An English woman’s take on Italian cooking

Rachel Roddy, after about 10 years of hard slog, is an overnight sensation. She's just scooped the André Simon award for best food book in 2015, a very big deal indeed for a first book. I'd been warming up this second helping for a day or two before that news came through last Friday. My original reason for revisiting this episode was that her book, Five Quarters: Recipes and Notes from a Kitchen in Rome, is due to be published in the US tomorrow, 2 February, under a somewhat different title: My Kitchen in Rome: Recipes and Notes on Italian Cooking The different titles were just one of the things we talked about and that are worth sharing again; Rachel's well-deserved award provides an extra reason. There's a lot more packed into the original, full-length episode. Rachel talked about how a website turned into a book and about how she's discovering life and cooking in one of the less glamorous towns of Sicily, the subject of her next book.