Nikkitha Bakshani’s debut novel, Ghost Chilli, published last year in the U.K. and now available in the U.S., portrays an Indian editor at a New York City food magazine.
I spent the majority of my 20s working at websites where I wrote or edited content (‘listicles’) about food, travel, or a combination of both. Some were perfectly reasonable, i.e. “Where to Eat in Barcelona.” Others had headlines like, “Hot Dog! 12 Franks That Will Make You Want to Hop on an Airplane.” This was a far cry from the kind of romantic food writing that drew me to the genre, such as M.F.K. Fisher’s descriptions of tangerines toasted on mid-century French radiators, or Nigella Lawson’s knack for sprinkling words like “Sisyphean” into cookbooks. But the listicles—a dated word in and of itself—captured the unique absurdity of the mid-2010s, a time when consumerist excess masked a growing sense of discontent. “Let us eat avocado toast,” cried millennials, “it’s not like we can afford homes.”
In my novel Ghost Chilli, as well as the others on this list, food orients the reader in a very specific time and place, whether it’s the Bourdain-ified era of edgy New York City restaurant culture, as portrayed by Stephanie Danler in Sweetbitter, or the technicolour movie theatre snacks of Camilla Grudova’s Children of Paradise. In all these novels, food grounds the narrative in the real, sensory world, because food is inherently mundane, and it often brings characters back to reality, as in Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed.
Food also reflects the inner lives of characters. Muskan, the protagonist of Ghost Chilli, gets disoriented when she pays $95 for the type of meal she would have paid $5 for in India. Here, food symbolises her fractured identity as not quite Indian and not quite American either. It is intricately tied with personal memory, as Proust established, as well as social reality, which every book on this list echoes.
The Cheffe
More often than not, books about food set in France lean heavily on the romance of it all, focusing on the country’s progressive values rather than its track record of racism, classism, and sexism. NDiaye’s The Cheffe is a more holistic depiction. Narrated by the titular chef’s doting assistant, it is a biography of a famous chef who does not want her notable biography—born into poverty, discovered as a genius at the age of 16 while working as a cook—to cloud people’s opinions of her food. NDiyaye, who co-wrote the screenplay of the brilliant French court drama Saint Omer, is a master at portraying mysterious, complicated women through the eyes of overly curious spectators. The result is a complicated portrayal of artistic genius, which comes with the price of being lonely and misunderstood.
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Children of Paradise
It’s not immediately apparent that Children of Paradise has anything to do with food. The book is about a group of misfits who work at a run-down movie theatre. They are often cleaning up candy crumbs and human excretions—the opposite of food, arguably. But details of exploding hot dogs, butter popcorn (with fumes toxic enough to poke holes in your lungs), and deeply unsanitary nachos stick out. These foods, full of hidden poisons, are mundane yet uncanny. They provide a sense of dramatic irony: We as readers, based on the descriptions of food, know something is seriously wrong with this place. But the characters just tolerate it. Why? That’s the question that makes the book so intriguing. It’s a gothic novel for contemporary times.
Creep
In this dark thriller, Alice cleans Tom’s apartment once a week—an event her whole life revolves around. They never meet; she is a gig worker hired through a faceless app. She obsessively analyses the contents of his fridge and pantry, cleaning the stains of his coffee mugs and every single crumb. This, in her mind, is intimacy. Her psychosis stems from a lifetime of body hatred and comparing herself with her thinner, more conventionally attractive older sister. The book shows how food, if conflated with shame, can make a person seek other forms of hunger that are fundamentally unsatisfying. It’s full of visceral descriptions—they’ll make your stomach rumble with hunger or churn with disgust.
The Debt to Pleasure
Remember that Australian lady on the news who tried to wipe out her entire family with a poisoned mushroom Wellington? Well, Tarquin Winot did it first. He is the unreliable protagonist of Lanchester’s 1996 debut, The Debt to Pleasure—the culinary Humbert Humbert, according to John Banville. Lanchester’s novel is a thriller, recipe book, and satire of middle-class pretentiousness all rolled into one, with lots of monologuing on the meaning of art. Some might find this tiresome, but I found it quite charming, as it was very much in character for a man so resentful of his brother’s artistic success. That’s the real story here, refracted through the ultra-sensory lens of food.
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Gourmet Rhapsody
Barbery’s Gourmet Rhapsody is a sort of reverse-Proust. Here, it’s not a cookie that uncorked a flood of precious memories, but a character searching for his cookie. The character is Pierre Arthens, "the greatest food critic in the world," per his own description. After so many memorable meals, he struggles to remember the dish he treasures the most, the one that sparked his love of food, which he cares about more than his own children. Pierre, in his own narration, comes off as a pompous but loveable eccentric. But the testimonies of the people around him are not so generous. It’s a short, whimsical book, and it provided the basis for Barbary’s most famous work, The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
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Milk Fed
At the start of Milk Fed, Rachel is basically anorexic. She survives on sweet potatoes mixed with Splenda, muffin tops, nicotine gum, and plain frozen yogurt, which she works off by spending three hours per day on the elliptical. One day, Miriam, an orthodox Jewish woman who works at her regular fro-yo joint, insists on adding a few extra toppings and flavours, free of charge. This act of casual generosity is enough to put Rachel out of her misery. They have an affair that awakens Rachel’s appetite not just for food, but for pleasure in all aspects of life. Pleasure, not pain or self-pity, is what gives Rachel the courage to stand up for herself. The book is a love letter to hedonism, with food as the gateway drug. It’s weird, sexy, and so much fun.
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Sweetbitter
I did not want to like Sweetbitter, which I learned about from a splashy news story about the author’s large advance. But after I found a copy in the library of a hostel, I thought, “Why not?” I loved it! And I never bothered watching the TV adaptation because for me, the appeal was entirely in its effervescent prose, which never reads as pretentious or trying too hard. Danler writes the way a waiter at a highly coveted New York restaurant talks, making you lean in and absorb every word, hungry with anticipation and dazzled by the casual glamour of it all. But her story shows that underneath all that glamour is just a group of very messy people. That era of jubilant hospitality, not yet crushed by the pandemic or unaffordable produce, may be over, but at least we have a record of it in Sweetbitter.
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