Recipes include: tiramisu as made by Proust,[3][6][7] cheese on toast by Harold Pinter,[4][7][8] clafoutis grandmere by Virginia Woolf,[4][9] chocolate cake prepared by Irvine Welsh,[7][8][9] lamb with dill sauce by Raymond Chandler,[8][9] onion tart by Chaucer,[3][7][9] fenkata (rabbit stew) by Homer,[3][7] boned stuffed poussins by the Marquis de Sade,[6][7][9] mushroom risotto by John Steinbeck,[7][9] tarragon eggs by Jane Austen,[3][7] Vietnamese chicken by Graham Greene[7] and Kafka's Miso soup.

[7] Among the recipes that did not make the original edition of the book was "plum pudding à la Charles Dickens" which was written but rejected by Mark Crick for being "too long-winded".

[1] Kafka's Soup is illustrated with paintings by the author in the style of a number of famous artists including Picasso, Matisse, Hogarth, De Chirico, Henry Moore, Egon Schiele and Warhol.

[14] Emily Stokes of the Observer called it an "illustrated masterpiece of pastiche" citing the lamb with dill sauce as "particularly good".

[8] C J Schüler wrote that Virginia Woolf's clafoutis grandmere is the "pièce de resistance" and called the collection "irresistibly moreish".

[3] The Croatian translation proved more popular than The Da Vinci Code, forcing it into second place on the country's best-seller list.

[1] A live reading of the French translation of Kafka's Soup took place at the Montreal Festival International de la Littérature in 2007 with the author in attendance.