A Sprig of Rosemarie

​Author: Rosemarie Saunders
Publisher: Print Matters
Reviewer: Nancy Richards
With the digital advent, all that’s required for instant dinner-design is to type the ingredients left in the fridge and up will pop a clever recipe – custom made for the moment. As a result I recently had a huge throw out of recipe books, keeping only those written by friends. Needless to say I’ve regretted it – not the friend’s books, but the lost recipe for spinach and vine tomato rice from the marie-

claire Zest cookbook (if you find it…).
But the point I make is that these days, cookbooks have more of a job to do than just deliver recipes. One of these is to inspire you, through words and pictures, to put something a little special on the table. Otherwise it would be sardines on toast every night. Their other job, in my opinion, is to tell you a tasty story, or stories, which in the instance of A Sprig of Rosemarie is the author’s culinary journey. 
To start at the beginning, Rosemarie has a Welsh mother and German father, an interesting fusion seasoned further by Hotel and Catering school in Birmingham. On her way to Australia she stopped off in Cape Town where a corporate cooking career finally gave way to a family and a catering biz. So that’s the abridged version. But it’s mainly the catering biz that fuels the Sprig stories. The first, lunch for 200 in an ice-cold airport hangar, resulted in thawing salmon towers the recipe for which is provided. Thirty years of a cookery school came next, Cuisine Marie Rose and the Provencal Kitchen – not to mention food and wine tours to France, a few years in Monaco and sojourns in all manner of interesting places. You may be starting to get the flavour of the journey - think Red Belle Pepper Soup and Gazpacho, Chicken Dijonnaise, Onion Tart with Chevre….you may also drool a little.    
Hedonism is a word that sprang to mind as I taste-travelled with Rosemarie, and amongst the sprinkling of accompanying maxims is ‘Multitasking is holding your cards in one hand and a vodka in the other.’ This goes with the story of ‘bridge afternoons in Provence’, as does Prawn Chowder. You can keep the bridge, but the Chowder recipe turned up trumps for me.
It must be said though, that whilst Rosemarie regales with delicious and decadent stories of tarts and tagines, flans, phyllo and functions in exotic destinations,  I like it that she is open enough to share the smell of burning rice. ‘I got busy chatting’ she confesses. Cindered jasmine is apparently a frequent occurrence in her home. Perhaps that’s another job of a good cookbook – complete honesty. Nobody likes a perfect cook.  ​