I remember reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Farmer Boy” (about her husband’s childhood) and feeling famished after all the foods they had at every meal. (I later read that she’d included all those dishes because they were in contrast to what she’d eaten as a child and the feasts she described were overly fanciful rather than being accurate.)
I seem to recall that Peter Mayle’s fiction, set in Tuscany, contained excellent food - but that the novels were fairly light.
“Hotel Pastis” was a stand alone novel:
And he has the Sam Levitt series, the first being “The Vintage Caper” (I think all titles in the series have “Caper” in them):
