Squirrel Pie

by Elisabeth Luard

'Sacrilegious to say it but Elizabeth Luard even beats Elizabeth David. Exquisite writing and wonderful food, and funny too' Prue Leith 'Elisabeth Luard proves that no matter where you are, there is food to be gathered, or hunted, or found. Squirrel Pie is a beautifully written tribute to food that has all but vanished from our everyday lives' Alice Waters Elisabeth Luard, one of the food world's most entertaining and evocative writers, has travelled extensively throughout her life, meeting fascinating people, observing different cultures and uncovering extraordinary ingredients in unusual places. In this enchanting food memoir, she shares tales and dishes gathered from her global ramblings. With refreshing honesty and warmth, she recounts anecdotes of the many places she has scouring for snails in Crete, sampling exotic spices in Ethiopia and tasting pampered oysters in Tasmania. She describes encounters with a cellarer-in-chief and a mushroom-king, and explains why stress is good news for fruit and vegetables, and how to spot a truffle lurking under an oak tree. Divided into four landscapes - rivers, islands, deserts and forests - Elisabeth's stories are coupled with more than fifty authentic recipes, each one a reflection of its unique place of origin, including Boston bean-pot, Hawaiian poke, Cretan bouboutie, mung-bean roti, roasted buttered coffee beans, Anzac biscuits and Sardinian lemon macaroons. Illustrated with Elisabeth's own sketches, Squirrel Pie will appeal to anyone with a taste for travel, and an affinity for that most universal of languages, food.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Food, Cookbooks, Essays, Culinary, Memoir

400 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2016

About the author

Elisabeth Luard is an award-winning food-writer, journalist and broadcaster who often illustrates her own work. Her most recent cookbook, A Cook's Year in a Welsh Kitchen with photography by Clare Richardson, was published by Bloomsbury in 2010. Previous books include European Peasant Cookery (US The Old World Kitchen), Festival Food and Tapas, all of which are in print with Grub Street. Others include Classic Spanish and Soups (Octopus), The Latin American Kitchen, The Food of Spain and Portugal and Food Adventures: Introducing your Child to Flavours around the World (Kyle Cathie) - written with daughter-in-law Frances Boswell, and Truffles (Frances Lincoln). She is currently Trustee Director of The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, contributes a monthly column to Richard Ingrams The Oldie Magazine, and is a member of the team at online culinary magazine Zester Daily. She has published 2 novels, one of which, Emerald, won the WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award. Her work as a journalist appears regularly in The Daily Mail, The Scotsman, Country Living, Cambria Magazine, The Jewish Chronicle and the TLS.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

(4.5) One of my favorite foodie reads of the year. Luard is a food and travel writer, and formerly a natural history illustrator – all such enviable jobs! These pieces were written on assignment for publications like House & Garden, Country Living, and Food and Travel. As the stepdaughter of a diplomat, she grew up in Uruguay and England; she raised her children in Andalusia; and now she lives in Wales. She’s learned that “home is a state of mind, portable as a penknife, the most useful item in a child’s pocket, and just as likely to be lost.” But, luckily for her travel writing, this means that she, like Jan Morris or Gerald Durrell, is a true citizen of the world and eagerly grasps at new experiences, particularly culinary ones.

Broadly speaking, the book is about indigenous and peasant cooking traditions, a remit that allows Luard to include and adapt pieces from the past 20 years.

Dishes that tell us who we are and where we come from, I have learned over the years, are far more than a list of ingredients and method. They might disappear for a generation or two – discarded as evidence of the deprivations of war, or dismissed as unacceptably primitive – but sooner or later, they reappear.

The book is subdivided by geographical region: Forests, Islands, Rivers and Deserts. Through her cozy, conversational pieces, I learned a fair bit about food cultures I knew nothing about before (Maui and Romania) and enjoyed further exploring the ones that I know from restaurant experiences, like Gujarat and Ethiopia. My favorite chapter, though, had her joining game hunters in Maine for squirrel pot pie and other hearty fare. Each chapter closes with between four and eight recipes; I’m most keen to try the mango muffins and the Gujarati potato curry.

I’ve docked a half star because the disparate parts haven’t quite been joined into a whole, and the editing for republication isn’t always seamless – a few facts get repeated. But this is still a very warm and enjoyable book for anyone who enjoys cooking or eating food from different cuisines, and Luard’s own sketches and line drawings provide a lovely accompaniment.

Favorite lines:

“for those for whom nature provides, living in harmony with the planet is not a lifestyle choice but the raw material of life itself.”

“My maternal grandmother, irritated at having to take care of a schoolgirl … told me that curiosity killed the cat. She was wrong. Curiosity is a gift, a treasure, a compass by which to set a course.”

[Penny · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elisabeth Luard is one of those enviable multi-talented people. She can cook, write and draw - plus she has a zest and enthusiasm for travel and new experiences, culinary and otherwise.
Squirrel Pie is a series of stories about her various adventures across the globe, mainly as a 'food reporter' for upmarket magazines.
Her talent for drawing and painting serves her very well. Many times when abroad she doesn't share a language, but the pictures she quickly sketches act as ice breakers.
I've not read any of her other books, but she constantly hints at a 'troubled' marriage (I gather her late husband was a serial philanderer). She also mentions the tragedy of losing one of her beloved daughters.
I liked the recipes she closes each chapter with, although I won't be attempting squirrel pie.
The book disappointed me for two reasons. Firstly there is a LOT of repetition of minor detail to the extent it became irritating. Shoddy editing.
Secondly, I struggle to believe that every food experience she had was as gushingly wonderful as she would have us believe. There must have been quite a few duds!
I understand she wouldn't wish to offend, but it felt like reading a food critic's reviews where absolutely everything they ate and drank was nothing less than superb. I'd have preferred more honesty.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

The travel experience is not just the sights and sounds of new locations, the tastes and the flavours make a place too. How many times has that bottle of wine that you bought back from holiday, not tasted quite as good as you remember it?. In this delightful book, Elisabeth Luard travels from deserts to rivers, forests to islands trying new foods and speaking to those that grow or make them. Luard joins hunters in the forests of Maine, looking for their native grey squirrel to make the title of the book. In Sardinia, she samples the finest, and eye wateringly expensive bottarga. Her river trip on the Danube brings a cross between a doughnut and churro, scented with vanilla and in Gujarat learns that it is as much about the customs as it is the food. Tasmania brings the salty tang of oysters and sweet sharp strawberries.

This is not the first of Luard’s books that I have read; that was Family Life an account of her life in Andalusia with her husband Nicolas and four children. Squirrel Pie has that same warm, calm authoritative voice of a lady who takes great delight in finding and sharing fine foods in the countries that she visits. The book is peppered with her lovely sketches of scenes from the markets and kitchens that she visited. At the end of each chapter there are a few selected recipes, each chosen to reflect the location she visits and the flavours encountered that you can recreate in your own kitchen. What permeates the book is the pure delight she has in finding something really nice to eat, and the joy in sharing that experience with you.

[Jill · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining read, this collection of sometimes poorly edited essays, takes us all over the world as the author writes for lifestyle magazines and gives lectures on cruise ships. Her passion for the traditional food of regions is evident as she explores squirrel pie in Maine, wallaby in Australia and snails in Sardinia. Each essay concludes with recipes for the dishes described, although it would be challenging to find the ingredients for many of them.

[Fiona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is divided into four global geographical features.

Forests
- Maine , USA
- Extremadura, Spain
Islands
- Crete, Greece
- Maui, USA
- Sardinia, Italy
- Tasmania, Australia
Rivers
- Rhone
-Danube
Deserts
- Gujarat, India
-Amhara, Ethiopia

There is an essay about the local food at each location and recipes using the local ingredients at the end of each essay. I will probably never make squirrel pie (from the forests of Maine), or the wild boar with chestnuts (from the Rhone river) however, the Melopitta (Cretan Honey Cake), Mango Muffins (Maui), butter rice and dhal (from the deserts for Gujarat) are all something I could try. Even though I may not try some of the more exotic recipes I enjoyed reading the essays on the local food customs and it is as much of a travelogue as it is food literature.

[SukiG · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elisabeth Luard explores diverse and often overlooked cultures in this culinary tour. I admit, many of the recipes I will likely not ever try (squirrel pie being one of them), but her travel tales and the insights she achieves regarding interpersonal relationships and the beauty of our world make this book a winner.

[Zen]

Yeah okay. I’ve decided this year that life is too short for me to force myself to finish a book.

Nothing against this book, per se. I think the intention for it is to be the Anthony Bourdain book version of a travel + food journal, which in theory sounds like a lovely idea, but the writing style feels a bit dry and lacks that pull that would make me want to keep reading or salivate over the yummy descriptions of food.

Actually, more words are put into describing everything else but the food.

There are a few recipes I would like to try (apple pecan coffee cake - honey cake - mango muffins), so I guess I’ll revisit it from time to time for those things, but I don’t see myself finishing it. And since I didn’t complete it, I don’t think it’s fair to rate it, so I will be leaving that blank.

Apologies to the author.

[JA J · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like Anthony Bourdain in subject but without video. Ms. Luard’s prose is seductive and the subjects quite ‘out there’, typified by the first chapter on what some people might consider roadkill. This book wanders from out of the way to really bizarre, and espouses the mantra that we are all alike as she goes. Mildly interesting, but the book cries out for video. Too much time is spent on the author’s painted ‘sketches’, which in the book are cartoons that don’t deserve to be called paintings. To add insult, one of the chapters describes her travel with an adjunct professional photographer, but no photographs are included! Unless you wish to read about food we will never taste (luckily) you might want to skip this one.

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd have given this book more stars if I weren't reminded, on nearly every page, of why I don't love most travel writing. Luard's stories are fascinating but a bit meandering, and her expository sentences are often confusingly long and flowery. But overall, a wonderful topic beautifully presented - and it has left me wanting to know more about her life.

[D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely book, perfect for armchair travelers and food lovers. A nice touch is the inclusion of recipes in each chapter.

[Petalbooks]

A very good read 🙂 some parts meandered, but that's all part of the travel+food narrative yes?

[Mairi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was interesting but a bit long. Enjoyed the chapters about Ethiopia and India the most.

[Genesee Rickel · Rating 1 out of 5]

The recipes were the best part of this travel memoir. The author came across casually racist, as if the book had been written several decades ago. I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone, you can get recipes elsewhere.

[Jim Pearce · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best food writer since Elizabeth David

Her recipes work and her travel pieces are always a joy to read. This is a book to dip into again and again

[AnnieM · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such high hopes. So very dull

[Mills College Library]

641.5 L9268 2016

[Louise Davy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a cookery book but a book about Luard's travels around the world researching food. I have preferred other books by her.

[Rosemary]

skimmed, tbh