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The Centaur's Kitchen - A Book of French, Italian, Greek and Catalan Dishes for Ships' Cooks on the Blue Funnel Line (Paperback)
Loot Price: R350
Discovery Miles 3 500
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The Centaur's Kitchen - A Book of French, Italian, Greek and Catalan Dishes for Ships' Cooks on the Blue Funnel Line (Paperback)
Series: The English Kitchen
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Loot Price R350
Discovery Miles 3 500
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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A paperback edition of a wonderfully evocative cookery manual by
one of England's greatest modern food-writers. Her Honey from a
Weed is a modern classic; her Plats du Jour, published in 1957, was
an important step in the re-education of British cooks after the
Second World War. The Centaur's Kitchen, however, had never (before
2005) been shown to the public, except in the galleys and
staterooms of the ships that once sailed under the ensign of the
Blue Funnel Line. It was written in 1964, at the request of the
company chairman, to better instruct their Chinese cooks in cooking
fresh and flavoursome food. In a few short chapters, Patience Gray
lays out a whole repertoire, drawn mainly from the Mediterranean
and France, that might be cooked on board ships. Her aim was to
wean the cooks off frozen, dried and packeted food and to respond
to both the seasons and the supplies available at ports of call.
The style of cookery was much as in Plats du Jour: retro to us,
bourgeois French in another form of shorthand. The style of writing
is eloquent and prescriptive: the author keen to impart good habits
as well as good cooking. Thus there are chapters about equipment
and kitchen basics as well as mere recipes. The text has been
illustrated by Miranda Gray, the author's daughter. Many of the
pictures, just as the title, draw on Greek mythology. The reason
for this is the Blue Funnel Line's custom of naming its ships for
mythological figures (Centaur, Ariadne, Neptune, etc). Other
drawings evoke the author's life beside the Mediterranean in Italy
and the Greek isles. Patience Gray sadly died early in 2005. Her
work has always been the intellectual acme of the cookery-book
world. Although her output was tiny, her fame is infinite. There
can be few cookery books that have been serialised as well as
dramatised for radio both in Britain and America, as was Honey from
a Weed over the past decade.
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