Seven books about women and food

Hannah Selinger is a James Beard Award-nominated lifestyle writer and mother of two based in Boxford, MA. Her print and digital work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere. Her 2021 Bon Appétit essay, "In My Childhood Kitchen, I Learned Both Fear and Love," is anthologized in the 2022 Best American Food Writing collection.

Selinger's new book is Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly.

At Electric Lit she tagged seven titles about women and food, including:

Same As It Ever Was by Claire Lombardo

New York Times-bestselling author Claire Lombardo opens her fresh novel, Same As It Ever Was, in a grocery store; there, protagonist Julia Ames runs into an old friend, Helen Russo, while shopping for the ingredients to make crab cakes for her husband’s birthday. Russo, an older woman who had been, for a time, a motherly figure to Ames, comes alive in later chapters, and through acts of cooking. Food, in fact, punctuates the book’s main events. Crab cakes: celebratory for a 60th birthday. Later, an apricot galette will set an affair in motion. Both Ames and Russo have entrenched domestic roles, and their work in the kitchen is at once ancillary and important. They are making something, feeding someone, memorializing something. For these characters, who exist in a world where limits are drawn and bound by the more powerful people around them, there is a certain freedom here, in a place where the rules are theirs and theirs alone.

Read about another book on Selinger's list.

--Marshal Zeringue