‘This whimsical account of his pig-out pilgrimage is required reading for anyone who would rather not share their Kit-Kat’ Evening Standard, UK
Welcome
The new book by acclaimed writer Paul Richardson
is a unique vision of Spain and its food.
A Late Dinner: discovering the food of Spain is published by Bloomsbury (UK) on August 8th . Later in the summer it comes out in the United States (Scribner), Canada (Key Porter Books) and Germany (Berlin Verlag)..
Novelist and travel writer Colm Toibin praises Richardson’s latest work as ‘a really good book about Spain, and the atmosphere of beautiful and ingenious novelty which pervades its traditional life. It is also a serious and well-informed account of one of the great and abiding delights of Spanish life, its food which reflects a country’s regional variety, its history and its addiction to pleasure.’
A Late Dinner is to be serialised this summer on BBC Radio 4 (Book of the Week, dates tbc)
"For a long time Spanish cooking, like Spain itself, was locked in the past. Until a few decades ago, traditional food was all there was. And old-fashioned forms of eating, with the ingredients and dishes typical of region, village, time of year, and occasion, still form the bedrock of the nation’s culinary habits even today.
But there is more to the story than this. In the last 15 years – the time I have lived in Spain - Spanish food has been undergoing a revolution. The country has surged ahead as a modern democratic state. From a largely agricultural, rural country, parochial and inward-looking, it has re-invented itself as a dynamic urban society. And its cooking has reflected these changes in no uncertain terms. Against the backdrop of traditional food with its comforting certainties, a series of brilliant chefs and cooks have invented a Spanish haute cuisine where none existed before."
This book takes the reader on a journey through Spain and Spanishness, using the metaphor of food to illuminate the remarkable nature of the country and its people.
This is a ‘food travel’ book that is also something more: a work of culinary reportage, bursting with all the authenticity and flavour of real live Spanish cooking. The story is told through a series of journeys throughout the Iberian peninsula, picking up on the people and places that feed the nation’s passion for good food, whether rustic or revolutionary. It is both an intimate record of the author’s growing love of his adopted country, and a portrait of that country and its culture, tracing the convulsive changes that have gripped Spanish life over the last quarter century through a combination of gastronomic and descriptive travel writing.
