Afternoons in Ithaca
The Temporary Bride: A Memoir of Love and Food in Iran by Jennifer Klinec – IRAN
Novel set in CORNWALL
Ten Great Books with a Culinary Theme set around the World
14th April 2024
Ten Great Cook Books set around the World. Eating is one of the great joys of living. As we travel more, we experience dishes from the four corners of the world. As we return home we wish to recreate them in our own kitchens. One the past few years many books have been written that bring the secrets of foreign chefs into our homes. Some are straightforward cook books, others are novels, memoirs, or travelogues where food (and recipes to match) are an integral part of the story.
Here are ten of our favourites.
The Risotto Guru by Laura Fraser – ITALY
A Sardinian wedding feast, the search for the perfect seaside pasta with wild fennel, meeting a risotto master: Laura Fraser journeys from the Spaghettis of her American childhood to savour the best of Italian cuisine and the culture that cooked it up. Using the same dreamy, delicious type of prose that made An Italian Affair a best-selling memoir, these essays will delight readers who loved that book, and all who love Italian food and culture. Sumptuous descriptions of Italian meals—and the passion that goes into them—make this e-book a mouthwatering, uplifting pleasure. In “Italy in 17 Courses,” Fraser uses the pace and order of the dishes in a wedding feast to muse on her own introduction to Italian food, and how it changed her from a diet-obsessed vegetarian to a pasta and pancetta connoisseur. “An Affair to Remember” explores themes of food and nostalgia, and how a good meal can lift the spirit.
Afternoons in Ithaca by Spiri Tsintziras – GREECE
A charming memoir of self-discovery, family, connection and the power of a tomato. ‘I remember crusty just-baked bread, rubbed with juicy tomato flesh, swimming in a puddle of thick green olive oil. I am seven years old. I sit on a stool in my grandmother’s house. It is the height of summer in a seaside village in the south of Greece. We little Aussies devour ‘tomato sandwiches’ as the family chats and laughs and swats flies …’ From the first heady taste of tomatoes on home-baked bread in her mother’s village in Petalidi, to sitting at a taverna some 30 years later in Ithaka with her young family, Spiri Tsintziras goes on a culinary, creative and spiritual journey that propels her back and forth between Europe and Australia. These evocative, funny and poignant stories explore how food and culture, language and music, and people and their stories help to create a sense of meaning and identity.
Bread and Oil: Majorcan Culture’s Last Stand by Tomás Graves – MALLORCA
On the island of Mallorca pa amb oli (bread and oil) is rubbed with garlic or tomatoes and salt, as it is in many other Mediterranean countries. Graves starts with this simple dish as a starting point to explore more cooking, traditions, agriculture, and historical influences that trace the dish back to Roman Times. This dish symbolises for the people of Mallorca their traditional roots and celebrates the resourceful nature, despite becoming a popular tourist destination and all the pressures that entails..
Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard – PARIS
Has a meal ever changed your life? Part love story, part wine-splattered cookbook, Lunch in Paris is a deliciously tart, forthright and funny story of falling in love with a Frenchman and moving to the world’s most romantic city – not the Hollywood version, but the real Paris, a heady mix of blood sausage, pains aux chocolats and irregular verbs. From gutting her first fish (with a little help from Jane Austen) to discovering the French version of Death by Chocolate, Elizabeth Bard finds that learning to cook and building a new life have a lot in common. Peppered with recipes, this mouth-watering love story is the perfect treat for anyone who has ever suspected that lunch in Paris could change their life.
The Temporary Bride: A Memoir of Love and Food in Iran by Jennifer Klinec – IRAN
In her thirties, Jennifer Klinec abandons a corporate job to launch a cooking school from her London flat. Raised in Canada to Hungarian-Croatian parents, she has already travelled to countries most people are fearful of, in search of ancient recipes. Her quest leads her to Iran where, hair discreetly covered and eyes modest, she is introduced to a local woman who will teach her the secrets of the Persian kitchen.
Vahid, her son, is suspicious of the strange foreigner who turns up in his mother’s kitchen; he is unused to seeing an independent woman. But a compelling attraction pulls them together and then pits them against harsh Iranian laws and customs.
Getting under the skin of one of the most complex and fascinating nations on earth, The Temporary Bride is a soaring story of being loved, being fed, and the struggle to belong.
A Late Dinner by Paul Richardson – SPAIN
In this vivid and humorous journey, Richardson takes us past the cliches of paella and gazpacho to tell the real story of Spain’s mouth-watering food, from the typical coastal cuisine to the shepherd cooking of the interior and the chic ‘urban’ food of Madrid and Barcelona. Along the way he gets caught up in a fish auction and the annual pig slaughter, spends a day at El Bulli restaurant and makes a never-ending stream of new friends.
Fragrant Heart by Miranda Emmerson – CHINA, SOUTH EAST ASIA
We buy food we can point to. We stalk the streets until rush hour and wait for the little hatches to open in the sides of restaurants. From the steamy openings, cooks in overalls sell jiaozi (dumplings) and bowls of thick, sticky, white congee – an unholy cross between soup and porridge. Baozi, steamed white buns, are light as air. I buy them filled with water spinach and nettle – delicious dipped in sharp, black Chinese vinegar. In 2008, Miranda and her partner set off for one last big adventure before settling down. They chose to travel through South-East Asia. All did not go to plan: Asian flu, falling off boats and the general chaos of a life abroad challenged them at every step, and yet, in the midst of it all, they fell in love with the culture and culinary delights of China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia.
Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel – MEXICO
The number one bestseller in Mexico and America for almost two years, and subsequently a bestseller around the world, Like Water For Chocolate is a romantic, poignant tale, touched with moments of magic, graphic earthiness, bittersweet wit – and recipes.
A sumptuous feast of a novel, it relates the bizarre history of the all-female De La Garza family. Tita, the youngest daughter of the house, has been forbidden to marry, condemned by Mexican tradition to look after her mother until she dies. But Tita falls in love with Pedro, and he is seduced by the magical food she cooks. In desperation Pedro marries her sister Rosaura so that he can stay close to her. For the next twenty-two years Tita and Pedro are forced to circle each other in unconsummated passion. Only a freakish chain of tragedies, bad luck and fate finally reunite them against all the odds.
Andina: The Heart of Peruvian Food by Martin Morales – PERU
Andina is the cuisine of the Andes of Peru. Welcome to one of the most contemporary yet ancient cuisines in the world. Featuring over 110 delicious and unfussy recipes accompanied by fascinating stories, dazzling photography and beautiful paintings, Andina is the first ever book to capture the food and scenery of the Andes and the spirit of its people and traditions.
Andina also signifies a dish, an ingredient or a lady from the Andes. Martin Morales’s grandmother was an andina and here he pays homage to her and all the women chefs (picanteras) who have shaped this soulful and traditional cuisine, which is at the heart of Peruvian food.
For the last 15 years, Martin has travelled throughout the Peruvian Andes to collect simple, traditional recipes, magical stories and culinary inspiration. With dishes dating back thousands of years, alongside new creations by Martin Morales and his team of chefs who run the award-winning Andina restaurants, Andina’s recipes have big flavours, vibrant colour and are simple to cook at home. From light, raw dishes to hearty stews and soups; cheeky bites to exquisite roasts; and sweet, aromatic desserts to comforting hot drinks, Andina presents authentic, nutritious all-day and all-year-round food made with seasonal ingredients.
Ant Egg Soup: The Adventures of a Food Tourist in Laos by Natacha Du Pont De Bie – LAOS
Natacha Du Pont De Bie is no ordinary tourist. She’ll trek for hours or even days in search of a good lunch. Her obsession with food is such that, while others are lying comatose on the beach or cycling up mountains, she’ll be down at the local market, elbow deep in produce, grilling people on where to find the best indigenous restaurants and cafés and jotting down recipes.
ANT EGG SOUP is the result of her adventures in Laos, the stories of the people she met, the places she visited and, of course, the amazing food she tasted: drinking raw turkey blood with herbs in a tribal village, cooking Paradise chicken in a little guest house by the Kung Si waterfalls and sampling fried cricket during the Festival of the Golden Stupa are just a few examples.
Funny and refreshing, with recipes and lines drawings, ANT EGG SOUP will awaken the senses while redefining the art of travelling and eating abroad.
Enjoy your culinary trip around the world!
Tony for the TripFiction team
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I really recommend Martine Bailey’s “An Appetite For Violets” – a great historical mystery with food firmly at its heart! https://www.tripfiction.com/books/appetite-violets/
1 Comment
Thanks. We already have ‘An Appetite for Violets’ in our database, but we have it classified as Historical Mystery. I have now added Food and Drink to the description.