The Old World Kitchen: The Rich Tradition of European Peasant Cooking

The best cookbook no one’s ever heard of.
--MARK BITTMAN, former New York Times food columnist

Through her eloquent writing and delicious recipes, Elizabeth Luard is able to bring us back in touch with the sources of real nourishment. This is a wonderful, inspiring and important book. --ALICE WATERS, founder and owner of Chez Panisseand the author of The Art of Simple Food

A classic on the essentials of European cooking

Award-winning food writer Elisabeth Luard joyously salutes the foundations of modern Western cooking with recipes collected during more than twenty-five years of travel and research, many of them spent living in rural France, Spain, Greece, Ireland, and Italy. This definitive collection of over three hundred time-tested recipes from twenty-five European countries is an indispensable guide to the simple, delicious, and surprisingly exotic dishes of peasant Europe.

ELISABETH LUARD is an award-winning food writer, journalist, and broadcaster. She is the author of ten cookbooks, including The Latin American Kitchen, The Food of Spain and Portugal, A Cook’s Year in a Welsh Kitchen; three volumes of memoir, Family Life, Still Life, and My Life as a Wife; and two novels. Her thirteen-part television series, The Rich Tradition, was broadcast on BBC2 and SBS Australia. She spent many years living in rural Spain, France, and Italy, and traveling across Europe collecting recipes, many of which are collected in The Old World Kitchen. Her work as a journalist appears regularly in The Daily Mail, The Scotsman, Country Living, Cambria Magazine, The Jewish Chronicle, and The Times Literary Supplement. She is currently Trustee Director of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, contributes a monthly column to The Oldie Magazine, and is a member of the team at online culinary magazine Zester Daily.