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.
