A Book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David

Trade paperback format.  Foreword by Clarissa Dickson Wright.

Long acknowledged as the inspiration for such modern masters as Julia Child and Claudia Roden,  A Book of Mediterranean Food is Elizabeth David’s passionate mixture of recipes, culinary lore, and frank talk. In bleak postwar Great Britain, when basics were rationed and fresh food a fantasy, David set about to cheer herself—and her audience—up with dishes from the south of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the Middle East. Some are sumptuous, many are simple, most are sublime.

Praise:

Mediterranean Food changed forever the way my parents’ generation thought about cooking. It was as though everything before then had been in black and white; now it was in color. And even today, a half-century later, anyone truly interested in food has a well-thumbed and spotted copy of that book on the kitchen shelf.
— The New York Observer

This wonderful book, evoking the colorful plentitude of the food markets and sun-dappled tables of Mediterranean countries, still possesses the power to elevate and occasionally startle the reader.
— Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe