Elisabeth Luard

Michael Berkeley talks to the food writer, artist and journalist Elisabeth Luard about her favourite music and the memories it conjures up of the joys and tragedies of family life.

The winner of the Guild of Food Writers Award for Lifetime Achievement, she has written more than twenty cookbooks, including European Peasant Cookery, Flavours of Andalucía, and A Cook's Year in a Welsh Farmhouse. And her compelling series of memoirs documents the joys and appalling tragedy she's experienced as a mother; the delight she found in living abroad with her young children; and the ups and downs of her long marriage. The latest is Squirrel Pie: Adventures in Food Across the Globe.

Elisabeth tells Michael about her childhood growing up in embassies in South America and her return to school in England and a very special choir master. She chooses flamenco music that reminds her of her life in rural pre-tourism Andalucia bringing up her four young children.

We hear Elisabeth's friend Christopher Logue reading from his poem War Music, and music by Mozart and Beethoven - and we hear a song which was special to Elisabeth's daughter Francesca, who died in her twenties.

Producer: Jane Greenwood A Loftus production for BBC Radio 3.