Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0761135553, Paperback)

Amazing things are happening at the new Spanish table. The sweet-hot pequillos of Navarra turn up in a classic potato tortilla (the beloved omelet found in every tapas bar). Purple-veined Cabrales butter melts across a thick grilled T-bone. Honey is drizzled over eggplant "fries." Chocolate meets olive oil, strawberries meet fennel, vanilla meets salmon. Mysteriously delicious savory ice creams—balsamic vinegar, thyme, saffron—garnish soups and seafoods.

Casual, quietly inventive, steeped in regional traditions but unmistakably modern, Spain is the new France and Italy, an ipicenter of contemporary Mediterranean cooking with a wealth of alluring flavors and preparations.

Written by Anya von Bremzen—an award-winning food writer who first fell in love with Spain in the early 1980s, introduced the Catalan genius and three-star chef Ferran Adrià to American readers in 1997, and today spends close to half her year in the country—The New Spanish Table delivers all the pleasures of this exhilarating cuisine.

It's a rustic table: Baked Fish with Romesco Potatoes. It's elegant: Rack of Lamb with Pistacchio Pesto. It's exquisitely simple: Smoky Fried Almonds with sea salt, an addictive marriage of four ingredients. It's for entertaining—dozens of tapas, paellas and cazuelas (named after the Spanish terra-cotta casseroles)—and, with its glorious comfort foods like fried eggs with crackling, crispy whites, and luscious unusual Rice Pudding Ice Cream, perfect for cozying up, alone.

Most of all, The New Spanish Table is an irresistible, festive celebration of flavors from a culture absolutely passionate about food, wine, and the pleasures of an excellent meal.