A Taste of Love – The Memoirs of Bohemian Irish Food Writer Theodora FitzGibbon

Book excerpt: Discover the many lives of free-spirited and much-loved Irish Times cookery writer Theodora FitzGibbon 'I have starved in some of the most beautiful places in the world ...' The Irish Times food writer Theodora FitzGibbon lived a life filled to the brim. Born in London in 1916, her appetite for love, pleasure, good food and adventure took her all over the globe until she died, in Dublin, in 1991. A Taste of Love, her two-volume autobiography, reveals a life fully lived: the names she used before settling on 'Theodora'; the cookery lessons given to her by the former Queen Natalie of Serbia; the 1920s childhood spent on food-chomping travels with her rakish father in Europe, the Middle East and India. Paris in the 1930s was home to Theodora's struggle to maintain an independent life as a young actress, where she began an affair with photographer Peter Rose Pulham and kept company with Balthus, Cocteau, Dali and Picasso. During the Blitz, Theodora escaped wartime Paris for bomb-ridden London, where she was friendly with Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, Francis Bacon and Soviet spy Donald Maclean, and adopted Gwladys the penguin and Mouche the poodle. In 1944, she married Irish-American writer Constantine FitzGibbon, travelling with him to the US, and divorced him fifteen famously stormy years later. In 1960 she married George Morrison, the film maker and archivist, and moved with him to live in Dalkey, Co. Dublin. Be enthralled by the fascinating story behind the woman who broadened the culinary horizons of many people in Ireland and beyond. In this highly entertaining memoir, discover the sights, sounds and tastes of Theodora FitzGibbon – food writer, adventurer and thoroughly modern woman. 'Theodora FitzGibbon was the most extraordinary woman. If you read her autobiography you realise how many lives she led.'Maeve Binchy