Done well, memoirs about love and food go together like steak and martinis. Meals are a perfect application for the "show, don’t tell" directive, from proposal soufflé to break-up pastina. These foodoirs have become a successful subset, one part chick lit mixed with one part chicken lit.

Likewise, the perfect foodie beach bag contains prime kitchen lit: books on food history, essays on sustainability, food-centric fiction (call it foodtion), and sentimental food memoirs, or foodoirs.

Foodoirs are celebrity confessionals or tell-alls. In more sentimental varieties of the foodoir, the author embarks on an emotional journey, returning to his or her ancestor's roots (and perhaps, by extension, root vegetables). Many have recipes, too.

It has not, so far, been a vintage year for cookery books. But in place of the conventional crop comes a glut of another type of food book. A hybrid of memoir sensually larded with recipes, the foodoir belongs in the bedroom or on the beach, not the kitchen.