Stories from the Kitchen (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series) Edited by Diana Secker Tesdell

Here is a mouthwatering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by a range of masters of fiction--from Dickens and Chekhov to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Isak Dinesen and Shirley Jackson to Jim Crace and Amy Tan. Here too are choice tidbits from famous novels: the triumphant boeuf en daube served in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Marcel Proust's rhapsodic memories of watching his family's cook prepare asparagus in Remembrance of Things Past, Émile Zola's extravagant "cheese symphony" scene from The Belly of Paris. Here are over-the-top amuse-bouches by Gerald Durrell, Nora Ephron, and T. C. Boyle; a touching short story by famous food writer M. F. K. Fisher; and a delightful account of the perfect meal by eighteenth-century epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who said "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are."