The Edible Atlas review – it's gastronomic heaven

This is the title I talked about with Mark Sainsbury on Radio Live yesterday (Sunday)

 Link to discussion:  http://www.radiolive.co.nz/Graham-Beattie-Edible-Atlas-by-Mina-Holland/tabid/506/articleID/46699/Default.aspx

Mina Holland tours the world for this entertaining yet educational store of food and cultural knowledge

• 
  

• 
• • Joanna Blythman - The Observer, Sunday 20 April 2014

Next stop, the Caribbean… Photograph: Alamy

There's a glorious randomness about Mina Holland's world tour of 39 cuisines. Why not 38 or 40? Why three in Africa and five in Italy? Not that it matters. Reading The Edible Atlas is like being on a long car journey with someone who never stops talking, and constantly strays off the point, yet who entrances you with their insight and experience. In the least didactic way possible, The Edible Atlas is educational. It meanders down well-trodden highways and byways of gastronomic and cultural knowledge, celebrating diverse cooking traditions in a wholehearted way, but then homes in with precision on their essential elements. The paired-down larder list Holland gives for each culinary region helps nail it.

1. The Edible Atlas: Around the World in Thirty-Nine Cuisines
2. by Mina Holland - Hardback - Canongate - NZ$40
3.