Introduction

The book now born, in 1999, was conceived in 1976. Talking to Jill Norman, then my editor at Penguin Books, I remarked that, in writing my book on Seafood of South-East Asia, I had been handicapped by the lack of a good and detailed reference book on foodstuffs, of global scope. Her response was instant and simple: ‘If you write such a book, we‘ll publish it.‘ Not long afterwards, my then agent, Hilary Rubinstein, suggested that this book, which I was by now planning, should appear first in a hardcover edition and in this guise would find a natural home in the Oxford Companion series. In a deal which would now be hard to imagine, let alone negotiate, Penguin, the Oxford University Press, and the separate Oxford University Press Inc. in New York all signed contracts with me for the same book, this one. My role was to produce it within about five years.