Sample text from Under the Olive Tree - La Cucina della Mamma.

I think everyone who has a passion for food has probably had someone who triggered that interest and helped encourage it. For me that person was my mother, Toti Gansser-Biaggi; for her it was her father. Her kitchen was a place of comfort and warmth and, for her, a place where she demonstrated through food her love for us all.

As a child you are not aware your life is special in any way - you just think this is how the world is. It is only later that it takes on mythological proportions. Growing up in Iran life was full of the colourful and the exotic, from trips to the produce markets with my mother to roller-skating around the Golestan Palace in Tehran with my friend Dodi, daughter of Princess Ashraf. At the centre of this life was my mother and the centre of her world was the courtyard garden of the house in Tehran.

Eating outside, she adapeted the North Italian cooking from her childhood to her new circumstances and readily sought out Iranian dishes to add to her repertoire, What she did, in effect, was to create her own style of al fresco eating well before it became understood and accepted, as it is now....