Welcome to Litsy!

Extraordinary #cookbook & #memoir of the author's unconventional life in Spain, Greece, Italy, where she lived in a trullo without electricity for years. Her recipes can be made in modern kitchens. Quote “Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance. Home-made bread rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil, shared - with a flask of wine - between working people, can be more convivial than any feast.“

This is my actually selelction for reading on spring.
A mix of books, magazines and catalogue.
Read a short synopses of each one in this post,
https://www.bcncookbookclub.com/post/lectura-de-primavera20 #bookhaul

Excited to jump in to my new book bought for me by my sister @Bambolina_81 . She knows what I like!!

Food writing excellence. Gray & her husband, a sculptor, lived in various rural areas of the Mediterranean in order to be near marble quarries. "The recipes in this book belong to an era of food grown for its own sake, not for profit." A passionate historical record, a joy to read.

I cannot imagine going through the trouble to make Staphíli Glikó - grapes in syrup:
"Peel the grapes and take out the pips with a needle or wooden toothpick, without breaking them - a daunting operation, it's worth it."

I'm charmed by Gray's recipes. "In spite of its name, Angel Bread is the ordinary homemade Castelpoggian cake, a cake a child can make." Ingredients include a coffee-cup of olive oil and a brandy glass of anice (aniseed liqueur). "One got the anice by the glass from the bar across the street and baked the cake in the baker's oven up a little alley."

The almond has this connection with the Virgin, that it has long been considered to bear fruit without previous fecundation. This ancient belief, still held by Salentine peasants, is mentioned in a discussion of the XXI Arcane majeur du Tarot de Marseille - the card representing the World, in which the central figure is enclosed in an almond-shaped vesica of laurel leaves.

In agricultural areas where communications are spasmodic, the pig figures as the winter saviour of mankind. [...] The excessive consumption of pork in winter naturally led to digestive troubles. The days of abstention (Wednesday & Friday) imposed by religious authority was initially required for physical wellbeing.

Every tree is clothed in white rime, and every plumed grass on the roadside is a wand of crystal.

A book about food can be as fatiguing as sitting through a six course dinner, so I propose to intrude a digression - offered like a glass of marc or eau de vie to brace the protagonists.

His sense of perfection found complete expression in cooking. This led to his flinging an 'imperfect' canard à l'orange out of the window in the presence of several expectant guests. This bird got inadvertently hitched onto a drainpipe several storeys up and had eventually to be rescued by the fire brigade on account of neighbourly complaints - it being high summer at the time.

"Who wants to eat a good supper should eat a weed of every kind." [an old Italian saying]

On Naxos we were sometimes faced in company with delicacies chivalrously proffered on a fork which were difficult to receive with a good grace: the grilled head for instance of a small bird, the fried spleen of a goat, a very spongy substance.

A sight that normally greets the stranger on landing in the port of Naxos is a pole festooned with the tentacles of large octopuses, supported on the backs of two rush-seated chairs and drying in the sun.

Wherever quails are raised, there is in spring a supply of quail's eggs, uova di quaglia, very pretty little eggs, a pale blue with tawny freckles. Eaten raw, they are popped into the mouth and crunched up with their delicate shells.

Pounding fragrant things - particularly garlic, basil, parsley - is a tremendous antidote to depression. But it also applies to juniper berries, coriander seeds and the grilled fruits of the chilli pepper. Pounding these things produces an alteration in one's being - from sighing with fatigue to inhaling with pleasure. The cheering effects of herbs and alliums cannot be too often reiterated.

I had better tell you the worst: a household of two with a good many visitors consumes in a year at least 60 litres of olive oil, using it for cooking, in salads and for conserving.

The maps and other illustrations are some of the things that make this venerable literary cookbook so astounding. #mapsinbooks