Stories from the Kitchen

Stories from the Kitchen is a mouth-watering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by a rich variety of authors from Dickens, Chekhov and Saki to Isak Dinesen, Jim Crace and Amy Tan. The menu includes choice titbits from famous novels: the triumphant boeuf en daube served in Virginia Woolf''s To the Lighthouse, Proust''s rhapsodic memories of watching the family cook prepare asparagus in Remembrance of Things Past, Zola''s extravagant ''cheese symphony'' scene from The Belly of Paris.

Here are over-the-top amuse-bouches by Gerald Durrell, Nora Ephron and T. C. Boyle; a short story by famous food writer M. F. K. Fisher; and a delightful account of the perfect meal by eighteenth-century epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously said ''Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.''