Gelman Judy - Table of Contents: From Breakfast with Anita Diamant to Dessert with James Patterson - a Generous Helping of Recipes, Writings and Insights from Todays Bestselling Authors

Table of Contents grew out of our ongoing infatuation with books and literature. As ravenous readers with a passion for great literature and delicious food, we are fortunate to have spent much of the last decade immersed in recipes inspired by the pages of our favorite books. Give us a slice of Sue Monk Kidd's honey cake while reading The Secret Life of Bees, and we're happy campers. A mojito with Gabriel Garca Mrquez's Love in the Time of Cholera sublime.

Through our early research into book clubs and our website, BookClubCookbook.com, we have confirmed what we had long suspected: we're not the only ones who feel this way. Readers in general are enthralled by food, and many have a strong appetite for recipes connected to the literature they read. Book lovers enjoy being transported to exotic locations and exposed to new cultures in their reading sampling unfamiliar foods is part of the journey. Some book clubs recreate entire menus to reflect a reading selection, conceive unusual dinner themes based on a book, or research a passing reference made to a dish to serve at their meetings. Countless book club members have shared with us the joy of using food to enhance and enliven their meetings. As one visitor to our website recently wrote, our greatest pleasures in life include both good books and good food!

In 2002, we teamed up to create a food and literature resource for book clubs. The Book Club Cookbook (Tarcher/Penguin, 2004) matched 100 top book club reading selections with recipes drawn from or inspired by those books. This was followed by a guide for youth book groups, The Kids' Book Club Book (Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), which included recipes and activities designed to enhance the reading experience for children and young adults. Our two websites, BookClubCookbook.com and KidsBookClubBook.com, offer recipes and resources for lovers of food and literature. They allow us to stay connected with book clubs and avid readers, offer current resources to book clubs, and help bring authors and readers together. BookClubCookbook.com has become a destination for readers hungry for new and updated author recipes. Here you can find our online cookbook of culinary/literary treasures, including Elizabeth Strout's recipe for the doughnuts that her character Olive Kitteridge adores, and the famous Chocolate Pie that Minny bakes in Kathryn Stockett's The Help.

Besides tapping the creativity of book clubs, we have frequently turned to authors for recipes inspired by their own writing and this book is the result. Food is often used as a plot device, a way of establishing historical or cultural context, or a method for revealing character in literature. But what we find most fascinating are the stories behind these references. Why did a certain dish appear in a particular scene? Did the author simply imagine the dish? Was it a family recipe? Was it something drawn from the author's travels or life experience? In short, was there a reason a particular food or recipe worked its way into their writing? Authors answered these questions, and through recipes and notes shared their family histories, interests and ambitions, the origin of their characters, or the meaning of their books' settings.

The result is the book you hold in your hands.

For this, our latest book, we chose the fifty authors featured in its pages from famous and well established writers to a new generation of up and coming literary lights for their proven appeal to readers. We didn't choose authors simply because their novels or memoirs had culinary themes; we wanted to include authors whose books we know readers and book clubs love.

Many writers were thrilled to participate; they had previously given thought to the role of food in their writing and therefore welcomed the chance to share their culinary creativity with readers. Novelist Barbara Delinsky describes herself as a noncook, but says I cook vicariously through my characters. The opportunity to offer readers a recipe is a gift that not only brings attention to a special element of my book, but has drawn in readers who have never read me before. Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, perhaps said it best when she ruminated about the early influences of food and its symbolic and practical role in literature:

I think tastes and smells are particularly evocative to us because as newborns we first experience the world through those two senses. That means that our emotional response to a taste or a smell (think of Proust and his lime-blossom tisane) can act upon us at a very powerful, subconscious level. This is also true in literature, folk tales, and mythology, where food and drink have played an important symbolic role for centuries.

In more recent literature, such references provide a handy means of reflecting different cultures and distant places. It's also a very useful indicator of personality. Eating habits provide us with an insight into a person's background, character, family, and upbringing, as well as their general attitude to life and to other people. Besides, readers understand food; in our increasingly diverse and multicultural society, eating remains one of the very few experiences we all have in common; a pleasure, a comfort, and a means of expression.

As writers submitted recipes, we were mesmerized by the stories that accompanied them. For example, characters inspired some recipes. Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, authors of The Nanny Diaries series, imagine their feisty character, Grandma, serving a Park Avenue Plum Torte to a group gathered in her New York City apartment. Alice, the narrator in Lisa Genova's novel, Still Alice, suffers from Alzheimer's disease and can't remember how many eggs belong in the bread pudding she has made so often. The pain of memory loss, explored in Genova's novel, is made palpable as the character struggles to prepare this family recipe.

Some authors linked recipes to their book's setting. Thrity Umrigar set her novel The Space Between Us in Bombay, and her recipe for bhelpuri a Bombay street snack made from puffed rice, onions, cilantro, chutneys, and spices is a culinary parallel to the cultural diversity of the city. Esmeralda Santiago's traditional Puerto Rican recipes conjure the homeland she left behind many years ago an experience she writes about in When I Was Puerto Rican. To make Santiago's recipes to rub a garlicky adobo spice mix onto pernil (pork shoulder), and to enjoy the fragrance of a ginger-cinnamon-clove spice infusion as it simmers on the stove is to be transported to the country that shaped her.

A novel's historical period also offers rich opportunities for culinary creativity. Katherine Howe's novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, is partially set in colonial New England during the Salem witch trials, and her recipes for Fish House Punch and Herb Sallet were gleaned from historical documents of the time. Similarly, Philippa Gregory, author of novels of ancient royal intrigue such as The White Queen and The Other Boleyn Girl, offers a recipe for Medieval Gingerbread. Although she translates the recipe into modern language, the basic ingredients and procedures remain true to Tudor England.

To our delight, there are many family recipes in this collection from tried and true favorites handed down through generations to new ones inspired by our request.

Chris Cleave challenged his chef wife, Clmence, to create a recipe combining Nigerian and Western ingredients and flavors to accompany his novel Little Bee, a story about the unlikely friendship between a Nigerian girl and an English woman. The result features a delicious and unusual combination of ingredients. In Dolen Perkins-Valdez's historical novel Wench, Mawu, a slave, practices magic and makes a stew that she claims can soften the white man. Many readers have asked the author: what was in Mawu's magical stew? Perkins-Valdez called upon her uncle, whom she calls the most accomplished cook in my family, to help her create Mawu's Magical Stew for our book. (You'll have to read on to learn what's in the stew!) Abraham Verghese provides three recipes to go with his novel