SC - Local dottir makes good...

[Nanna Rögnvaldardóttir]

Adamantius wrote:

Very
>enjoyable, especially when my dramatic reading of the passage on sheep's
>heads and eyes, for the benefit of my son, was overheard by half a
>subway car's worth of commuters...

Thanks. Yeah, I can believe that. Most of the eyes still end up on my plate
anyway since the rest of the family tends to favor other parts of the head
but my six-year old granddaughter grabbed a whole eye off my plate the other
day and devoured it with relish so I guess I´ll have to share from now on.

You are right, Alan should have asked me (or someone else) about Icelandic
food and cooking before he wrote the Iceland entry in the Oxford Companion
to Food - actually this entry is full of inaccuracies and is by far the
worst blemish I´ve yet found on this wonderfully informative book. I´m not
sure why this is so but my correspondance with Alan didn´t start until last
year, after the Companion had been sent to the printers, so I didn´t see the
entry until the book was published. But the next edition will have a revised
entry Alan has written based on corrections from me and from an Icelandic
culinary historian.

In fact, our correspondance on this and other matters (part of which is
published in PPC but certainly wasn´t written with publication in mind, as
can clearly be seen) eventually lead Alan to invite me to stay for a week at
his workflat in London earlier this year - I had a wonderful time there, met
several interesting people, had many extremely enjoyable conversations with
Alan and his wife Jane, ate heaps of good food and browsed lots and lots of
interesting cookbooks. (Just imagine staying for a week in a flat filled
with thousands of cookbooks, many of them rare and out of print - especially
when you come from a country where the foreign (English) language cookbook
section has just been expanded from two shelves into three.)

In fact, one of the things that more or less resulted from this visit is
that I´ve just signed a contract with Hippocrene Books for an Icelandic
cookbook in English. I´m to deliver the manuscript in February of next year,
so the book will probably be published in late 2001. I have the recipes, of
course, but I´ve got to translate them and re-test them using American
measurements. And I want to write a short introduction to each recipe,
describing its history. And I´m also planning to write 20 pages or so
dealing with the history of Icelandic cooking (starting with Viking age
foodstuffs, of course). Since this comes on top of other cookbook projects
I´m working on, I see a busy time ahead of me ...

Nanna