petal jam, the evening ices eaten
on an Athenian café terrace in
sight of the Parthenon, the unlikely
fish stews concocted by a sponge
diver from the Dodecanese island
of Symi who briefly cooked for me
in Alexandria. So it came about
that at that particularly bleak and
painful period of English
gastronomic life immediately
following the end of World War II,
I put together the bare bones of the
book which became Mediterranean
Food.
Some two years later, in 1949, a
friend with connections in the
literary world offered to show my