Paul Levy

Paul Levy

Writer and former chair of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery

https://www.paullevy.com
Born in Lexington, KY in 1941, over-educated at the University of Chicago, University College London, Harvard (PhD) and Oxford, Paul Levy has lived in Oxfordshire for more than 50 years. Among his nine books are the biography of the philosopher, G.E. Moore and the letters of Lytton Strachey; he is an authority on the Cambridge Apostles and the Bloomsbury Group. As a food writer he was one of those who coined the word “foodie”; was Food & Wine Editor of The Observer (the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper) in its glory days; wrote “the London Letter" for Gourmet; and was restaurant critic for Travel + Leisure. He wrote and presented the Channel 4 networked 5-part series “The Feast of Christmas”, shown in the UK, Australia and Canada, before reverting to type and writing on European culture for the Wall Street Journal for the next 24 years. The younger of his two daughters does catering and recipe development at thekitchencooperative.com. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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Paul's collections

10 Recipes That Shook the World from The Official Foodie Handbook

When The Official Foodie Handbook started the revolution 36 years ago, the late, extraordinarily witty Ann Barr and I had a small problem, as she didn’t cook. That might explain why I have never quite got right the amount of salt needed for Ada Gail’s “Authentic Jewish Pickled Cucumber — Jewish Mothers’ Monopoly Ended”; but the misprint in the French translation seems to have been responsible for the strange phenomenon of the “hundreds of Belgians and Frenchmen [who] were seen walking around with puckered lips.” My wife maintains that still less salt is needed for this shatteringly important recipe; but there can be no doubt that Foodies have won the War as well as the Battle.

Paul Levy

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Features & Stories

The ckbk guide to Christmas

The ckbk guide to Christmas

The ckbk Guide to Christmas pulls together our authors’ festive words of wisdom on everything from party planning to homemade gifts – and great recipes, of course. Let the festivities begin!

Paul's favorite cookbooks

Cooking à la Ritz

Cooking à la Ritz

The book from which I learned to cook, by a disciple of those old crooks and embezzlers, Ritz and Escoffier.

Roasting: A Simple Art

Roasting: A Simple Art

Barbara Kafka

Crank up the oven, disable the smoke alarm, and open the kitchen window for the best-ever roast chicken recipe in this beautifully written and scientifically literate book.

Available on ckbk now
Sud de France

Sud de France

Caroline Conran

Hard to choose one title from the writer who also translated adapted the works of the nouvelle cuisine chefs for the UK, but this is a classic.

Available on ckbk now
Available on ckbk now
Available on ckbk now