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Stanley Park has some good food scenes in it (sorry-the author is escaping me at the moment). One of the sub-plots is a bit weird/confusing, but if you ignore that, its a pretty good book.

John Grisham and food scenes... now that's an unexpected combination. :P

for the younger set, anything by enid blyton.

I just read a long 19th c. Portuguese novel in which there was much wonderful eating and cheese pastries played a major part in the plot. It's called The Maias.

I remember reading Brian Jacques' Redwall books when I was a kid...the man seriously can't get through a chapter without writing extensively and mouthwateringly about lavish feasts and the process of preparing them.
He spared no detail down to beverages...

Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, was as much a memoir as a novel, but it did have wonderful food scenes throughout.

understood betsy by dorothy canfield had such wonderful descriptions of 19th century rural new england home food. betsy ate baked beans, chicken fricasee and biscuits, pancakes and ham, applesauce, doughnuts, and made maple candy by pouring hot syrup on snow.

i also find myself frequently rereading a girl of the limberlost by gene stratton porter to hear her tell what elnora's mother put in her school lunchbox every day and what treats she sent along for elnora's friends to share: spice cookies, raisin turtles, candied pears, popcorn balls, haws, doughnuts, and hazelnuts.

Moonstruck is my favorite movie and I love the scene around the breakfast table where Olympia Dukakis serves everyone oatmeal. I don't think such heavy stuff has ever happened over a bowl of breakfast mush.

The movie Fatso with Dom Deluise and Anne Bancroft has so many great food scenes, it's hard to choose. I guess the day after the "food orgy" when Dom Deluise's brother asks, "How did they get spaghetti on the ceiling?" is a favorite scene.

Lucy Maud Montgomery novels often contain great food scenes - set in the late 1800s and early 1900s (most of them), they feature rural cooking and the like - lots of descriptions of "teas" and "picnics" and home baking.

And I'm blanking on the author of a series of books about a financial investigator who lives in a scuzzy loft in NYC, drinks like a fish, and eats the craziest stuff. His descriptions of street food in NYC always made me wish I could move there (to this day I want to try roti goat). It's not Robert Ludlum I don't think, but someone of that style.....?

All good scenes - even the ones from the movies, chiff0nade - you just made me really hungry for spaghetti. It somehow takes on an aura of even more deliciousness to think of it hanging from the ceiling. :)

The scene that sits in the center of my mind is one from Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City (1951).

The hunger for sweets, jellies, and soda water raged in us like a disease; during the grimmest punchball game, in the middle of a fist fight, we would dash to the candy store to get down two-cent blocks of chocolate and "small" -- three-cent-glasses of cherry soda; or calling "upstairs" from the street, would have flung to us, or carefully hoisted down at the end of a clothesline, thick slices of rye bread smeared with chicken fat. No meal at home was complete without cream soda, root beer, ginger ale, "celery tonic". We poured jelly on bread; we poured it into the tea, we often ate chocolate marshmallows before breakfast.
[ . . .]
. . . paper spills of hot yellow chick peas. I still hear those peddlers crying up and down the street - "Arbes! Arbes! Hayse gute arbes! Kinder! Kinder! Hayse gute arbes!"

This song of ringing reminiscence goes on for many bright lingering paragraphs. Unbelievable. Almost wanton in its delight if it were not so incredibly strong and vital.

You can find this part of the book in Molly O'Neill's "American Food Writing Anthology" if you are so inclined.

cybercita, I just added both those books to my list.

I also love the Laura Ingalls Wilder books for food descriptions. All the books have a lot of food scenes, but it's true, Farmer Boy has the most vivid descriptions of what was enjoyed at table.

I've always wanted to try maple snow, like they do in Little House in the Big Woods.

Given the composition of your standard Victorian wedding-cake (think hardcore fruitcake, with fondant), I suspect her cake didn't so much decay as fossilize. But yes, that's definitely a memorable scene...

hi ann and lauren,

both of those books are available on amazon. unfortunately they are not in stock at the strand.

glad to know of another gene stratton porter fan.

Haha, I have an old, yellowed, falling apart copy of Farmer Boy.
I do remember reading that one over and over again when I was younger and marveling at the sheer size and variety of their spreads every day.