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
no more than exotic memories, and
fresh fish something you stood in a
queue for, I see that it was also
largely in a spirit of defiance that I
wrote down those Mediterranean
recipes. I had collected them in
Provence, in Corsica, Malta, Athens
and the island of Syra in the
Cyclades where I had lived for
seven months before the Germans
overran Greece. Subsequently I had
spent a year in Alexandria, where I
was employed by the British