A readable and erudite study of the cultural history of Spain and its people.

Guild of Food Writer’s Awards, Highly Commended in ‘General Cookbook’ category (2021) Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower is a cookbook about plants – it's about making the most of the land's bounty in your everyday cooking. Making small changes to the way we cook and eat can both lessen the impact we have on the environment and dramatically improve our health and wellbeing: good for us and for future generations to come. Making plants and vegetables the focus of your meals can improve your cooking exponentially - they provide a feast of flavours, colours and textures. Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower is a true celebration of seasonal vegetables and fruit, packed with simple and surprisingly quick vegetarian recipes. With roots, we think of the crunch of carrots, celeriac, beetroot. From springtime stems like our beloved asparagus and rhubarb, through leaves of every hue (kale, radicchio, chard), when the blossoms become the fruits of autumn – apples, pears, plums – the food year is marked by growth, ripening and harvest. With 120 original recipes, every dish captured by acclaimed photographer Andrew Montgomery, and Gill's ideas for using the very best fresh ingredients, Root, Stem, Leaf, Flower is a thoughtful, inspiring collection of recipes that you'll want to come back to again and again. Praise for Time: "I love Gill Meller's food: it is completely his own, and ranges from the (unpretentiously) rarified to the smile-inducingly cosy; indeed, he often seems to fuse the two... his recipes make me want to run headlong into the kitchen." – Nigella Lawson "Gill Meller's latest cookbook, Time, is poetic and romantic – a string of beautiful recipes guide you through the seasons. – Yotam Ottolenghi, Guardian Praise for Gather: "My book of the autumn and possibly of the year... Gather is a perfect expression of something food writers have been trying to define for the past three decades: modern British cooking." – Diana Henry "Just stunning. There's no one I'd rather cook for me than Gill and there's not a recipe here I wouldn't eagerly devour." – Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Originally published: Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1988.

Lily is the daughter of a humble farmer, and to her family she is just another expensive mouth to feed. Then the local matchmaker delivers startling news: if Lily's feet are bound properly, they will be flawless. In nineteenth-century China, where a woman's eligibility is judged by the shape and size of her feet, this is extraordinary good luck. Lily now has the power to make a good marriage and change the fortunes of her family. To prepare for her new life, she must undergo the agonies of footbinding, learn nu shu, the famed secret women's writing, and make a very special friend, Snow Flower. But a bitter reversal of fortune is about to change everything.