Apricots on the Nile: A Memoir with Recipes Book

The subtitle of the elegant Apricots on the Nile says it all: A Memoir with Recipes. Similar to other books with mouth-watering recipes embedded in the text, such Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, this is a feast for the senses, a memoir pervaded with just the right amount of melancholy, like a finely judged pinch of salt, to bring out the flavour. Colette Rossant had the kind of enchanted childhood that most of us like to think we had, but didn't. In her case, this involved arriving, straight from Paris, in the greatest city in Africa, Cairo, at the tender and hugely impressionable age of five. Here she was to live with her Egyptian-Jewish father and her beautiful French mother. When her father died, she was then passed around amongst a veritable tribe of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. This certainly suggests that her mother was stronger in hedonistic than maternal instincts--but all the same, it made for a magical and various childhood, with no two days the same. She remembers the jasmine vines growing over the garden wall, the purple and red bougainvillea in their clay pots, and the "stately mango tree". She remembers going with her grandfather to the Khan-al-Khalili market, and the names of the streets: "Gold Street, Copper Street, Silk and Cotton Streets, Carpet Street ... And most of all, of course, she remembers the food. Rossant has written no less than eight cook-books before, and this one is, among other things, her ninth. The recipes alone are enough to get the juices flowing: Fried Fish with Ground Almond-Anchovy Sauce; Soeur Leila's Red Lentil Stew; and the ones whose names you don't even understand: Babaghanou, Mulukhiyya and the intriguing Ful Medames. This is a book to savour slowly and enjoy to the full. --Christopher Hart Read More