The seven greatest cooks in literature

Samuel Ashworth has been a bartender, a dancer, and a reporter. He has gutted seafood in the back of Michelin-starred restaurants and assisted with autopsies in a Pittsburgh hospital. His fiction and nonfiction appear in the Atlantic, the Washington Post, Longreads, Eater, Hazlitt, Gawker, The Rumpus, and so on. He is a professor of creative writing at George Washington University, and assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse Magazine. A native New Yorker, he now lives with his wife and two sons in Washington, DC.

At Electric Lit Ashworth tagged seven great cooks in literature, including:

Aida from Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

Aida is one of the few working chefs in contemporary fiction (credit also to Bryan Washington’s Lot and Lillian Li’s Number One Chinese Restaurant), but Zhang quickly removes her from the hustle of the restaurant industry. Agricultural experiments by a Monsanto-style company in middle America have choked Earth’s atmosphere with smog, annihilating crops worldwide and forcing humans to rely on mung bean flour. The book kicks off when she is invited to cook in an “elite research community” of plutocrats in the Italian Alps, in a tech billionaire’s secret redoubt untouched by the smog. Zhang’s food writing is exquisite, soaked in sex and pleasure (“larks’ bones crunching in the molars like the detonation of a small star”), and made all the more so by the sinisterness of Aida’s environment. The book asks a question: How far will we go to fulfill our desires?

Read about the other entries on the list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue