Still Life

(Bantam Press, 1998)




www.amazon.co.uk/Still-Life-Elisabeth-Luard/dp/0593042530/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244147573&sr=1-5

Family life is never easy - there's the best of it and the worst, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. And then the children grow up and you're on your own, just the two of you, if your marriage has managed to survive fortune's slings and arrows. These are the middle years, the time of exploring new worlds, a world beyond the family.

Prize-winning food writer Elisabeth Luard chose to explore this through her cookery. Using material drawn from diaries and sketchbooks, she takes us into the kitchens of the peasant housewives of Eastern Europe, gives us a flavour of life above the Arctic circle, and explores the wild with the inhabitants of the High Tatras. Along the way, she asks some universal questions: what exactly is it that makes us know who we are? Why do we refer to our neighbours by the foods they eat? And she points out that it's easy to underestimate the power of the cooking pot, but the kitchen never lies. The true history of a nation is read not in libraries, but in domestic habit.

Illustrated with Elisabeth's own line drawings and interspersed with recipes, Still Life offers an exotic and highly individual look at the world beyond the family. Written with passionate enthusiasm and joie de vivre, it is a book packed full of magical anecdote and liberal helpings of sound common sense.