Table of Contents

Preface Introduction Part One: Long, Long Ago; The Way We Were; On Being a Debutante; Girl about London and Mexico; Wedding Bells; Of Babies, Wine and Roses; Ole Torero; Sunshine and Donkey Droppings; Trouble Comes in Threes; Of Flukes and Fleas; Alarms and Interventions; Politics and Postscripts Part Two: Call in the Plumbers; Dancing with Diaghilev; The End Game; No Longer a Wife Postscript

Preface Introduction Part One: Long, Long Ago; The Way We Were; On Being a Debutante; Girl about London and Mexico; Wedding Bells; Of Babies, Wine and Roses; Ole Torero; Sunshine and Donkey Droppings; Trouble Comes in Threes; Of Flukes and Fleas; Alarms and Interventions; Politics and Postscripts Part Two: Call in the Plumbers; Dancing with Diaghilev; The End Game; No Longer a Wife Postscript

About the Author

Elisabeth Luard, author and illustrator, has won many awards for what her peers described, when awarding her the coveted Glenfiddich Trophy for 2007, as 'her seemingly effortless style of writing, self-drawn illustrations and understanding of the way in which ordinary people's cooking reflects their history, culture and everyday life - making her one of the most individual and distinctive food writers of all time.'In 1963 and just turned twenty-one, she married Nicholas Luard, novelist, travel-writer and co-founder of Private Eye. Within six years, she had had four children and had moved to a remote valley in southern Spain, where she worked as a natural history artist for the Tryon Gallery and Kew. Twelve years later, she turned to full-time writing. She is the author of a number of successful cookery books, including European Peasant Cookery (Grub Street, reprint 2005). Her first autobiography-with-recipes, Family Life - Birth, Death and the Whole Damn Thing, was The Guild of Food Writers' Book of the Year in 1996, and Sacred Food: Cooking for Spiritual Nourishment won the International Gourmet Award for best historical food-book in 2003.Elisabeth currently has a cookery series running until January 2009 in Country Living and a monthly ingredients-column in Waitrose Food Illustrated. She also contributes a monthly column to Richard Ingrams' The Oldie, and next year expects to contribute monthly food pages to Country Living. She is a regular contributor to various national newspapers and magazines including The Independent and The Scotsman, to which she contributed a cookery column for 10 years. She contributed the food pages to The Telegraph in 1997-8 and was the cookery correspondent of The Field through the 1980s.Other books include The Flavours of Andalucia (Glenfiddich winner, 1992), The Latin American Kitchen (Kyle Cathie 2002), The Food of Spain and Portugal (Kyle Cathie 2004, Gourmet Food), Food Adentures (Kyle Cathie, 2006), Truffles (Frances Lincoln 2006, Gourmet Award winner). Other work includes illustrations for the biologist Dr Miriam Rothschild.An experienced broadcaster, Elisabeth contributes regularly to The Food Programme and Woman's Hour. TV experience includes regular appearances on UK Good Food and a 13-part tv series, The Rich Tradition, made for SBS Australia shown on BBC2 in the early 1990's. She now lives in far west Wales where she is responsible for a hundred acres of regenerated native woodland and this year served on Transition Town Lampeter's steering committee for local sustainability after climate change.

Reviews

Unspeakably moving - she deserves a medal - Libby Purves, The Times. Writing with admirable courage, she contributes memorably to the literature of family life - Elizabeth Buchan, Mail on Sunday. A magnificent and poetic writer, Luard's not-so-simple tale of family life is quite literally a triumph - Daily Express.