Food Fit for Heroes

A hand-written cookbook of 58 dishes, meticulously hand-written and illustrated by Corporal James Abraham Harrison will be auctioned next month. The gimmick to this cookbook? Harrison was one of Montgomery's Desert Rats and served as mess chef in the North African desert.

They say an army travels on its stomach and Harrison served his mates a mixture of familiar fare (boiled beef and carrots) and more exotic grub (okra, for example, which is ubiquitous in Berber tagines, wasn't found in Old Blighty).

I'm a huge fan of "practical" cookbooks, so I'd love to get a look at this one. It sounds like it should be up there with The Settlement Cookbook, which begins its rabbit stew recipe with "First, catch a rabbit."

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