3 Review(s)

In The Food of Spain, Claudia Roden, the James Beard award-winning author of the classics A Book of Middle Eastern Food and The Book of Jewish Food, and one of our foremost authorities on Mediterranean, North African, and Italian cooking, brings her incomparable authenticity, vision, and immense knowledge to bear in this cookbook on the cuisines of Spain. New York Times bestselling cookbook author Claudia Roden believes that through food a cook can reconstruct an entire world. And in her classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food–eight hundred recipes long, a treasure trove of folk tales, proverbs, stories, poetry, and local history–that's just what she did. Historian and critic Simon Schama has said of her that "Claudia Roden is no more a simple cookbook writer than Marcel Proust was a biscuit baker." The Book of Jewish Food, another classic, is equally magnificent in its span, a cookbook that is also a history of Jewish life and settlement, told through the story of what Jews ate, and where, and why, and how they made it. Now, in The Food of Spain, Claudia Roden applies that same remarkable insight, scope, and authority to a cuisine marked by its regionalism and suffused with an unusually particular culinary history. In hundreds of exquisite recipes, Roden explores both the little known and the classic dishes of Spain–from Andalusia to Asturias, from Catalonia to Galicia. And whether she's writing about smoky, nutty Catalan Romesco sauce, Cordero a la Miel–sweet and hot tender lamb stew with honey–or the iconic, emblematic national dish of Spain, saffron-perfumed Paella Valenciana, her clear, elegant, humorous, and passionate voice is a reader's delight, a guide not only to delicious food but to the peoples and cultures that produced it. Both comprehensive and timeless, The Food of Spain is one of the most important books on this tremendous cuisine to appear in the last fifty years. A classic in the making, it is an essential work not only for fans of Spanish and Mediterranean food but for every serious cook as well as discerning armchair travelers.