Quotes of the Day

Deep in our brains, somewhere near the part that says it's time to eat, there's a little plate of leftovers. Whether it's Mom's apple pie or that first oyster, food memories can propel even the most indifferent of eaters back, back into the night kitchen of nostalgia.

Much as Proust had his remembrances of madeleines past, a banquet hall full of chefs, cookbook writers and restaurant critics have been turning their personal epiphanies of gustatory glory into a thriving literary genre: the food memoir. In the past year alone, a baker's half a dozen have hit the market, often shelved near the cookbooks and sometimes indistinguishable from them. Indeed, many food memoirs have recipes sprinkled throughout or stuck on the end like dessert.

Consider the newest item on the menu, Gordon Ramsay's Humble Pie. The Michelin-starred British chef trots briskly through, as he puts it, "The tough childhood [poor]. My false start in football [a brief stint with Glasgow's Rangers]. The years I spent working literally 20 hours a day [dues paying in the U.K. and France]. My battles with my demons [his bullying father]. My brother's heroin addiction [which resisted Ramsay's efforts to cure]." No recipes, alas, but lots of spice. As a young cook at a country restaurant, he knew he was destined for a food career because "I loved making the jugged hare more than I did having sex with the boss's wife." As a private chef on a yacht, he had to call his mother for instructions when asked for shepherd's pie. Ramsay and his wife used in vitro fertilization to have three of their four children because "I had a low sperm count, the result of my balls being in front of all those hot ovens."

Ramsay's well-warmed ramblings should be read alongside Marco Pierre White's White Slave, published just a few weeks earlier and peppered with culinary tips (top your fried sweetbreads with flaked almonds and pine kernels). Ramsay worked for White at his iconic London restaurant Harvey's, but they later fell out for reasons neither chef convincingly explains. Much like Ramsay, White recounts the tough childhood (in Leeds), the distracted father (White's mother died when he was six), the obsession with fame (White became the youngest British chef to win three Michelin stars) and, of course, his demons. White threw plates at errant subordinates, tossed unappreciative customers into the street and, at least once, had sex with a female diner in his office while her husband sat oblivious waiting for dessert. After concluding that "there has got to be more to life than cooking," he hung up his toque in 1999 to become a restaurant entrepreneur. But cooking does have its moments — as when White makes dinner for 200 of Prince Charles' guests. He gets dragged off to meet the royal host, who addresses him effusively in French for a full three minutes — until White interjects that, despite his middle name, he grew up in Leeds and doesn't speak the language.

Julia Child didn't, either, when she set off for Paris with her husband, Paul, in 1948 as he took a job at the U.S. embassy. In My Life in France, the American cookbook author — who died in 2004, just before finishing this memoir with her grandnephew Alex Prud'homme — writes of the long and happy years the couple spent in a country renowned for its cuisine. "What's a shallot?" the California-grown Child has to ask her well-traveled husband over their first French lunch. "It was the most exciting meal of my life," she says, and it led her to enroll at Paris' famed Cordon Bleu cooking school, write (with French pals Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck) the best-selling Mastering the Art of French Cooking and later become TV's first food superstar. Observes Child of her enduring fame: "I have always been a ham."

That could also be said, without malice, of Madhur Jaffrey, a subcontinental Julia Child who was a successful movie actress ( Heat and Dust) before turning her hand to cookbooks and TV shows with an Asian theme. In Climbing the Mango Trees, Jaffrey writes charmingly of an Indian childhood in which food played a starring role, from the Hindu honey dripped onto her infant tongue to the Muslim delicacies she enjoyed as a girl — until India was partitioned in 1947. Then most of her Muslim friends fled to Pakistan, and were replaced by Hindu Punjabi refugees escaping in the opposite direction with their own intriguing dishes. Looking back on that tumultuous upbringing, she observes: "The innocent Indian honey of my infancy was now mixed with pungent Indian spices, the sour and bitter, the nutty and the aromatic."

For nutty, you can't beat Gael Greene's Insatiable, the U.S. writer's lively memoir of life as a restaurant critic and serial man-eater. Among the memorable meals she recounts are some even more remarkable conquests: famous chefs on both sides of the Atlantic, Hollywood hunk Clint Eastwood and even Elvis Presley. After she infiltrates his entourage for a 1956 interview and one-day stand, the King asks her to phone room service and order him a fried-egg sandwich. Recalls Greene: "At that moment, it might have been clear I was born to be a restaurant critic. I just didn't know it yet." Now we know.

Greene's salty crust hides an unpalatable filling of snarkiness and name dropping that also mars Ramsay's and White's books. But don't turn on them for that alone. Greene helped start Citymeals-on-Wheels, a charity that feeds indigent New Yorkers. Likewise, Ramsay launched a Britain-wide campaign to get families eating Sunday dinner together. And White, the plate thrower, performs acts of quiet generosity and ends his book with a touching tribute to the mother he lost far too young. Something about the pursuit of culinary excellence brings out both the sweet and the sour in its practitioners. Fortunately for us, they like to share it.

• DON MORRISON
• A taste of the latest in food memoirs, a thriving literary genre