She writes with her usual infectious enthusiasm in her most recent book about the food and cooking of Sicily. The story centres on a cooking school run by a handsome Sicilian chef, and the experiences of the four women who attend.
Each has her own history of food and love, and each comes with some uncertainty in her future, and the course and the other members affect each of them in different ways.
Somehow central to the whole story is an extraordinary dark chocolate with 85% cocoa around which many of the recipes revolve, quite unlike anything to be easily found in New Zealand, but worth trying, I am sure.
Pellegrino weaves through the story other themes; an ancient and deeply satisfying way of life in a small village; living to eat rather than eating to live; locally produced and wild food cooked with love.
There are, of course, tensions in the group, and romance, even a long-ago misdeed, everything, in fact, to make a good read, best savoured perhaps on a sunny beach by the sea, or in a summer garden on a lazy weekend.
And there are recipes at the end of the book, for those who, like myself are keen to try something different involving chocolate.
- Margaret Bannister is a retired Dunedin psychotherapist and science teacher.
Win a copy
The Otago Daily Times has five copies of The Food of Love Cookery School, by Nicky Pellegrino (RRP $37.99), to give away courtesy of publisher Hachette and its imprint Orion.
To go in the draw, email helen.speirs@odt.co.nz with your name and postal address and ''Food of Love Book Competition'' in the subject line, by 5pm on Tuesday, September 24. Winners will be notified.
