Round the World in 80 Dishes

This charming little book was first published in 1956 when people in England were still enduring post-war restrictions on both traveling and eating. As Lesley Blanch says in her introduction to a later edition ‘benign fate whisked me elsewhere to follow less restricted ways, traveling widely and eating wildly.’ She said: ‘I don’t belong in England, I don’t belong anywhere, it is rather restful…I have met everybody and known nobody.’ Seductive and piquant like its author, this is ‘an appetizer for enthusiastic beginners’ rather than a basic cookbook. Lesley Blanch’s gastronomic world tour includes eighty recipes each prefaced by an account of where they were first tasted, or with some amusing anecdote. Lesley Blanch was born in June 1904 and died in 2007, aged 102. She studied painting at the Slade, and later designed book jackets for TS Eliot at Faber. She was, from 1937 to 1944, the dynamic and imaginative features editor at Vogue. Elegant and devastatingly pretty, she had many admirers and was married to the French novelist Romain Gary for fifteen years. She travelled extensively, principally in the Middle East, and during her long and extraordinary life wrote 12 books, the best-known of which is The Wilder Shores of Love, which has never been out of print since it was first published in 1954.