Staff Picks Category: Culinary fiction

Virtually Perfect by Paige Roberts [Book]

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Following her fifteen minutes of fame as a celebrity chef (complete with TV show, cookbook deal, magazine column, and adoring fans), Lizzie Glass is reduced to working as a food truck shill and still can’t make her rent. She gives up her apartment and moves home to New Jersey where she takes a job as private chef to a wealthy family, literally catering to their comically extreme individual dietary restrictions and those of their frequent guests. Among the guests are the daughter of the house Zoe, who runs a popular website and app dedicated to clean living, and their black sheep son Nate, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C. When Lizzie discovers Zoe has been posting her recipes and photographs of her work without permission, she has to decide between compromising her values and unemployment.

Roberts’ debut is a sound entry in the young-women-finding-themselves genre, and is a good pick for fans of Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella, cooking shows, and reality television.

The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig [Book]

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“Can’t cook but doesn’t bite.” So begins the newspaper ad offering the services of an “A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition” that draws the hungry attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. And so begins the unforgettable season that deposits the noncooking, nonbiting, ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with a stamped of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big Ditch — a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the “several kinds of education” — none of them of the textbook variety — Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region’s one-room schoolhouse.
A paean to a vanished way of life and the eccentric individuals and idiosyncratic institutions that made it fertile, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative best.

The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister [Book]

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This novel about a cooking class will make you hungry, and every detail was so beautifully written with well-drawn characters each with very different issues. While learning to cook, students come away with greater life lessons to help them with their issues. My favorite class was pasta and red sauce, all from scratch. The lesson: the ability to cook and live without worry of time.