Elisabeth Luard Paints us a Picture of Her Mediterranean Memories
Our Friend Elisabeth Luard is a prize-winning British food-writer who has written more than a dozen cookbooks, a couple of door-stopper novels, and three memoires-with-food. She writes regularly in the UKs national newspapers and magazines. She often illustrates her own work from material gathered on her travels but is usually to be found at home in Wales with an assortment of visiting grandchildren. Her most recent cookbook, A Cooks Year in a Welsh Farmhouse (Bloomsbury, 2011), is illustrated with her own watercolors. Today we are so happy to have Elisabeth paint us a picture of her Mediterranean memories.
Elisabeth says: The life of the lands of the Mediterranean and its foodways is something Ive known and appreciated since childhood my own and my childrens. But it was not until I travelled with the writers, academics, and chefs on Oldways expeditions that I was able to explore and deepen that knowledge. I have used the Oldways experience and have particular reason for gratitude to Dun and Sara as hosts in my writing ever since. And since I use watercolors rather than camera to keep a record of my travels, the result of a previous career as a natural-history artist. So I hope these pages from my sketchbooks will serve to remind to my fellow-explorers of the wonderful times we had together and the knowledge we shared. Hooray for Oldways! And to those who haven’t yet tasted the sweetness of Amals lemons straight from the tree, or sampled a dish of wild-gathered greens in the mountains of Crete its all still out there waiting.
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