"Sour. Salty. Buckets of leafy greens Small splashes of strong flavour. Colour and seasons - they are all still there, crisscrossed with snippets from my travels and our everyday shifting needs." Tessa Kiros
I'm in clean-up mode it seems. In many different ways, and today I am tidying up my desk a little bit.
I bought this book a while ago now as a treat for me. I read it, earmarked a few recipes and put it on my desk to write about one day. And it has taken me until now to get around to it. Two or three months I think.
One thing I found is that our tastes change from day to day. Of course they do. Not all of the recipes that I bookmarked as examples I would write about, still appealed, and others have appealed that I did not note before. But then one day we fancy a pie for dinner, the next a curry. So what's unusual about that?
It led me, however, to look at which recipes from the book have been chosen by others for a rave and a published recipe and which have not. Lots of raves, not many recipes is the conclusion I have come to. But that may be all to do with copyright issues I guess.
Tessa Kiros has written eight cookbooks so far. I have one other which is called Provence to Pondichery and is about the food from some of France's colonies, with the major and interesting omission of North Africa - Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia - all of which to a lesser or greater degree have been influenced/governed by France. Maybe Egypt too. Not the Pacific colonies either. But then I guess there are always size restrictions when you write a cookbook.
I guess if there is one thing that all of her books have in common it is that they are all associated with particular cuisines, combined with her personal memories of those places. Like Claudia Roden and Madhur Jaffrey, many of her recipes are not actually hers, but have been collected by her from family, friends, people she has met on her travels. And they are always acknowledged and written about. The books are personal histories and reflections on how food is always a constant in one's memories of place.
Perhaps the travel aspect comes from her personal history. Born in London, at an early age and for all of her childhood and youth, the family lived in South Africa. She may have been born in England but her parents are not English. Her father is of Greek-Cypriot origin and her mother is Finnish - which you would think is quite a contrast in national personality. At the age of eighteen she left home and worked as a cook in London, Sydney, Athens and Mexico, married an Italian and has been living in Tuscany for the last twenty years, with her husband and two daughters. That love of travel is obviously in her bones:
"I travel and collect things that I love. Memories, tastes, colours and stories. I bring them home and make the beautiful meals that I had, so we can live them all again."
We probably all try to do that, although, of course we can never reproduce that meal we had on the banks of the Mediterranean. The place itself is missing, no matter how close the food comes to the remembered taste.
This book is arranged in sections which each deal with a period of her life and a particular place, as well as her life today. Italy and Greece appear here and there, and there are chapters on New Orleans, Mexico and Thailand. Sydney doesn't get a look-in. I wonder why.
I should mention here the design of the book, because as one reviewer remarked:
"For me to love a cookbook, it needs to meet three requirements: visual beauty, recipes that appeal, and (most important) recipes that work perfectly with no tinkering needed from the user"
It is indeed a beautiful looking book if you like this particular genre of design. Each section has a title page, like this one - a kind of scrapbook collection of photos, and cuttings, and objects. Presumably her own - she does, after all, admit to loving to collect things. But we surely can't credit her with the overall design. I have no doubt that she conferred with the designer and photographer, and maybe even chose which ones should be used, but obviously she did not design it. That was down to a design team and the publishers. Maybe they have an overall 'look' for her books, for the Provence to Pondichery book has similarities.
The design is a little bit like the writing. I have been trying to work out why I feel that it is slightly overwritten. A bit too precious and 'heart-warming' in the worst sense. Although I also feel that I am being unfair. After all Nigel Slater is also sometimes, maybe often, somewhat precious but every now and then he is lyrical and touches a nerve. With this book - and the other one that I have read, I get the same feeling I get when reading those novels like Eat, Pray, Love. A world is presented in which everything is perfect and beautiful and romantic. How I wish it was. And sometimes it is and I always try to see - and in fact do see - the everyday beauty that is all around. What can I say? It just jars a bit - a bit too over the top.
Take, for example this photograph taken of her kitchen as part of a double-page spread at the beginning of a section. Two-thirds of the spread is taken up by the photograph and the rest by these somewhat sentimental, but heartfelt words:
"A little of something special every day. Some moments of the day I love. Dusk Afire in winter. Pizza on Sunday nights. And a window to look through for the week ahead."
Is it me, or does it just miss something really magical? And that kitchen is of a particular kind and not to everyone's tastes. How could you cook with all that clutter?
On the plus side we do indeed learn something of the life of the writer - or at least the life of a writer that she would like to present to the world - for all I know a true one, and I have now read a few reviews from people who know and indeed love her, so there is no reason to assume that in real life she is a monster. I jest. I guess it's just that it all seems just a little bit too designer beautiful.
However, I really don't want to detract from what is overall a lovely cookbook, full of interesting recipes - some classics, some unknown from elsewhere and from friends and family, and some from her own head. When asked in an interview what were her favourite recipes from the book she gave two - both from the first section 'Things that stay', which is prefaced by a piece on her memories of her childhood and youth in South Africa: Toasted almond vanilla ice cream, which, so far, has no recipe online, although the photograph I found, included the recipe - well almost - the rest is on the next page; and Sipi's oven roast lamb chops with lemon and oregano/Taste TV. Sipi is her mother - and let me say that this recipe would neatly slot into the three ingredient challenge - so maybe I'll try it sometime soon. This is a recipe that a few have now tried with much acclaim.
So what did I choose initially? Well quite a few, but I just present three here, one of which has a recipe online on the Taste Edit website - Chicken 65 and the other two which do not: Macarpone cake and Lmab biriyani with rose. Tesa Kiros loves roses and the book is littered with them.
Then there the three most popularly chosen recipes online - each with an actual recipe:
Sugar lemon tart/Bake; Hortopita/Giuilia Scarpaleggia/Letters From Tuscany and Ricotta and jam pastries - another three ingredient recipe - with a bonus interview on the Cook Republic website. I now have so much jam that I may well try these some time soon.
Not every dish in this book has a photograph, and so it is left to your imagination a little, but then that's what we all started out doing is it not? Elizabeth David, Robert Carrier, Jane Grigson and Julia Child had no pictures in their early books, and yet we found treasure within. And still do.
I think I have probably been a bit mean. It's certainly a book that I shall keep and use, I hope, every now and then. Besides in her section on her favourite kitchen things she said this - which appealed to me enormously.
"I do think that parsley is the most underrated herb."
Borrow it from the library and make up your own mind as to whether you want to add it to your collection.
U - there are not many nouns, or things in the everyday world beginning with U. Here is some undergrowth. I also found a uniform and an umbrella.
YEARS GONE BY
February 21
2024 - Cooking as a game - a bit of a coincidence considering yesterday's post
2023 - Seriously easy - more coincidence - three ingredients.
2021 - Rambling - a moment in time
2020 - Do I need a freezer?
2019 - Nothing
2018 - A word from Jill Dupleix
2017 - Autumn? Surely not
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