Food Literature

Hoping to create a new growth agent for food with beneficial uses to mankind, two scientists find that the spread of the material is uncontrollable. Giant chickens, rats, and insects run amok, and children given the food stuffs experience incredible growth and serious illnesses.

Do you know the stories behind delectable dishes—like the fun connection between scallion pancakes and pizza? Or how dumplings cured a village’s frostbitten ears? Or how wonton soup tells about the creation of the world? Separated into courses like a Chinese menu, these tales—based in real history and folklore—are filled with squabbling dragons, magical fruits, and hungry monks. This book will bring you to far-off times and marvelous places, all while making your mouth water.

When twenty-seven-year-old Joan Bergstrom sends a fan letter—as well as a gift of saffron—to fifty-nine-year-old Imogen Fortier, a life-changing friendship begins. Joan lives in Los Angeles and is just starting out as a writer for the newspaper food pages. Imogen lives on Camano Island outside Seattle, writing a monthly column for a Pacific Northwest magazine, and while she can hunt elk and dig for clams, she’s never tasted fresh garlic--exotic fare in the Northwest of the sixties.

England in 1932 is in the grip of the Great Depression. Stella Douglas, author of a much-loved but not very successful biography, is a bit depressed herself. When she’s summoned to see her editor in London, she expects her writing career is over before it’s even started. But much to her surprise, she is being commissioned to write a history of English food. It's to be quintessentially English and intended to lift the sprits of the nation. There's just one problem: a lot of English food is actually quite terrible (and anything good is usually imported from elsewhere).

Writer Catherine Davitt has returned to the Keys to research a book about Hemingway’s wives, but she’s also on the hunt for the truth about her missing friend. Hayley quickly agrees to help investigate and they hit the road to see what clues they might find. Back in the late 1970s, Catherine and her friend Veronica were part of a group of lost souls camping in the mangroves of Big Pine Key, until Veronica vanished, and the sheriff’s office cleared out the camp. Catherine and Hayley begin interviewing Big Pine Key residents who were around at the time of Veronica’s disappearance.

The quaint fishing village of Salmon Cove, Maine, seems like the ideal location for a girls' weekend with Hayley's gal pals, Liddy and Mona. Liddy's on the rebound from a breakup, but when she meets a handsome tourist, it looks like a little romance might liven things up. Unfortunately, Liddy's new sweetheart is found dead on the beach the next morning at the town's Lobster Bake, next to an overturned cooking pot. The liberated lobsters may be scrambling back to the sea, but Hayley's not about to let a murderer escape so easily.

This Halloween, Hayley can't imagine a worse trick than her ex-husband Danny returning to Bar Harbor. Her kids may be happy to see their dad, but Hayley's determined not to be taken in by his charms, and suspects he's in financial trouble - again. Still, the haunted holiday is about to get a whole lot scarier after Danny's moonshine - making uncle is found lying dead next to a tombstone in a cemetery - and Danny quickly becomes the prime suspect. To prove her ex is innocent, Hayley will have to dig deep into her own bag of tricks to unmask the real culprit.

This classic follows coffee's journey around the world, from London to Brazil, telling in fascinating detail and amusing anecdote the singular history of the legendary commodity - from the discovery that chewing on the beans were keeping goats awake in Yemen to the author's own experiences with the bean in 1935.

Enjoy the holiday season with three festive mysteries set in coastal Maine. This anthology includes "Yule Log Murder" by Leslie Meier, "Death by Yule Log" by Lee Hollis, and "Logged On" by Barbara Ross.

Tess is a Londoner whose relationship with Richard transports her from a Jamaican diaspora in the city to the English countryside, where predatory birds hover over fields, buses run twice a day, neighbors barter honey for cider, and no one looks like her. As Tess and Richard settle in, the dramatic arrival of their fraternal twins—one who presents as black and the other as white—recasts the family dynamic, stirring up complicated feelings and questions of belonging.

Depression is a common and debilitating problem among women, though it rarely occurs in a vacuum. As Susan Nolen-Hoeksema's original research shows, overthinking, a tendency to ruminate on problems rather than seek solutions, often co-exists with unhealthy eating habits and/or heavy drinking. This groundbreaking audiobook explains how these three core problems reinforce one another, wreaking havoc on women's emotional well-being, physical health, relationships, and careers.

Of all the essentials for survival: oxygen, water, sleep, and food, only food is a vast treasure trove of memory and of sensory experience. Food is a portal to culture, to times past, to disgust, to comfort, to love: no matter one's feelings about a particular dish, they are hardly ever neutral.

Newcomers to Tinker's Cove, Ty and Heather Moon have moved into a dilapidated house reputed to be a haven for ghosts. Now strange noises and flickering lights erupt from the house at all hours and neighborly relations are on edge. And when a local boy goes missing near the house, it's up to Lucy Stone to unravel the mystery of the eccentric couple and their increasingly frightful behavior.

The third in the Corinna Chapman series, Devil's Food is another irresistible, criminally entertaining read from the master crime writer, Kerry Greenwood.

Corinna Chapman, baker extraordinaire and amateur sleuth, returns in another delicious mystery.

From an early age, Grace Dent was hungry. As a little girl growing up in Currock, Carlisle, she yearned to be something bigger, to go somewhere better. Hungry traces Grace’s story from growing up eating beige food to becoming one of the much-loved voices on the British food scene. It’s also everyone’s story—from treats with your nan, to cheese and pineapple hedgehogs, to the exquisite joy of cheaply made apple crumble with custard.

Amateur sleuth Isabelle "Izzy" James proudly serves her famous boozy pies at the hundredth birthday party of Sunshine Springs' oldest citizen. But the celebration ends with a bang when the guest of honor himself is shot dead. At first, everyone thinks it's obvious who killed him. But what if everyone is wrong? Izzy has a hunch that there's more to this murder than meets the eye, and she's determined to get to the bottom of things. With her trusty Dalmatian Sprinkles at her side, she chases down clues.

Melanie Cooper has zero interest in catering her 15-year high school reunion, but Angie insists it’s only right that they bask in the success of Fairy Tale Cupcakes - and Mel’s engagement to the delicious Joe DeLaura is the cherry on top! Everything is going better than expected until Mel’s high school nemesis picks a fight. No longer willing to put up with Cassidy Havers’s bullying, Mel is ready to tell the former homecoming queen to shut her piehole and call it a night. But as Mel and Joe prepare to depart, Cassidy is found dead in the girls’ bathroom....

During the week between Christmas and New Year's, the year-round population of Key West, Florida, faces a tsunami of tourists and snowbirds. It doesn't help that outrageously wealthy key-lime-pie aficionado David Sloan has persuaded the city to host his pie-baking contest. Every pie purveyor on the island is out to win the coveted Key Lime Key to the City, and Key Zest food-critic Hayley Snow is on the scene to report it. Meanwhile, Hayley's home life is turning more tart than sweet.

This box set includes the first three books in Lucy Burdette's cozy culinary Key West Food Critic Mystery series: An Appetite for Murder, Death in Four Courses, and Topped Chef.

Shortly before turning the big five-oh, Cooking with Gusto! TV personality Augusta "Gus" Simpson finds herself planning a birthday party she’d rather ignore - her own. To make things worse, the network wants to boost her ratings by teaming Gus with the beautiful, ambitious, and younger Carmen Vega - the former Miss Spain, no less. But Gus isn’t going without a fight - whether it’s off set with her two demanding daughters, on camera with the vicious beauty queen herself, or after hours with Oliver, the new culinary producer.