is a good thing. Questioning her husband’s attachment to her, she asks him, “WHAT IS BROKEN ABOUT YOU THAT MAKES YOU THINK THAT?” His response could serve as our own: “Because you are great.”

My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories

My Life in Recipes

$45 $29 at Amazon

The doyenne, or perhaps the bubbe, of Jewish cooking in America, Joan Nathan looks back at her life through recipes in this captivating memoir turned cookbook. She opens with matzo ball soup — the “one dish that defines my life” — and closes with a butter cookie recipe made with cream cheese, orange zest, and dates — sourced from an outing with her grandkids to a California farm run by immigrants from Mexico. Nathan’s life is a who’s who of 20th and 21st century culinary and media world figures, from M. F. K. Fisher, Diana Kennedy, Julia Child, Alice Waters, and José Andrés to Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post, Leo Lerman at Condé Nast, and Judith Jones at Knopf. Even Albert Einstein, who shares a train compartment with Nathan’s father, makes an appearance.

But also present — and this speaks to Nathan’s greatest strengths as a food writer and historian — are the people often elided in books like these: her family’s housekeeper in childhood, Susie Marbry, a Black woman from the South who often cooked those life-defining matzo balls; and Maria Hernandez, a Salvadoran woman who has worked for Nathan for many years. Recipes from both are among the more than 100 included here. Fastidious, thorough, and lived in, the book reaches back to her family’s histories in Central and Eastern Europe and forward to her own long, rich marriage to the late Allan Gerson. Her grief and the pandemic are strands among many in this account of a rich and well-considered life.

The Paris Novel

The Paris Novel

$29 $22 at Amazon

This novel (the only work of fiction on this list) comes with serious pedigree: it’s written by Ruth Reichl, the former editor in chief of Gourmet, restaurant critic for The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and recipient of many James Beard awards (including one, this year, for lifetime achievement). Reichl has long been in book mode, having authored five memoirs, a cookbook (My Kitchen Year), and a previous novel. In her latest book, young, withdrawn Stella lives a small and drab life as a New York City copyeditor before being sent to Paris as a condition of her inheritance. There she discovers she is a person with a particularly sensitive palate. The plot of this confection is as light as meringue and the descriptions of food are as evocative as you you’d expect from a lifetime critic. 

A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

A Season for That

$18 $16 at Amazon

They were all in: Steve Hoffman, his wife Mary Jo, and their two kids had picked up their Minnesota life and moved to France. For the James Beard Award winner, Food & Wine contributor, professional tax preparer, and a self-described shameless Francophile, the move was the realization of a long-held dream — and perhaps a chance to become a different person. 

But as he recounts in this funny, fluidly written memoir (his first book), the person “who Steve Hoffman became” without Minnesota wasn’t exactly comfortable, confident, or mindful of his family’s needs. “You’re just playing some character,” says Mary Jo, “and I don’t even like him.” Her words are the critical jolt that sends Hoffman into the lives of his neighbors and the vineyards of his community, where his curiosity, humility, and labor serve to cohere his vision of France, his family, and himself.

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes

Slow Noodles

$29 $17 at Amazon

Chantha Nguon’s life story — like so many of those who lived through the Khmer Rouge (or “Pol Pot Time” as Cambodians call it) — is as extraordinary as the chaotic, violent, and world-shifting events she experienced first hand. Raised in a prosperous home in the city of Battambang in northwest Cambodia, Nguon’s early memories are of her ethnic Vietnamese mother’s cooking over a wood fire and her Khmer father’s death from an untreated ulcer. Rising violence (government-sponsored and otherwise) against ethnic Vietnamese spurred the fatherless family to splinter, with Nguon, her mother, and some of her siblings fleeing to Saigon. The timing, and location, is unfortunate: the capital city, embroiled in a U.S.-supported civil war with the north, is about to fall. Siblings separate, her mother dies, and Nguon is left alone to fend for herself, caught between two unstable countries and desperately trying to reach a third, the safe haven of Thailand.

Throughout, she cooks: recipes born of memory, hunger, and practicality. Today, Nguon is the cofounder of an NGO that provides services to women and their families in rural northeastern Cambodia, the Stung Treng Women’s Development Center. And, with cowriter Kim Green, she’s a compelling storyteller, with recipes from her childhood (like her mother’s fish amok) and from refugee camps (Mama-brand instant noodles) that make her tales come alive.

A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy...a Memoir of Sorts

A Thousand Feasts

$26 $21 at Amazon

“I see no point,” longtime Observer food columnist Nigel Slater declares in A Thousand Feasts, “in putting pen to paper to preserve anything negative, sad or painful.” Author of many bestselling books, including 2003’s Toast, which detailed his scrappy culinary (and otherwise) coming of age and was adapted for stage and screen, Slater turns his attention here to joy. Vignettes fill the pages: mangoes in Goa, his collection of plates, a meal in a friend’s garden, “the toffee-like goo left behind by the pancetta” which he stirs into tarragon white wine vinegar. Slater is at his best when contemplating the small miracles of rendered fat and herby acids. Moments of joy, indeed.

What I Ate in One Year (and Related Thoughts)

What I Ate in One Year

$35 $16 at Amazon

Stanley Tucci and the internet have a relationship, the nature of which depends on personal preference and/or age bracket. (Is he your dad, your best friend, your boyfriend?) The actor, director, writer, and foodie is beloved for his television show, Searching for Italy; for his cookbooks, The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table; for his many movies, the perfect Big Night (which he cowrote, codirected, and costarred in) among them; for his whole public persona. Like the title suggests, time provides the narrative structure here: a diary of meals that is as starry (hello Ralph Fiennes and Isabella Rossellini!) as it is self-aware. After being told that King Charles wished to attend an event only if the actor were also invited, Tucci writes: “What can I say, dear reader. Such is my lot in life.”

Wild Figs and Fennel: A Year in an Italian Kitchen

Wild Figs and Fennel

$45 $25 at Amazon

Another gorgeously illustrated and photographed cookbook of Sardinia from London restaurant world–expat Letitia Clark, Wild Figs and Fennel as irresistible as her previous books. Divided by season, Clark guides us through a Sardinian year with delicate line drawings and photos soaked in honey-colored light. In spring, nettles go into nettle pesto; summer figs dot pizzas and tarts; fall grapes are braised with a whole chicken, and winter grapefruits brighten up salads and cakes. Her father-in-law has “the air of a priest presenting a communion wafer” as he hands her half of a ripe tomato, salt slathered on the cut face as if it were a pat of butter on warm bread. “It’s always the simplest things that stay with you,” he tells her. Her first bite, no surprise, is rapturous.

Why I Cook

Why I Cook

$35 $30 at Amazon

Tom Colicchio — Top Chef mainstay, cofounder of Gramercy Tavern, and 1991 F&W Best New Chef — traces his culinary history back to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where his grandfather tended abundant tomato plants in five-gallon buckets in their concrete driveway. Intermingled are 60 recipes, including “The Dish That Launched a Thousand Brussels Sprouts” from Craft, his flagship restaurant; most are drawn from what he made at home during the pandemic. Expected (but no less enjoyable) are stories from his kitchen education: working at a Hilton kitchen where nearly 1,000 eggs are dropped whole into a stand mixer to make scrambled eggs for hundreds of conventioneers. (The shells are strained out afterwards.)

Less expected, but especially compelling, is Colicchio’s soul searching after the revelations of the #MeToo movement and seeing the gender dynamics on Top Chef play out on screen. He also observes his relationship with his wife Lori and his own ideas about masculinity — tracing back to his days in Elizabeth — that had both fueled and hindered him. “The same toxic tropes of male infallibility…had hurt generations of women, and, more specifically, the one in my own home,” he writes. “What was this teaching our sons? How would this serve them in their own relationships one day?” He starts to repair these relationships, in part, through cooking.