Mediterranean Seafood - Prospect Books

Introduction to the New Edition
This, the first of all the books I have written, has always had a special place in
my affections and I am really delighted to see it reissued in this handsome new
edition.
Way back in the 1960s, in Tunisia, I produced a fairly primitive roneo’d
booklet to help English-speaking residents and visitors identify the fish in
Tunisian markets and restaurants, and to benefit the Tunisian equivalent of
the Red Cross. The booklet served both purposes well, but the interest – partly
nomenclatural and partly culinary – which I then took in fish might have
evaporated but for a coincidence. A colleague in the Embassy had known
Elizabeth David in Cairo during the war. He sent her the booklet, she wrote
about it in The Spectator, and years later, when it had been long out of print,
she persuaded her editor at Penguin, Jill Norman, that it should be turned into
a proper book covering the whole Mediterranean. So in 1972, out came the
first edition of the present book.
Now I say a fond thank-you to Penguin, who kept the book in print for a
quarter of a century; and express my warm thanks to Tom Jaine of Prospect
Books in Devon and to the Ten Speed Press in Berkeley, California.
As happened with earlier revised versions of the book, changes have been
slight. On this occasion I have updated or corrected a few scientific and
vernacular names, and made a few modest subtractions from and additions to
the text. Thanks in large part to the generous cooperation of the FAO in
Rome, many of the species are now far better illustrated than they were
originally. I warmly thank Helen Saberi for shouldering the burden of organizing
all these changes.
The World’s End, Chelsea, London alan davidson
2002
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