The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 2006 Thursday

For the beach: A feast of culinary novels
By Dianna Marder, Staff Writer

In 1991, I made the mistake of reading Amy Tan's novel The Kitchen God's Wife, on the beach at Barnegat Light.

And I'm still kicking myself.

I anticipated a wrenching story of mother-daughter angst, and it was that. But who knew the mother would stop so many times along the back roads she traveled in her escape from China - to make dumplings?

The author's vivid descriptions left me drooling, but the closest Chinese restaurant was a seven-mile traffic jam away. And it was extremely mediocre.

Foodies, don't let this happen to you.

To help you pack wisely for your time at the beach/mountain/family reunion, here is a short list of titles designed to stimulate your literary appetite and anticipate your cravings.

You can expect to see more than a few beachgoers engrossed in My Life in France (Knopf, $25.95), the memoir started by the late Julia Child and completed by her great-nephew, Alex Prud'homme.

The book describes Child's years in France after World War II and chronicles her efforts to rescue American families from processed cheese and instant Jell-O. Have your copy of her Mastering the Art of French Cooking close by.

After the master's memoir, you could segue right into the new culinary romance novel Last Bite (Algonquin, $22.95), by Madame Child's longtime executive chef, Nancy Verde Barr.

Barr, who served as culinary producer for PBS's Baking With Julia and ABC's Good Morning America, lets fiction imitate life with a heroine, Casey Costello, who is executive chef at a morning television show. When you start to salivate (which will likely be just a few pages into the book), flip to the back pages, where Barr features recipes for ragu (gravy, call it what you will - it's still red sauce to Italians), braciole (small meat rolls), eggplant parmesan, and panzanella (summer salad with cold chicken, meat or fish).

For beautiful storytelling, we welcome back National Book Award winner Julia Glass (for her 2002 novel Three Junes). In her new book, The Whole World Over (Pantheon, $25.95), Glass explores what happens to Greenie Duquette, a wife, mother and Greenwich Village bakery owner, when the visiting governor of New Mexico tastes her spectacular coconut cake and tries to woo her away to be his personal chef.

"Read it before they make a movie of it and ruin it with the wrong casting and a compressed story line," one reviewer urged. But first, stock up on coconut cake.

Another enticing read (trust us with the title) is You Gotta Have Balls (William Morrow, $24.95), by Lily Brett.

The daughter of Holocaust survivors, Brett let her heartbreaking family history shape her international best-seller, Too Many Men. Now that book's neurotic heroine, Ruth Rothwax, returns in You Gotta Have Balls, to rescue her octogenarian father from the grip of a lusty Polish widow who wants him to open a meatball restaurant on the Lower East Side.

Too much meat? Maybe you're ready for a meatier read? Try The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan (Penguin Press, $26.95).

Pollan starts with the eternal question - "What's for dinner?" - and concludes that our politics are most clearly demonstrated by what we put on the table, not what lever we pull in the voting booth. After this book, you may want to skip dinner altogether.

If Pollan's work is too scary, you might want to delve into the culinary mystery category: a genre-within-a-genre.

Here, one undisputed master is Diane Mott Davidson. Her series featuring caterer and amateur sleuth Goldy Bear Schultz has made Davidson a regular on the New York Times and USA Today best-seller lists on and off for the last 15 years.

In Davidson's latest, Dark Tort (William Morrow, $24.95), our heroine has landed a plum gig catering a weekly breakfast for one of the top law firms in town. In addition to plot and character development, the book delivers 11 recipes (for the titled torte, a sausage casserole, asparagus quiche, blue cheese cake, and Strong Arm Cookies, which we've reprinted here).

Still in the culinary-mystery queue, we find Tamar Myers, whose Magdalena Yoder series (with recipes) is set in Lancaster County.

Yoder is an innkeeper who keeps busy solving crimes that leave the local police stumped. In Myers' latest, Grape Expectations (NAL Hardcover, $19.95), unscrupulous outsiders hell-bent on starting a vineyard match wits with teetotaling Mennonites.

And finally, in the lighter-than-air category of culinary chick-lit, there's Love, Life and Linguine (Avon Trade Paperbacks, $12.95) by Melissa Jacobs. (See her accompanying recipe for "Linguine With Love Sauce." ) A Jersey girl who lives near Rittenhouse Square, Jacobs sets her second novel in South Jersey and delivers all the L's promised in the title.