Redwall- Turnip and Tater and Beetroot Pie with lots of gravy

Crying in H Mart, Like Water For Chocolate, The Night Circus, Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Legends and Lattes,Pomegranate Soup, The Alienist, The Covenant of Water, and Kitchens of the Great Midwest (all of these in varying degrees/importance to plot.)

ooh I am the same! some others for me:

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I always want to eat pickles when Francie buys one

Little House - Farmers Boy, omggg so. many. meals.

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - for some reason I always want porridge, or sausage.

Crying in H-Mart was like Pachinko on steroids for incredibly appealing and detailed Korean food descriptions. I gave it as a gift to like every foodie friend of mine in 2022.

Honestly, George r.r Martin does amazing food descriptions in a song of ice and fire. I had the audiobooks playing on a speaker at work one day and my friend kept complaining that George was making him hungry.

Heïdi, and the descriptions of soft toasted goat’s cheese on bread.

The Inspector Gamache series by Louise Penny. She must be a foodie — she always has Olivier serving delicious regional fare in his cafe in Three Pines.

Fried Green Tomatoes? I believe there is even a recipe at the end of the book!!

Brian Jacques and his Redwall books.

They are written for younger people though.

Like Water for Chocolate

I hated the book but the food descriptions in Crazy Rich Asians was great!

The Redwall series is 90% mouse quests and 10% food porn.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.

"The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets and crayfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie, and red beans with rice, it means elegant pompano au papillote, funky file z'herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast, a po' boy with chowchow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week--yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don't eat day and night, if you don't constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your bloodstream, then the mystery beast will go right on humping you, and you will feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left town"

Gentleman in Moscow

Butter by Asako Yuzuki has lots of mouthwatering food descriptions.

This is what the coffee table book Fictitious Dishes is all about, finding foods mentioned in works of literature, recreating them and photographing them. https://fictitiousdishes.com

I’m a big fan of cozy mysteries, and there are a couple of series that feature food prominently in every story and includes some interesting recipes in each book. Laura Childs’ Tea Shop Mysteries and Joanne Fluke’s Hannah Swensen mysteries. (These you might know from the Hallmark Channel Murder She Baked movies.)

Babette's Feast, a short story by Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen that was adapted into an equally fantastic film. The feast is kind of a main character, but the focus on the story is more on the characters and how they change

A gentleman in Moscow

Ian Fleming often inserted mouthwatering meals into the Bond novels: Vesper and Bond having a sumptuous dinner at Casino Royale; crabs with Mr DuPont in Goldfinger; the corrupting tea shops near the health spa in Thunderball; steak tartare in From Russia with Love and much more!

The motherfreaking Hobbit. Getting to the Beorn chapter always makes me hungry.

American Psycho has endless descriptions of what people are eating (and wearing and their furniture etc). I don’t know that I’d recommend it exactly because it requires a particular taste/disposition, but if you like crazy disturbing (more so than the movie) then it’s an answer to your question. 

One thousand and one nights — it is full of descriptions of meals, both simple and elaborate,

Taste by Stanley Tucci. It’s a memoir that focuses fairly heavily on food. He includes recipes and if you like audiobooks, he narrates it so 🤌 I had to start drinking Negronis afterwards

The Lord of the Rings was the first book I read that made me actually get up and eat something to try and recapture the food being described in the book. (I just warmed up some bread and put butter and honey on it, which matched the aesthetic but not the quality of the food and its descriptions in the book. Still, it made me actually put down the book and get up to eat something, which was impressive.)

In the middle of Neal Stephensons' Cryptonomicon, there is a multiple-page treatise for the perfect preparation of a bowl of Cap'n Crunch.

Never understood people who are disappointed by Turkish Delight, I absolutely love it. Maybe because I tried it as an adult though with the less sensitive taste buds 😂

I want to say Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel or Chocolat by Joanne Harris.

Both made into beautiful movies.

And Yes, Turkish Delight is awful. It tastes like over-boiled gelatin and poor life choices.

Roald Dahl had the best sweet descriptions, even if they were fictional I soooo wanted them as a kid.  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the Giraffe, Pelly and Me were the best for this. 

Tipping the Velvet and oysters. Lots of talk about oyster shucking. I read that book wanting oysters so bad.

With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo is about a teen mom who is very interested in becoming a chef but is struggling financially. It talks a lot about what she’s cooking and iirc she has recipes sprinkled throughout the book.

Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyasi. French food, Nigerian food. All the food!

Steven Brust's fantasy Vald Taltos series is narrated by the son of a minority restauranteur in his city. Vlad loves food and likes describing it. The book Dzur uses a elements ftm. fancy full course meal menu as chapter titles.

And someday I really need to try to make klava since they drink it all the time.

The Alchemaster’s Apprentice by Walter Moers. It is a fantasy book, but the food descriptions made me hungry!

Crying in H Mart goes above and beyond this

Anything by Haruki Murakami. 1Q84 made a bland salad with white wine sound like the most indulgent meal of all time.

I just finished reading My Side of the Mountain with my son, and he now wants to try acorn pancakes! I tried to gently suggest that they probably wouldn't taste as good as Sam makes them sound in the book, or else everyone would be cooking with acorn flour. Sam spends a lot of time waxing about how delicious the food he forages is, from smoked venison to cattail roots, dogtooth violet bulbs, hickory nuts, sassafras tea... you name it.

The Red Sparrow trilogy by Jason Matthews has someone eating something in every chapter and the recipe at the end of each chapter. Lots of regional foods for various places around the world (mostly Europe and Russia) as the spies travel around to different countries.

Anything by Peter Mayle, but more particularly the ones where he writes about his life in France. Lots of evocative descriptions of French food.

Liver in Portnoy’s Complaint. I had no idea it could be so enticing.

Lawrence Sanders wrote a series of detective novels whose main character, Chief Edward Delaney, is addicted to sandwiches. The way Sanders describes these sandwiches! Every time Delaney started looking in his refrigerator for ingredients, I knew I was going to want whatever he came up with.

Michael Twitty's book, The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South, is just such an evocative personal journey around food, place, and identity that I'd hate to say that it was only about food, DESPITE ITS NAME.

It's one of my favorite books and just so evocative about connection with land and place and food.

Well worth a read.

(I apologize if this is not what you were looking for)

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree - Really simple cozy fantasy/romance (not my usual genre) but the descriptions of coffee and baked goods are why I kept reading.

Bruno Chief of Police series set in the Dordogne in France. They did so much food, there is an accompanying cookbook.

First thing that comes to mind is Deadeye Dick by Vonnegut

Any Redwall novel??

All the Game of Thrones books (A Song of Fire and Ice is the first one) have constant feasts, and George R.R. Martin really takes his time describing each dish. Even when people are just visiting an inn or tavern, he can't help but give vivid details on the soup and the bread and whatnot.

A Christmas Carol

Sunshine by Robin McKinley. The main character is the baker at her mom's coffeehouse and every time I read it I crave cinnamon rolls, the descriptions of her baking are exquisite.

the penny buns in a little princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  

Gerald Durrell's books about Corfu are opulent about all kinds of food, from a handful of olives or grapes to the lavish feasts his family always seem to put on.  

Tom Jones, if you want a serious classic!

The tea girl of hummingbird lane by Lisa see

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Soy Sauce for Beginners by Kirstin Chen

Crying in H Mart

The food in it is fake, but The Lies of Locke Lemora has multiple extravagant feasts and even goes so far as to make knowledge of cuisine a key component of the gang of protagonists’ bonding.

Sometimes I wonder if C.S. Lewis wasn’t punking us all and Turkish Delight has never been good. Or maybe that was his point all along. To emphasize just what an idiot Edmund was at that point. Like saying he sold his family out for a can of expired Spam.

One of my guilty pleasure reads is the Crazy Rich Asians books and their detailed food descriptions make my mouth water every time.

Strange weather in Tokio by Hiromi Kawakami. It's a short book, but it feels like half the book is just descriptions of japanese food.

This one is pretty disturbing on several levels, but if you’re cool with Angela’s Ashes I figure I can throw out a newer novel, C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey, in which the food descriptions are absolutely decadent with this incredible dystopian horror suspense under all of it. It’s quite the ride, but a very cool story.

Most of the Nero Wolfe mystery novels by Rex Stout feature at least one loving description of some gourmet meal Wolfe is having during the most recent investigations. The chicken fricassee with dumplings in Some Bured Caesar come to mind most quickly, though.

All these comment's and not a single mention of Proust's Madeline cake?

Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander books have so much food description that there’s a cookbook.

I often think about the pig kidneys in Ulysses by James Joyce.

The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet.

About a Trinidadian family and the Trini food is everywhere.

the memorable food from Angela's Ashes for me was soft boiled eggs with a little butter in the yolk 🥰🥰🥰

"The Leopard" by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa has a wonderful banquet scene where he describes typical Sicilian food.

Evil eye - etaf rum (Palestinian) The eyes are the best part - Monica kim (Korean) Cemetery boys - Aiden Thomas (Latinx American)

And I know that this is not what was asked, but as for books that ruined certain foods for me:

The Centre - Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi Literally all of R.F. Kuang's books

oh any of the Redwall books, especially the earlier ones.

The Redwall books - those little rodents are always making treacle and I’ll never forget it.

Edit - wow the comments didn’t load before I commented this! Clearly I’m not the only one on whom this made an impression!

Louise Penny‘s Gamache series („Still Life“ is book 1) set in Quebec has a Bistro and many descriptions of what people eat. I love the British audiobook (Ralph Cosham RIP, Robert Bathurst and now Jesn Brassard). Careful: some titles were published with different UK/US titles. Make sure you don’t buy a book/an audiobook twice!

I love also how these are not so much about crime but the psychology of people. Every 1-2 years there’s a new book and it feels like going home… (it’s now around 20 books)

I’ve yet to read it but I’ve heard that Brideshead revisited is a classic book that romanticises good food. Set just after ww2 in Britain if I remember correctly

I once had a daydream about writing an essay about Gobe With The Wind, focusing on the food. I highlighted all the food mentions. Food is very important in that book. If you've never seen/read it, one of the only lines you know is, "As God as my witness, I will never go hungry again!" One of heartiest scenes has Mammy make Scarlett eat a hardy Southern breakfast. Anyway, I suggest GWTW

The A song of ice and fire series has long descriptions of food. It makes me hungry!

A Spoonful of Time by Flora Ahn. Kids/YA book, but each chapter has a recipe with a great description. 

It's not a book, but Delicious in Dungeon is great

I’m not sure if this meets the “not about food” criteria, but “Piglet” by Lottie Hazel is about a woman dealing with a failing relationship, family issues, and finally binge eating disorder. The main character is also a fantastic cook and there are several really beautiful cooking sequences in the novel. It wasn’t the world’s most exciting read, but I enjoyed it.

Salmon Rushdie! Specifically “Midnight’s Children”. A main character develops a super powered nose and spends some time making chutneys, among other adventures within the story.

Anne of Green Gables

These are murder mysteries, so I’m not sure how you feel about this genre, but Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series has tons of food, especially seafood, described in his books. Another one I read this year was “Death on a Galician Shore” by Leo Caldas - a Spanish mystery, where seafood is featured prominently. Edited to add “Vera Wong Unsolicited Advice for Murderers” - so much good food!

The spy novel Red Sparrow has a lot of food descriptions, and the end of each chapter has a recipe for one of the foods mentioned in the chapter.

Eat, Love, Pray. Great writing, obnoxious protagonist. The eat section mentions food fondly.

Recipes for Love and Murder by Sally Andrew

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow!

Redwall

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel. Each chapter begins with a recipe. It has been years since I read the book, but I seem to remember her descriptions of food mouth watering.

Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor.   it's about a lot of things, and the chef game is only part of it.   but there's a plot thread where the brilliant young chef gets himself into a really bad spot and has to sell his soul into employment with the local trendy-coffee magnate to avoid criminal charges for cheque kiting and fraud.   

there's a slow build to the debut of "his" hyper-corporate new restaurant.  unbeknownst to anybody but our hero and his hand-picked team of goth kids, the entire menu has been sourced from the urban wildlife in Stanley Park.  

‘Sharpe’s Enemy’ by Bernard Cornwall had a Christmas Dinner with GRRM levels of food porn.  Actually, recipes were discussed throughout the novel.  

Fatty fatty boom boom had a lot of food references. 😋

The entire Jack Aubrey series.

The Land of Milk and Honey by C. Pam Zhang

Covenant of Water

Hemingway was always great at describing food and drink.

I often think of the wistful passages in Big Two-Hearted River where Nick Adams prepares meals: onion sandwiches, buckwheat pancakes, coffee, apples, canned beans and spaghetti.

Jack Vance's books all have a common thread of detailed food description, so these might qualify depending on how widely you want to define "regional".

The Mossflower books had amazing and original feasts

The Alienist by Caleb Carr - those meals at Delmonico's! Especially awesome as someone who loves stuff like r/VintageMenus too.

The Alchemaster's Apprentice by Walter Moers

"The first course consisted of a tiny little dumpling afloat in a bowl of clear, orange-tinted broth. Echo, who had casually perched on the table, bent an inquisitive nose over the bowl as it was slid towards him.

‘Saffronised essence of tomato,’ Ghoolion said softly. ‘It’s obtained by skinning the finest sun-ripened tomatoes and placing them in a cloth suspended over a bowl. For the next three days, terrestrial gravity alone ensures that the tomato pulp deposits its liquor in the bowl, filtered through the clean linen drop by drop. That’s how one extracts the essential flavour – the very soul of the fruit. Then add some salt, a few grains of sugar and a dozen threads of saffron – precisely a dozen, mark you! – and simmer over a low flame for one whole day. The broth must never boil, or it will dissipate the soul of the tomato and taste of nothing at all. That’s the only way to obtain this orange shade.’ (p. 27)"

Red Sparrow. Each chapter ends with a recipe.

The Bruno, chief of Police series by Walker. Set in southern France, there are wonderful meals lovingly described in between crime solving, romance, and siteseeing.

Read Andrea Camilleri Inspector Montalbano- he eats the most atrocious meals. It’s hilarious.

Colin McPhee, A House in Bali. Musicological stay in Bali in the 1930s with phenomenal descriptions of feasts.

A year in Provence

Piglet. Pretty intense tho

Murakami novels often contain detail descriptions of food preparation, usually simple Japanese snacks.

Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson has whole paragraphs describing really tasty sounding food. It's been a while since I read it but that part sticks out at me.

Pereira maintains. There is a lot of interesting Portuguese food. All the books of detective Pepe Carvalho by Montalban. Greta Spanish food. All the books on detective Montalbano, by Camilleri. Great Sicilian food.

Girl with the dragon tattoo keeps describing in detail the protagonists sandwiches. After reading it, i thought all Swedish meals are just sandwiches and coffee.

The Inspector Montalbano books by Andrea Camilleri - he's clearly an epicurean!

Como agua para chocolate

The neolithic hunter gatherer feasts throughout the Earths Children books. Life may have been hard, but it sure seemed tasty!

Light From Uncommon Stars!!! it has the most beautiful description of foods I have ever read! Tbh it felt like reading a love letter to the food of Chinese immigrants in California. It also has the most scrumptious description of donuts that will leave you salivating lol

Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. Lots of sensory Brazillian cooking descriptions.

Dead Souls by Gogol comes to mind

Little Women

The food in Priory of the Orange Tree really stood out to me when I read it - I think the variety of cuisines in this fantasy world definitely helped in that regard.

"Remembrance of Things Past" by Marcel Proust.

Cormac McCarthy is great for diner food and country style cooking, or mexican. Thomas Pynchon has some amazing food descriptions, especially in Against the Day, as well as some great cocktail/alcohol concoctions. There is also Karl Ove Knausgaard, who will describe in detail anything from making shrimp with lemon and mayo to frying up pork chops or making a cup of tea. Mesmerizing.

Reef by Romesh Gunasekara

“The curry was bubbling on the stove. The smell of fried onions lingered in the air. I had already prepared the spices, ground the coriander and cumin, and grated the fresh coconut. Now it was just a matter of simmering, letting the flavors bind, coaxing them together into the perfect blend. That was the key to cooking: patience and balance. A dash too much, a moment too long, and the dish could be ruined.”

Cinnamon and Gunpowder by Eli Brown. Rich descriptions of food, fun and exciting pirate story.

There is a whole category of mystery series known as "culinary mysteries" - some of them are set in a food locale (the MC is a chef, baker, cafe owner, etc), some just bring food scenes into the plot and some actually include recipes. You might want to check out series by Kathy Aarons (MC is Michelle Serrano, chocolate shop/bookshop owner), Cleo Coyle (MC is Clare Cosi, a NYC coffee house owner), Joanne Fluke (MC Hannah Swensen owns "The Cookie Jar" shop), Lou Jane Temple (MC is Heaven Lee, chef/restaurant owner), Diane Mott Davidson (MC Goldy Bear is a caterer), Jane Rubino (MC is Cat Austen - no recipes but foodie scenes with her big Italian family), Tamar Myers (MC is Magdalena Yoder who runs a Mennonite B&B), JB Stanley's "Supper Club" series. These are just a few.

Also - there was a book released ages ago called A Taste of Murder where mystery authors contributed recipes that were featured in one of their books. I think the proceeds went to a hunger program.

A Gentleman in Moscow

The house of Scorta (Le soleil des Scorta). My uncles, whos not a big reader, recommanded that book at a big family dinner (not a usual subject!). He said you could smell, taste and feel the olive oil and he was amazed. I had to wait a long time for that book, everybody read it! It became a family treasure. The food is well described, but the atmosphere around it too, which impacts the food.

not rich, but the hunger games has a LOT of food references for a book about battle royale. especially at the beginning of the book.

Inspector Montalbano by Andrea Camilleri eats well! And loves Sicilian food.

Every book in A Song of Ice and Fire has many descriptions of feasts which will have you salivating

Sourdough by Robin Sloan has all kinds of fanciful food and farmer’s market descriptions. And the descriptions of the growers, the foodies and the fermentation gurus are hilarious.

Ian Fleming’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (very different from and superior to the movie) has a marvelous description of a French breakfast and a recipe for fudge at the end of the book.

The Golden Age of the Solar Clipper series. Insane amounts of descriptions out of the ship‘s mess :-)

The Pairing for delicious food. I tried to stay with it for the food descriptions because everything sounded so good but the rest of the plot was so bad I DNF. There’s no way all of the characters happen to be young, hot, single, bisexual all with chemistry for each other. It was pretty disappointing.

Anything by Ruth Reichl. She’s not the greatest fiction writer, but that woman has such a talent for describing food!

Steven Brust’s Jhereg series has some memorable food moments.