Out now - Recipes and Ramblings

Oldie Publications Ltd (15 Sep 2010)



The illustrations in this book are from my own working sketchbooks accumulated over the years - I take my culinary and place-notes in watercolour - and the intention is to illuminate rather than instruct.

As for the choice of recipes, these, while extracted from the full ten years of articles in The Oldie, have been rearranged in conventional cook-book order, sometimes with new or altered introductions, bearing in mind that recipes are all the more usable for knowing how the finished dish should look and taste and where it comes from and why.

Cooking is an inexact science, subject to unknowable interventions - size of eggs, dampness of flour, brawniness of arm - to lend itself to the garage-manual approach.

And if the experience of a lifetime can be summed up in a recipe-book - as I believe it can - then those of us who write about food are indeed fortunate to find ourselves in the hands of a sympathetic editor. Without Richard Ingrams, not only would there not have been a chance to celebrate ten years of whatever popped into my head, but I - and maybe you too - wouldn’t have had half the fun.

Guardian Best Food Books of the Decade

Featuring European Festival Food and Classic Spanish Cooking

Wed 23rd December 2009
www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/dec/23/best-food-books-decade

Richard Ehrlich says: "Once upon a time in the noughties, loads of publishing houses let the best books on their cookery lists go out of print. Grub Street, a small independent publisher, grabbed the rights to (among others) E David, J Grigson, C Roden, and Elisabeth Luard. The bone-headed publishers did us all a favour: Grub Street's editions are lovely. Ms Luard is a great cookery writer and this book, originally published in 1990, is one of her best." Matthew Fort and Catherine Phipps both recently recommended this as a book of the year too.

Allegra McEvedy opted for Luard's Classic Spanish Cooking: "I find this cute little volume very attractive physically - not in a flash way, but it's a sturdy hold, and beautifully illustrated in watercolours by this most-respected author. The chapters are divided sensibly, so though it is regional the divisions are chicken to eggs to tapas to beans and so on. Recipe-wise it's an intriguing stretch from great versions of the standards (tortilla Catalan; clams in sherry) to those a bit more special (potatoes with almonds and saffron; goose with turnips and pears), all with interesting notes from Luard, and all in all, it's the authenticity that sings out from the pages that makes this a fave of mine."

April 2010

The Oldie tour of Puglia

Gastronomic and cultural seven-day tour of Puglia with Elisabeth Luard and Malcolm Gluck.

www.theoldie.co.uk/eventsAndOffers/index.php

November 2009

The Oldie Game Cookery Course, West Wales


www.theoldie.co.uk/detail.php?item_id=293&page_id=21