Early on in Picky, his ode to growing up second-generation British Nigerian and 1990s junk food, restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa unmasks the illusion that is food memoir. “Working as a food writer,” he writes, “can have a warping effect on childhood memories ... The past becomes an editable document.” It’s provocative but risks spoiling the show.
There’s masterful writing, as Famurewa rhapsodises about a Twix “scraped down to a soggy, denuded girder of a shortbread”, the “wincing remnants” of Brannigans crisps. It’s refreshing to read an account of a reasonably happy existence – especially when it’s of a single-parent son. Picky is also a significant meditation about the “cultural performance of immigrant life”, crucial to understanding the machinations of code-switching that is instinctive to multinational children.
He is wonderful at expressing the heightened sensations of childhood, such as the giddiness of travelling to the US as an unaccompanied minor, “a continent-hopping Paddington Bear of the sky”. His paean to McDonald’s enlightened this second-generation immigrant reader why the “slender, elegant uniformity of McDonald’s fries in a pillar-box-red sleeve” held not only me, but my parents, in its sway.
Famurewa, whose previous book was the eloquent Settlers, about the British black African experience – is a thoughtful, thorough writer. However, in a memoir the author must be the star, and even though he studied drama at Royal Holloway, Famurewa is reluctant. Out of respect, he never really delves into the people he loves, particularly his mother. Perhaps it’s his British reserve coupled with the modesty of a “Nice Nigerian Boy” but in Famurewa’s conscientious refusal to manipulate his story, he and his characters never really take flight.
If Famurewa is diffident about showcasing his immigrant family, Shahnaz Ahsan has no qualms about bragging about hers. Her cookbook memoir, The Jackfruit Chronicles, starts with her grandfather Habib, who arrives in Manchester from what is now Bangladesh in 1953 and starts a family that thrives despite Enoch Powell, Thatcher-era racism and post-9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment.
British-Bangladeshis such as Habib created what we know as the “Indian curry house”, where one pot of house gravy is tailored into different dishes with proteins, vegetables and spices. Jackfruit’s “Benglish” recipes offer an intriguing glimpse of early immigrant adaptation: cheese and Patak pickle pinwheels, crumpets swapped for the flatbread chitoi pitha.
Unfortunately, Ahsan’s style is prone to cliched platitudes that emphasise the wonderfulness of a clan for whom “food is the love language which we share”. “Thank you,” she writes, “to Aneesa and all the other aunties who pass on their wisdom both in and out of the kitchen.”
Ahsan grew up on Enid Blyton, and Winona Ryder’s Little Women, and it shows in her relentlessly heartwarming prose. Her characters lack nuance; her jokes fall flat. There’s a touch of preachiness to Ahsan, who as a teenager would hide “lads’ mags” such as Zoo (where Jimi Famuwera once worked) “in the belief that if we could, somehow, limit the availability of this media, women would actually be regarded with a modicum of respect one day”. In some families there is a refrain: Someone should write about how marvellous we are. The Jackfruit Chronicles is exactly the kind of saga that your grandma would bless.
Food writer Olia Hercules, from London, must stand by as the landscape and people of her idyllic Ukrainian childhood are demolished. Her parents’ home, built “to retire in, to grow weathered in, alongside the creased riverbank that stretches below” is occupied by the Russian military.
However, as she realises in Strong Roots, the war opens up another past, one whose wounds had been covered over during more halcyon days. “When I was growing up, I never questioned why we talked about certain things in half-whispers,” she writes. “My grandparents’ memories were ‘mined’ and had to be trodden on lightly for a long time.”
The irony is that the tales that Hercules gathers – horrifying, hilarious – might have been discarded were it not for the current terror. She’s not alone; hordes of Ukrainians, since the war began, have been scrambling to preserve their heritage. However, such stories come with a cost, as Hercules realises when she prods her grandmother Vera for what is ancient and unendurable.
“(F)rom out of her stiff body came a stiff voice ... I understood that her stiffness was a barrier, a barrier against the past, perhaps to shield her from things that she might have never discussed before.”
There are some overripe moments. (For example: “A list of occasions when I see my ancestors’ smiles” that includes “my children’s eyes”.) However, Hercules knows how to mix lushness with crisp, unyielding fact; what’s more, instead of explaining her characters, she describes them. Her grandmother Vera excitedly gets ready for a “foto sessiya” with a crinoline blouse and “huge lacquered hair”. “I need you to be natural, grandma!” Hercules shrieks, and makes her change.
The people in Hercules’s book have been maturing inside her for a lifetime, gathering richness. They can be stubborn, quick to anger and vain; she conveys the way they talk over each other, and how their punchlines falter. Hercules’s people may be strong, but she has also rendered them so vividly so that they will endure. They are blood, breath and bone – shut your eyes and they resound with exuberant cacophony.
Slutty Cheff, the anonymous author of Tart, is a few years shy of 30. As her name suggests, she’s a horny workaholic in an esteemed London restaurant, and bangs many a dish, on and off the line. She’s white, socially privileged and loves her parents; she’s at the sweet spot in life when things are on the cusp. In short, you’d hate her if she weren’t so winningly self-deprecating.
Tart is not strict memoir. As Slutty told British Vogue, “Stories are based on my stories, and stories of my chef friends,” which makes it all the more entertaining, an updated 18th-century picaresque where the rogue hero is a woman “who will feed your desire, like a Tesco meal deal”.
Plus, although Tart has plenty of fat-and-sugar stoked steam, its author knows that the cardinal rule for both culinary and erotic writing is to stay crisp and dry. She observes, “The other reason why I don’t want people to know about my lover is far more important than gender politics: the man I’m sleeping with has a topknot.”
There are darker aspects of Tart, like panic attacks and a sleazy co-worker, and Slutty confesses, “Whenever I lose the sense of who I am or what I do, or I spin into disassociation or fall into a sense of depression I feel scared and worry that I’ll never be happy again. There are two things in my life that are a constant reminder that pleasure exists: food and sex.”
The kitchen, touted by many as an artistic vocation, can also be a form of self-medication, its mania an addictive panacea for people too terrified to stop.
Laurie Woolever is 22 when Care and Feeding begins. She has a lot in common with Slutty, except instead of present-day London, she lives in 1996 New York. A blond Ivy League graduate who can cook and write, she will become assistant to the two chefs synonymous with that era’s culinary machismo – the not-yet #MeToo’ed, evangelist of Italian cuisine Mario Batali, and Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain.
Much as in Tart, what unfolds is a heady rush of alcohol, food, dirty sex and high-calibre work, proving that whoever said drink and drugs were counterproductive was wrong.
Except. Let’s just say that we hope Slutty doesn’t suffer like Woolever in 20 years. This raw, scalding book is about what happens when one’s career is ascendant while one’s personal life unravels. Some events are spectacularly badly timed; shortly after Woolever gets sober, her husband leaves her and Bourdain kills himself.
Woolever is briskly inventive, like when she describes a lamb tongue’s salad as “intriguing because of the truffles and provocative because of the tongue”. She’s deadpan about Ferran Adria, pink limousines and a writer who “had a revolting Humbert Humbert-ish way with wine descriptors ... bottles were “sexy babies” and “flirtatious teens”.
Still, an attraction of the book is the two outsized men with whom she was affiliated, and on this Woolever delivers, sometimes reconfiguring their signature swaggers in unexpected ways. About Batali (who concluded a written apology about his misconduct with a recipe for cinnamon rolls) she’s gentle – he’s an erudite, generous monster who’s a surprisingly astute observer of her spiralling behaviour.
Regarding Bourdain, whose kindness she paints in many lights, Woolever gives him a remarkable send-off. “He had,” she states, “made the colossally stupid, but somehow wholly plausible decision to die of a broken heart.”
If only she wasn’t so excruciatingly hard on herself. Woolever details every embarrassing incident in her life, and reprints her journal extracts and emails with every blemish – they’re broken and sloppy, the sort of thing a vainer writer would want permanently erased.
However, much of Care and Feeding makes you crave reckless behaviour, such as that “woozy punch-in-the-face feeling” of a gin-and-tonic at a Sri Lanka bar. You can’t forget the brilliant accomplishments – in kitchens and elsewhere – that were fuelled by the admittedly toxic adrenaline of that time.
Compare Woolever and Slutty to the more virtuous recollections of Famurewa, Ahsan, and Hercules; consider that there won’t be a Batali autobiography any time soon, and it seems that, at least for now, in the world of food memoir, it will still be the white girls who have the most fun.
In Moveable Feasts, Chris Newens seeks, in each of Paris’s arrondissements, a dish that encapsulates something of the city’s soul. Methodical and charming, Newens starts his research the old-fashioned way, by talking to strangers, waylaying Sri Lankan plongeurs on a sleeper train and sniffy haute bourgeoises after church.
In the world, Paris is the city most famously defined by its outsiders. As his title suggests, Newens’s teenage hero was Ernest Hemingway, and he is caught between the schoolboy fancies that lured him there, and the mercurial, multinational Paris that keeps him. His city hovers between unconventional and stereotype, with diaspora dishes that are also predictably Parisian (bahn-mi in the 13th), croissants and Congolese-style malangwa fish.
As a white English man with fluent French, Newens can navigate the homeless in the Bois des Vincennes and a 1993 Saint-Émilion with equanimity. More than Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Newens recalls another culinary Paris chestnut, George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Like Orwell, Newens is at his best when he is observing individuals where they work, like the employees at the smoothly functioning colossus of decent-priced dining, Bouillon République.
Many memoirs touch on home, that mysterious place where you belong. A Paris expat like Newens, however, decides to settle in a place where he will forever be foreign. It’s not a choice all Paris immigrants make. For the Sri Lankan waiter at La Fontaine de Mars or the Peruvian-American student at the Cordon Bleu, there’s a yearning for geographical and emotional permanence, to become an indelible part of the city’s history. It is our sincere, if somewhat naive, hope that they will.
