When I was writing about the dinners I had with my elderly friend Edward, I made a decision early on not to include any recipes. Edward, an accomplished cook, rarely wrote down any instructions for, say, his oysters Rockefeller or chicken paillard. While the food we ate was certainly important, the book was not meant to be a cookbook, but instead a memoir about the nature of friendship.

In this pursuit, I was inspired by a rich literature of culinary writing in which food is a central motif, but is held together by the story of its preparation and the fellowship that comes from sharing a meal. So many writers – from MFK Fisher, who wrote lyrically about the pleasures of dining alone, to New York chef Gabrielle Hamilton, who documented her hardscrabble upbringing through family meals – use food as a catalyst for memories and loving nostalgia.

While I’m still a big fan of a good recipe book – anything by Jamie Oliver, Yotam Ottolenghi and Julia Child – it’s the stories in beautifully rendered memoirs that stay with me longer than any recipe. It’s Nigel Slater using burnt toast as a metaphor for his mother’s love, and Anne Fadiman getting drunk as a teenager when she tries to please her vintage-wine-obsessed father. Below, are what I consider some of the best culinary memoirs.

1. The Wine Lover’s Daughter: A Memoir by Anne Fadiman

Fadiman’s most recent book about her father, the American author and radio personality Clifton Fadiman, is a deftly written memoir – a coming-of-age story written around her father’s oenophilia. He was “a lousy driver and a two-finger typist”, she writes, “but he could open a wine bottle as deftly as any swain ever undressed his lover”.

2. The Gastronomical Me by MFK Fisher

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher was ahead of her time. After spending “two shaking and making years in my life” with her new husband in Dijon, she returned to California in the early 1940s where she became a serious food writer. The Gastronomical Me recounts some of her very poetic encounters with food. Here was a woman who loved nothing more than dining alone in a restaurant “as if I were a guest of myself, to be treated with infinite courtesy.”

MFK Fisher at home in 1971. Photograph: Richard Drew/AP

3. Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

Hamilton runs Prune, a jewel of a restaurant in New York’s East Village. She is also a gifted writer who takes you on a journey from her difficult adolescence in rural Pennsylvania to New York’s aptly named neighbourhood Hell’s Kitchen, where she moves after high school before opening her restaurant.

4. Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin

The New Yorker writer and Gourmet magazine columnist’s memoir is about the joys of cooking at home. From her tiny Greenwich Village kitchen, she writes about meals shared with friends and family. “I love to eat out, but even more, I love to eat in,” she says. I fell for the ordinary extraordinariness of her stories, the reliance on available resources and implements to create something wonderful. This is what I tried so hard to capture in my own book.

5. Consider the Oyster by MFK Fisher

WH Auden called Fisher “America’s greatest writer”, which is my excuse for choosing a second book by her. It’s easy to see why the poet so admired her, in this slim 1941 volume – an ode to the gastronome’s prize treat. “An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life,” she begins. Fisher tells you everything you ever wanted to know about this bivalve mollusc and writes brilliantly about such unfamiliar ingredients as Herbsaint.

6. My Life in France by Julia Child, with Alex Prud’homme

A great account of the Childs’ life in Paris after the second world war. Working with her grandnephew Alex Prud’homme, the great chef reminisces about meeting her husband Paul in what was still Ceylon while both were working for the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA. When Paul took a job in Paris, Julia immersed herself in French cooking. Her description of eating sole meunière for the first time at a restaurant in Rouen is mouth-watering: “It arrived whole: a large, flat Dover sole that was perfectly browned in a sputtering butter sauce with a sprinkling of chopped parsley on top.”

Julia Child in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photograph: Rick Friedman/Corbis via Getty Images

7. Cooking for Mr Latte: A Food Lover’s Courtship With Recipes by Amanda Hesser

The “Mr Latte” of the title is the author’s boyfriend, a writer for the highbrow New Yorker who has rather lowbrow tastes in food. Although affable and intelligent, he ends each exquisite meal they share with the fine-dining faux pas of a latte. First told in instalments for the New York Times where Hesser worked as a food writer, this is as much a love letter to New York and food as it is to the man Hesser ends up marrying.

8. More Home Cooking: A Writer Returns to the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin

Since the subject here concerns appetite, I’m going to recommend a second helping of Colwin. I feel a real kinship to her because I share her obsession with what people eat at home. Written the year Colwin died aged just 50, this is a treatise on the importance of the family dinner – no matter who you consider to be family. “We know that without food we would die,” she writes. “Without fellowship life is not worth living.”

9. Talking With My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater by Gail Simmons

Simmons is a presenter/judge on Bravo’s Top Chef, but she’s also a fellow Canadian who found herself struggling to make it in a tough industry in New York. In this memoir, she writes about growing up in Toronto with a mother who wrote food columns and conducted cooking classes in their suburban home. Simmons’s trial-by-fire in some of the toughest high-end restaurant kitchens in New York City makes for a great read.

10. Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger by Nigel Slater

Slater tells the story of his childhood through a catalogue of British sweets – fairy drops and Bluebird milk chocolate toffees – and the culinary failures of his mother. Burnt toast was her specialty. “My mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning,” writes Slater, who nevertheless longs for blackened bread after she dies and his father marries a woman who is the perfect housewife but very much the evil stepmother.

• Dinner With Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship by Isabel Vincent is published by Pushkin. To order a copy online, go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on web orders over £15.