The best chef biographies for food lovers to read

There is a special skill required to making food sound interesting and that means you should pick your food memoirs carefully. Publishers see 'foodoirs' as a lucrative genre these days and if I see another one about moving to France and cooking traditional French cuisine I may go mad. Books about the histories of particular foods can be very interesting but we're dealing here with memoirs - books about real-life experiences.

The best food memoirs go way beyond the food and into someone's reality - food memoirs can be deeply revealing about families and working environments. Several memoirs have been particularly influential. Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential was published in and helped develop the cult of the chef. It's a gritty account of life in professional kitchens with as much booze and drugs as cooking.

Best food writers of all time

Bourdain is greatly missed. A Year in Provence , from , is not a food memoir but an autobiographical novel by Peter Mayle - however it established the idea that life and eating is simply better in France it also influenced the French real estate market. Julie and Julia: Days, Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen by Julie Powell is a gimmicky memoir but helped ignite a fresh wave of interest in Julia Child and continued the theme of the French doing it better.

Child has her own memoir called My Life in France if you want to hear it from the horse's mouth. After reading Heat, I had a new-found respect for anyone who works in a restaurant kitchen. Buford, a writer on the New Yorker, goes to work in a major New York restaurant and suffers for his literature, literally - cuts, burns, extreme tiredness and bullying in a high-pressure environment.

Toast is completely different and very personal, almost too personal at times. Much of it is about bad food in the s and s during Nigel Slater's rather painful childhood in Worcestershire. However, quality food writing has been around for a long time.