the efforts of Miss Eunice Frost, the
only woman director of Penguin
Books, strongly supported by Sir
Allen Lane himself, that the offer
for Mediterranean Food had been
made. The remaining members of
the board had opposed the project.
Of those disagreements I knew
nothing at the time. My task was to
revise and update the book, to
write some new material, add a
few recipes. I was only too pleased
to comply with Penguin’s modest
requests. As I wrote in my preface
to their first, 1955, edition, ‘So
startlingly different is the food
situation now as compared with