Peasant cookery is the foundation on which all subsequent cuisines is based. A rich oral tradition, passed down through generations, the peasant kitchen offers healthy, real food - the antithesis of fast-food catering - and is as relevant now as it was centuries ago.In this remarkable book, Elisabeth Luard sets out to record the principles of European cookery and to rediscover what has been lost in over-refinement. The recipes come from twenty-five countries, ranging from Ireland in the west to Romania in the east, Iceland in the north to Turkey in the south. It is an enormous compendium which covers Vegetables dishes, Potato dishes, Beans, Lentils, Polenta and Cornmeal, Rice, Pasta and Noodles, Eggs, Milk and Cheeses, Fish, Poultry, Small Game, Pork, Shepherd's Meats, Beef, Breads and Yeast Pastries, Sweet Dishes, Herbs, Mushrooms and Fungi, Oils, and Preserves. Written with the scrupulous attention to detail and authenticity that is the hallmark of Elisabeth Luard's cookery writing, the recipes are peppered with hundreds of fascinating anecdotes and little known facts about local history and folklore.

Author Biography

Winner of the 2007 Glenfiddich Trophy, Elisabeth Luard has earned a string of prizes for her unique, intelligent, and engaging food writing.She is the food columnist for The Oldie and a regular contributor to Waitrose Food Illustrated as well as many national newspapers. She is also the author of ten cookbooks and two volumes of autobiography.It was while raising her children in a remote valley in Andalusia in southern Spain and living for a year in the Languedoc in rural France that she acquired an appetite for the feasts and festivals of the peasantry whose lives she shared. It was there that she learned to pickle her own olives, grow and dry her own beans, and clean and pluck a chicken.Throughout her lifetime of travelling, she has worked alongside men and women who cook with instinct, love and devotion and who rely on the thread of ancestral memory rather than recipes committed to paper. It is her hands-on experience with the larders of the world that gives her writing its humanity and eloquence.