A Catalan Cookery Book

There are sixty recipes, from soups to sweets, taking in a summer and a winter drink along the way. There are also eleven fine engravings by the artist Nicole Fenosa, at whose home in Vendrell Irving Davis spent many summers. There are under a hundred recipes which are disarmingly simple yet make few concessions to the novice cook: this is not Delia Smith for the Mediterranean masses. There are eight main chapters covering soups; omelettes; pasta; snails; sea food; meat; salads and vegetables; and sweets. There is an appendix with some further documents about Irving Davis, including a few lines of his own on his life. The love affair of the English (and all northern Europeans) with the Mediterranean had especial piquancy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – before easy travel opened to us other regions of the sun.