Bittersweet

Description

On a sunny morning in May 2005, foreign correspondent Matt McAllester's mother, Ann, died unexpectedly of a heart attack, and despite having spent six years reporting on death and devastation from the world's most brutal war zones, he was pole-axed by grief. Pole-axed, and also astonished to be grieving for a woman who had been largely absent from his life, lost for two-and-a-half decades in her private world of madness. In the weeks and months that followed, Matt found himself poring over old family photos and letters, searching for the warm, quick-witted and beautiful woman he remembered from his earliest childhood, who had now vanished for the second time. But as he looked anew at her long-cherished collection of cookbooks, it occurred to him that the best way to find her again might be through something they both treasured: the food she had once lovingly prepared for her family before she was snatched away from them by illness. With the help of Elizabeth David, the cookery...