A beer brewing memoir set in CORNWALL
10 Great Novels and Memoirs centred around European Gastronomy
16th March 2025
Novels and memoirs centred around European gastronomy offer a delectable blend of storytelling and culinary exploration. These narratives transport readers to vibrant markets, bustling kitchens, and intimate dining tables across Europe.
These books often weave food into the fabric of the plot, using it as a vehicle for character development, cultural exploration, and even social commentary.
Novels set around European gastronomy frequently explore the cultural significance of food, highlighting regional traditions and customs. They offer insights into the social and historical context of European cuisine.
Here are ten of our favourites:
The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi – ORVIETO
Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four Italian rural women gather in a derelict stone house in the hills above Italy’s Orvieto. There – along with their friend, Marlena – they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink their beloved local wines, and talk.
Here, surrounded by candle light, good food and friendship, Miranda, Ninucia, Paolina and Gilda tell their life stories of loves lost and found, of ageing and abandonment, of mafia grudges and family feuds, and of cherished ingredients and recipes whose secrets have been passed down through the generations. Around this table, these five friends share their food and all that life has offered them – the good and the bad.
The Language of Food by Annabel Abbs – ENGLAND
‘A sensual feast of a novel, written with elegance, beauty, charm and skill in a voice that is both lyrical and unique. The Language of Food is an intriguing story with characters that leap off the page and live, but what sets it apart from it’s contemporaries is Abbs’ outstanding prose’ Santa Montefiore
Eliza Acton, despite having never before boiled an egg, became one of the world’s most successful cookery writers, revolutionizing cooking and cookbooks around the world. Her story is fascinating, uplifting and truly inspiring.
Told in alternate voices by the award-winning author of The Joyce Girl, and with recipes that leap to life from the page, The Language of Food by Annabel Abbs is the most thought-provoking and page-turning historical novel you’ll read this year, exploring the enduring struggle for female freedom, the power of female friendship, the creativity and quiet joy of cooking and the poetry of food, all while bringing Eliza Action out of the archives and back into the public eye.
Map of Another Town by M F K Fisher – AIX-EN-PROVENCE
M F K Fisher moved to Aix-en-Provence with her young daughters after the Second World War. In Map of Another Town, she traces the history of this ancient and famous town, known for its tree-lined avenues, pretty fountains and ornate façades. Beyond the tourist sights, Fisher introduces us to its inhabitants: the waiters and landladies, down-and-outs and local characters, all recovering from the effects of the war in a drastically new France.
Fisher is known as one of America s most celebrated food writers; here she gives us a fascinating portrait of a place. It is, as she confesses, a self-portrait: my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself. This is an intimate travel memoir written in Fisher s inimitable style confident, confiding and always compelling.
The Risotto Guru by Laura Fraser – ITALY
A Sardinian wedding feast, the search for the perfect seaside pasta with wild fennel, meeting a risotto master: Laura Fraser journeys from the Spaghettis of her American childhood to savor the best of Italian cuisine and the culture that cooked it up. Using the same dreamy, delicious type of prose that made An Italian Affair a best-selling memoir, these essays will delight readers who loved that book, and all who love Italian food and culture. Sumptuous descriptions of Italian meals—and the passion that goes into them—make this e-book a mouthwatering, uplifting pleasure. In “Italy in 17 Courses,” Fraser uses the pace and order of the dishes in a wedding feast to muse on her own introduction to Italian food, and how it changed her from a diet-obsessed vegetarian to a pasta and pancetta connoisseur. “An Affair to Remember” explores themes of food and nostalgia, and how a good meal can lift the spirit.
A Late Dinner by Paul Richardson – SPAIN
In this vivid and humorous journey, Richardson takes us past the cliches of paella and gazpacho to tell the real story of Spain’s mouth-watering food, from the typical coastal cuisine to the shepherd cooking of the interior and the chic ‘urban’ food of Madrid and Barcelona. Along the way he gets caught up in a fish auction and the annual pig slaughter, spends a day at El Bulli restaurant and makes a never-ending stream of new friends.
Sweet Honey, Bitter Lemons by Matthew Fort – SICILY
At the age of twenty-six Matthew Fort first visited the Italian island of Sicily. He and his brother arrived in 1973 expecting sun, sea and good food, but they were totally unprepared for the lifelong effect of this most extraordinary of Mediterranean islands.
Thirty years later, older and a bit wiser – but no less greedy – Matthew finally returns. Travelling around the island on his scooter, Monica, he samples almond ice cream on the spectacular coast and intoxicating mouthfuls of sausage stew in olive groves, and goes fishing for anchovies beneath a star-scattered sky.
Matthew is drawn once again to the intensity of life in Sicily, its dramatic landscape and traditions, and discovers how the island’s vibrant food culture is intertwined with its often turbulent past.
Afternoons in Ithaka by Spiri Tsintziras – ITHAKA
A charming memoir of self-discovery, family, connection and the power of a tomato. ‘I remember crusty just-baked bread, rubbed with juicy tomato flesh, swimming in a puddle of thick green olive oil. I am seven years old. I sit on a stool in my grandmother’s house. It is the height of summer in a seaside village in the south of Greece. We little Aussies devour ‘tomato sandwiches’ as the family chats and laughs and swats flies …’ From the first heady taste of tomatoes on home-baked bread in her mother’s village in Petalidi, to sitting at a taverna some 30 years later in Ithaka with her young family, Spiri Tsintziras goes on a culinary, creative and spiritual journey that propels her back and forth between Europe and Australia. These evocative, funny and poignant stories explore how food and culture, language and music, and people and the stories help to create a sense of meaning and identity.
Bread and Oil: Majorcan Culture’s Last Stand by Tomas Graves – MALLORCA
On the island of Mallorca pa amb oli (bread and oil) is rubbed with garlic or tomatoes and salt, as it is in many other Mediterranean countries. Graves starts with this simple dish as a starting point to explore more cooking, traditions, agriculture, and historical influences that trace the dish back to Roman Times. This dish symbolises for the people of Mallorca their traditional roots and celebrates the resourceful nature, despite becoming a popular tourist destination and all the pressures that entails..
Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson – TUSCANY
Gerald Samper, an effete Englishman, lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. He is a ghostwriter for celebrities, and a foodie, whose weird tastes include ‘Mussels in Chocolate and Garlic’ and ‘Fernet Branca Ice Cream’. His idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, a vulgar woman from a former Soviet republic now run by gangsters, notably male members of her family. She is a composer in a neo-folk style who claims to be writing a score for a trendy Italian film director. The neighbours’ lives disastrously intertwine. The entourages of the rock star and the director come and go: mysterious black helicopters bring news of mayhem in Voynova, Marta’s homeland: and along the way the English obsession with Tuscany is satirized mercilessly.
From here, you can’t see Paris by Michael Sanders – LES ARQUES
A sweet, leisurely exploration of the life of Les Arques (population 159), a hilltop village in a remote corner of France, untouched by the modern era. It is a story of a dying village’s struggle to survive, of a dead artist whose legacy begins its rebirth, and of chef Jacques Ratier and his wife, Noelle, whose bustling restaurant – the village’s sole business – has helped ensure its future.
The author set out to explore the inner workings of a French restaurant kitchen but ended up stumbling onto a wider, much richer world. Whether uncovering the darker secrets of making foie gras, hearing a chef confess his doubts about the Michelin star system, or absorbing the lore of the land around a farmhouse kitchen table after a boar hunt, Michael Sanders learned that life in Les Arques was anything but sleepy. Through the eyes of the author and his family, the reader enters this world, discovers its still vibrant traditions of food, cooking, and rural living, and comes to know the village’s history, sharing along the way an American family’s adventures as they find their way in a place that is sometimes lonely, often wondrous, and always fascinating.
Enjoy our selection of novels and memoirs centred around European gastronomy!
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