By Ina Garten
Crown, 2024. 306 pages. Memoir
Ina Garten, the author of thirteen best-selling cookbooks, beloved Food Network personality, Instagram sensation, and the cultural icon whose face has launched a thousand memes, shares her personal story with readers hungry for a seat at her table.
I’ll admit that while I vaguely knew who Ina Garten, I’d never seen her show or perused any of her cookbooks. But after reading Be Ready When the Luck Happens, I’m now completely charmed by her. She’s a born storyteller and throughout her memoir, she comes across as warm, candid, self-aware, and completely likable. She’s famous not only for her approachable take on classic recipes and her passion for entertaining, but also for her devotion to her husband of many years, Jeffrey. Both loves come through in her memoir, and I appreciated her honesty about both her career and marital struggles over the years. This was a memoir that left me craving comfort food, eager to host a dinner party, and pondering if I need to open a specialty foods store in the Hamptons.
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by Stanley Tucci
Gallery Books, 2021. 291 pages. Memoir
Stanley Tucci grew up in an Italian American family that spent every night around the kitchen table. He shared the magic of those meals with us in The Tucci Cookbook and The Tucci Table, and now he takes us beyond the savory recipes and into the compelling stories behind them. Taste is a reflection on the intersection of food and life, filled with anecdotes about his growing up in Westchester, New York; preparing for and shooting the foodie films Big Night and Julie & Julia; falling in love over dinner; and teaming up with his wife to create meals for a multitude of children. Each morsel of this gastronomic journey through good times and bad, five-star meals and burned dishes, is as heartfelt and delicious as the last.
by Julia Child
Knopf, 2006. 368 pages. Memoir
Although she would later singlehandedly create a new approach to American cuisine with her cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her television show The French Chef, Julia Child was not always a master chef. Indeed, when she first arrived in France in 1948 with her husband, Paul, who was to work for the USIS, she spoke no French and knew nothing about the country itself. But as she dove into French culture, buying food at local markets and taking classes at the Cordon Bleu, her life changed forever with her newfound passion for cooking and teaching. Julia’s unforgettable story—struggles with the head of the Cordon Bleu, rejections from publishers to whom she sent her now-famous cookbook, a wonderful, nearly fifty-year long marriage that took the Childs across the globe—unfolds with the spirit so key to Julia’s success as a chef and a writer, brilliantly capturing one of America’s most endearing personalities.
SGR
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