A Food Lover’s Pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela by Dee Nolan, Lantern, $100
This book is so beautiful it makes me squeak. That grass-green jacket – the colour, I’m told, of the hills on which you walk during stages of the grand six-week (though many do less) pilgrimage of St James, which ends at the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in western Spain.
My suggestion for savouring this book is you turn to pages 10-11 (just after the dazzling photographs of European verdancy by Earl Carter) and study the map of feeder routers to the cathedral – a dendritic fan through the most beautiful countryside of France, narrowed to two for the final push through Spain.
Your choice is between the busy, landmarked French route (Camino Frances) or the Camino del Norte along the wild green coast, la costa verde, where the rain never ceases and the sun is a stranger.
But this is a food lover’s pilgrimage and so a veneration of the farmers and growers discovered along the way, who follow the traditional practices and proudly show you their fat pigs, their woolly sheep, their full fruit baskets. Not self-conscious environmentalists but those who savour taste and value their bounty.
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