Squirrel Pie (and other stories): Adventures in Food Across the Globe

Description

'Sacrilegious to say it but Elizabeth Luard even beats Elizabeth David. Exquisite writing and wonderful food, and funny too' Prue Leith 'Elisabeth Luard proves that no matter where you are, there is food to be gathered, or hunted, or found. Squirrel Pie is a beautifully written tribute to food that has all but vanished from our everyday lives' Alice Waters Elisabeth Luard, one of the food world's most entertaining and evocative writers, has travelled extensively throughout her life, meeting fascinating people, observing different cultures and uncovering extraordinary ingredients in unusual places. In this enchanting food memoir, she shares tales and dishes gathered from her global ramblings. With refreshing honesty and warmth, she recounts anecdotes of the many places she has visited: scouring for snails in Crete, sampling exotic spices in Ethiopia and tasting pampered oysters in Tasmania. She describes encounters with a cellarer-in-chief and a mushroom-king, and explains why stress is good news for fruit and vegetables, and how to spot a truffle lurking under an oak tree. Divided into four landscapes - rivers, islands, deserts and forests - Elisabeth's stories are coupled with more than fifty authentic recipes, each one a reflection of its unique place of origin, including Boston bean-pot, Hawaiian poke, Cretan bouboutie, mung-bean roti, roasted buttered coffee beans, Anzac biscuits and Sardinian lemon macaroons. Illustrated with Elisabeth's own sketches, Squirrel Pie will appeal to anyone with a taste for travel, and an affinity for that most universal of languages, food.

Elisabeth Luard is a food writer, journalist and broadcaster, and in 2016 received the Guild of Food Writers' Lifetime Achievement Award. Her cookbooks include A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse, European Peasant Cookery and The Food of Spain and Portugal. She has written three memoirs, Family Life, Still Life and My Life as a Wife. She has a monthly column in the Oldie, is a Trustee of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery and writes in Country Living, the Telegraph, Country Life and the Daily Mail. elisabethluard.com / @elisabethluard

Elizabeth Luard's prose is so colourful it transports you, and you can almost taste the food. You feel you're right there with the people she meets, from Maine, to Crete, Maui to France * Delicious * A crucial element of any book like this is that you trust the person leading you. Luard passes the test completely * Daily Mail * A romp through Luard's travels with food ... She knows how to tell a story, thanks to a life rich with colourful anecdotes -- Xanthe Clay * Sunday Telegraph * Elisabeth Luard is the best living writer about the purpose, business, geography and anthropology of eating. Her Squirrel Pie eloquently, purposefully and honestly combines the how and the why of dinner -- AA Gill * Sunday Times * Elisabeth Luard has packed in more experience of roving, living and cooking than any other writer. Now she brings together a lifetime of sublime and bitter moments in a merry masterwork, beautifully illustrated by her own hand * The Times *