Food themed book club books??

In reading a bit about Wine and War after my last entry, I have come across a number of delectable titles that we may need to add to a specially themed list of possible book club books. So here inuagurates the food book list:

The Passionate Epicure, Marcel Rouff
In the classic French novel The Passionate Epicure, Marcel Rouff introduces Dodin-Bouffant, a character based loosely on Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, an infamous bachelor and epicure dedicated to the high arts: the art of food and the art of love. This edition contains a Preface by Lawrence Durrell and a new Introduction by Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic for Vogue magazine and author of the bestselling book The Man Who Ate Everything.

The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten
The food critic for Vogue conducts his readers on a mouth-watering and outrageously funny survey of practically everything that anyone anywhere has ever called "dinner."

Like Water for Chocolate, Laura Esquivel
Earthy, magical, and utterly charming, this tale of family life in turn-of-the-century Mexico became a best-selling phenomenon with its winning blend of poignant romance and bittersweet wit. The classic love story takes place on the De la Garza ranch, as the tyrannical owner, Mama Elena, chops onions at the kitchen table in her final days of pregnancy. While still in her mother's womb, her daughter to be weeps so violently she causes an early labor, and little Tita slips out amid the spices and fixings for noodle soup. This early encounter with food soon becomes a way of life, and Tita grows up to be a master chef. She shares special points of her favorite preparations with listeners throughout the story.

Crescent, Diana Abu-Jaber
When a handsome professor of Arabic literature and Iraqi exile enters her life, single, 39-year-old Sirine, a passionate cook in a Lebanese restaurant, finds herself falling in love and, in the process, starts questioning her identify as an Arab-American.

The Edible Woman, Margaret Atwood
Ever since her engagement, the strangest thing has been happening to Marian McAlpin: she can't eat. First meat. Then eggs, vegetables, cake, pumpkin seeds--everything! Worse yet, she has the crazy feeling that she's being eaten. Marian ought to feel consumed with passion, but she really just feels...consumed. A brilliant and powerful work rich in irony and metaphor, The Edible Woman is an unforgettable masterpiece by a true master of contemporary literary fiction.

Consider the Oyster, M.F.K. Fisher

(Author of The Art of Eating also recommended but at 600 pages, I kept off of our list. Translated The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, not available at all from the public library, but I'd be willing to read this one as well.)

M.F.K. Fisher, whom John Updike has called our "poet of the appetites," here pays tribute to that most delicate and enigmatic of foods---the oyster. As she tells of oysters found in stews, in soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel--and of the pearls sometimes found therein--Fisher describes her mother's joy at encountering oyster loaf in a girls' dorm in he 1890's, recalls her own initiation into the "strange cold succulence" of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve's famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers. Plumbing the "dreadful but exciting" life of the oyster, Fisher invites readers to share in the comforts and delights that this delicate edible evokes, and enchants us along the way with her characteristically wise and witty prose.

Summaries were used from the Hennepin County Library catalog, "Food in Fiction" from the Multnomah County Library and Random House Publishing.