Stories from the Kitchen

A tempting anthology of tales about the culinary arts, from across the centuries and around the world.

Stories from the Kitchen presents a mouth-watering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by authors ranging from Dickens, Chekhov and Saki through Evelyn Waugh and Isak Dinesen to Jim Crace and Amy Tan. The bill of fare includes choice titbits from classic novels - the triumphant boeuf en daube served in Woolf's To the Lighthouse; Proust's rhapsodic memory of the family cook preparing asparagus in Remembrance of Things Past; Zola's extravagant 'cheese symphony' scene from The Belly of Paris. Here too are over-the-top amuse-bouches by Gerald Durrell and Nora Ephron, a touching story about food and love by American food writer M.F.K. Fisher, and a delightful account of the perfect meal by eighteenth-century epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously declared, 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.' From a barrel of oysters endowed with the powers of seduction to a dish of stewed tripe liberally spiced with vengeance, this is a feast of fiction to tantalize, entice and satisfy literary gourmands everywhere.