Book Readings

Grace Dent is widely regarded as one of today’s most eminent restaurant and food critics and was 2019 winner of the Guild of Food Writers Award. We have two extracts from her new memoir, Hungry, read by Grace Dent herself.

Bitter Honey by Letitia Clarke

Chef, artist and food-writer Letitia Clarke reads an extract from her first book Bitter Honey: Recipes and Stories from the Island of Sardinia.

La Vita é Dolce by Letitia Clarke

Letitia Clarke’s second book is La Vitaè Dolce. She read two extracts from it for Talking of Food.

Mark Crick’s  Kafka’s Soup: A Complete History of World Literature in 17 recipes is a book often borrowed and seldom returned.  It is a joy to dip into this collection of literary pastiches for recipes written in the style of Raymond Chandler, Irvine Welsh, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, Homer, Chaucer and so on.

Lord Tebbit is perhaps the only politician ever to have written a cookbook, The Game Cook, thanks to a chance conversation in his favourite butcher's shop. Lord Tebbit recently agreed to record a conversation with Anne Dolamore on video for Talking of Food, on how he came to write it. Following their conversation, he recorded two extracts from the book.

Patience Gray: Honey from a Weed

Honey from a Weed is a passionate record of the life of Patience Gray with her sculptor husband in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. Avena Mansergh-Wallace reads three extracts for us.

Corinna Sargood: the recipe

Anne Sedgwick reads 'The recipe: the dish that saved my bacon' from The Village in the Valley, by Corinna Sargood.

Agnes Jekyll Kitchen Essays book cover

Agnes Jekyll's gift for friendship and organisational skills made her an excellent hostess. Helen Garlick reads three more extracts from Kitchen Essays, published in The Times in 1922, in which Lady Jekyll passes on 'some of the wit and wisdom of her clever and imaginative housekeeping'.