5 Books to Get You in the Mood to Eat

“Smorgasboard,” from The Night In Question, by Tobias Wolff
In this hilarious short story, a scholarship student at an east coast prep school is one of the few kids left on campus during a free weekend. “I was always hungry,” he notes. He and a few others left in the dorm are invited out to dinner by the stepmother of a boy who was “the nephew of a famous dictator, and all his friends were nephews and cousins of other dictators.” The narrator’s friend Crosley suggests they eat at the local smorgasboard, “where the local fatties went to binge.” While the glamorous, Spanish-speaking stepmother smokes, the boys stuff themselves and watch the other patrons, including a family that “seemed to be eating their way toward a condidtion where they would never have to eat again.”

The Devil’s Larder, by Jim Crace
Crace, the winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other honors, turns his attention toward food in 2001’s The Devils Larder. The book consists of 64 short, surprising tales that all revolve around food in some unexpected way, including a story in which a daughter asks her mother, “Do you think that pasta tastes the same in other people’s mouths,” and they experiment to find out. “The finest food, like the best of marriages, is bound to break the rules,” Crace writes.

 A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Who wouldn’t want to live—and eat—in Paris of the 1920s? The closest we can get now is through Hemingway’s dashing account of this time and place in A Moveable Feast. He’s not writing just about food, but about the sustenance a vibrant atmosphere gives: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” Still, there’s plenty of good eating in this book. “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away,” Hemingway writes, “leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

 “Hunger Tales,” from Orientation and Other Stories, by Daniel Orozco
Innovative fiction writer Orozco combines three vignettes of hunger into one moving story in this tale from his debut collection. First comes the story of a woman who lives alone and heads to the grocery store after the gym to buy some cookies. “The cookies would be gone fifteen minutes after she got them home…Afterwards, marooned on the sofa in front of the TV, the sweet euphoria would slip away, and she would sit alone, abandoned to face the inevitable bloat of guilt and self-reproach.” Next comes a vignette from the life of a 700-pound man, stuck in his apartment and dependent on help from a local church group, who deposit his V.A. checks and give him sponge baths. Finally Orozco crafts the story of a father who returns from the funeral of his wife with his son. Numb, they head home and confront the piles of food well-wishers have brought them. They eat until “they lay on the floor, breathing shallowly through their mouths, like wounded creatures.” “Hunger Tales” beautifully illustrates the way suffering humans turn to food to ease their grief and loneliness.

 “Babette’s Feast,” from Anecdotes of Destiny & Ehrengard, by Isak Dinesen
In this classic short story, Babette Hersant flees France for Denmark during a period of violent upheaval. Bearing a letter of recommendation from a mutual friend, she goes to live with two elderly sisters, members of a puritanical religion. Babette offers to become their cook in exchange for living with them, and despite her great skill, she dutifully cooks bland food, according to her hostesses’ religious dictates. One day Babette wins the lottery, and spends every penny of the money on cooking a flavorful French feast for the congregation that they’ll never forget. The sisters can’t believe her generosity, telling her, “Now you will be poor the rest of your life.” But Babette, who was the head chef of the Café Anglais before political upheaval sent her packing, says, “An artist is never poor.”