A Book of Mediterranean Food

and fruit were scarce, lemons, oranges and tomatoes as rare as diamonds, commodities such as olive oil, rice, and imported pasta ...

Admiralty and four or five in Cairo organizing and running a reference library for the British Ministry of Information in the Mi ...

cook. Given the difficulty of finding basic ingredients to put into my pots and pans, it is hardly surprising that shopping for ...

crumbling biscuits, I had no such dismal hoards. So I was free to go out looking for anything fit to eat which might be on offer ...

of. Even garlic was hard to come by. If you’d mentioned basil or tarragon you’d have been asked who they were. When in the early ...

1947 became memorable as the coldest winter, April as the wettest spring, of the century. It was during those icy, hungry, weeks ...

addicted to the food and cookery of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. That addiction I have never lost. But in the England ...

petal jam, the evening ices eaten on an Athenian café terrace in sight of the Parthenon, the unlikely fish stews concocted by a ...

ragged collection of recipes – I had after all been using them – to various publishing acquaintances. All of them except one sai ...

met John Lehmann. I had never met any publisher and had no idea what to expect. When I was shown into his office, Mr Lehmann was ...

Alan Ross. I thought it looked interesting and certainly it was most decorative. So that was settled. Now about the title. Mr Le ...

reached for a straw. ‘Er... the Blue Train never went to Alexandria and Cairo, did it?’ Mr Lehmann agreed that that had been the ...

about, and not at all happy at the prospect of thinking up a new title. So it was a tremendous relief when only two or three day ...

could have been called anything else. At the time, the decision had really been in the balance. As for the Introduction, I produ ...

style such as the use of capitals, italics, punctuation and footnotes, the correct placing of quotation marks, and of course spe ...

apparent purpose. All such points are important in a cookery book, but are often ignored by the cookery writers themselves, as I ...

about commas, Leonard Russell, literary editor of the Sunday Times in the late 1950s, once told me. No wonder, given some of the ...

persuaded John to publish the book on the strength of it – ‘Imagine, a whole roast sheep, and the meat ration a few ounces a wee ...

Ernestine Carter, the American editor of Harper’s Bazaar, who by mischance had got her hands on the typescript. Who does she thi ...

6d. John Minton’s jacket was stunning. In the shop windows his brilliant blue Mediterranean bay, his tables spread with white cl ...