When the author was growing up in Africa his early food experiences whetted his appetite for travel, much like Anthony Bourdain.
Shopping in food markets, fishing for his dinner from rocks or watching a human ‘net’ bring in calamari to his feet on a beach in Angola as the sea turned black, all added to his visual sense that food was the central focus and the best reason to travel.
This book is an edible journey through some of the most remarkable landscapes of Africa, Europe, and California. And the food is unforgettable.
LINK TO THE PUBLISHER: https://www.blkdogpublishing.com/post/calamari
Here is food to fall in love with in a book for everyone who loves food and travel, the perfect antidote to the past two years of pandemic lockdown. It is a book that will introduce you to the foods of Africa, Europe and the USA with great company along the way. It is food imbued with a sense of place.
The son of a baker, Julian Roup grew up in South Africa with two powerful food cultures, his mother’s French-Dutch-Norwegian heritage and his father’s Eastern European Jewish food tradition. The mix provided him with a sophisticated and discerning taste buds from the earliest age. In a land of sun ripened fruit and vegetables teeming with game, great beef and lamb and seas brimming with a huge variety of fish, he started life with a cornucopia of food choices, in a sometimes hungry land where food was part of the political reality.
The author is best known for his books on the environment, horse riding, fishing and politics, but now he invites you to join him on his long trail out of Africa into Europe and America, with all the colour and tastes of the places he fell in love with.
On the menu is food for falling in love, a birthday lunch on a yacht, Spain on a plate, or eating Greece, fish barbecues in Africa and sour fig jam from succulents, the great food markets of the world, drive in delights and secret pleasures. The book is edible.
His journeys around South Africa, Mozambique and Angola provide tales of adventurous travel well stocked with interesting food. Emigrating to the UK in 1980 he discovered a whole new world of tastes in Europe as he ventured into his new continent from Greece to Portugal, Spain to France and Italy with visits to America’s west coast as well. He is as interested in the taste of bread as he is in cordon bleu menus.
This is not a gourmand’s book of overindulgence, but a slow savouring of the food that has nourished the author’s body, imagination and taste over a lifetime. The title of the book comes from a unique beach delivery of live squid in Angola; there is a small warm loaf of bread that sticks in the memory as a special birthday gift; a roast duck birthday feast in a cherry orchard in France; an American breakfast in a California marina; a bouillabaisse on the Croisette in Cannes; a fish barbecue on the rocks of the Cape where he grew up. Wherever in the world the author takes you, you can taste the food and smell it too and savour the flavours of the place, the terroir that produced it. Reading this book, you consume the food and your spirit is nourished by it.
This is a book that will feed your appetite to break bread and to take to the road once more in search of the best the good earth offers us.