Book review: Tessa Kiros' The Recipe Collection - mouthwatering compilation

I'm a big fan of Tessa Kiros and have several of the prolific and well-travelled author's cookbooks, including Falling Cloudberries, Food From Many Greek Kitchens and Twelve: A Tuscan Cookbook. Her latest, The Recipe Collection, though, made me realise that much of the charm of her previous books comes from the context: she focuses on her family life in Falling Cloudberries (she was born in London to a Finnish mother and Greek-Cypriot father, and raised in South Africa); and the food of Greece and Tuscany, respectively, in the other two.

That's not to say The Recipe Collection is a bad book; it's just more straightforward. Instead of travelling back and forth between London, South Africa, Finland and Greece, or hopping around the Greek islands, or wandering, month by month, through sleepy, sun-dappled villages in Tuscany, you get a more standard recipe format that takes you through starters, soups, salads, seafood, meat, vegetables and desserts. The recipes in this volume are compiled from Kiros' previous cookbooks, so if you already have those, it wouldn't be worth buying this one.

Still, the recipes are mouthwatering (and varied). I've put Post-it notes on the pages for babka; koupes (a Middle Eastern pastry with a bulgur wheat shell, and a savoury filling that includes meat, pine nuts and cinnamon); fisherman's soup; spaghetti with tomato and scampi; polenta-crusted anchovies; prawns with lemon, piri piri, garlic and feta; pan-fried veal chops with lemon, sage and mascarpone; and lemon sandwiches with raspberries and cream.