Book Review / Recipes for love and loss

Books can be good, bad or patchy, but there are some that you will never forget. Elisabeth Luard's belongs in the last category.

That is the only category for it: it defies all others. It is not a proper autobiography, for there are decades of her life that are scarcely mentioned; nor is it really an account of her family, for much the same reason. A prize-winning cookery writer and a professional artist, she punctuates her text by recipes and charming line-drawings, but this is neither cookery nor picture book. Though littered with famous names, it is, least of all, a gossipy memoir. At the end, she remarks: ''Looking at the admirable adults my children have become, I cannot judge them, I can only love them. And then I cook them dinner, which I see as the greatest earnest of maternal affection.'' Perhaps it is just - or supremely - a mother's book.

In her early twenties, she married Nicholas Luard and gave birth to six children in rapid succession. Of rhesus-negative blood, they were ''blue babies'' and two did not survive the trauma of birth. Taking the other four, the Luards set out for Andalusia, where they lived in a clearing in the cork-oak forest above Tarifa. In their first week at school, the children learned to plant and grow lettuces; then to trap the rabbits that came sniffing out the lettuce; then to skin the rabbits and cure the skins; and finally, to make a delicious rabbit stew. Their mother heartily approved of this practical education, and gives the recipe for the stew.

These Spanish chapters are the warm heart of the book. The family undergoes total immersion in Andalusian culture: in sickness, they call on Cura, a kindly witch who magics away warts by skilful shenanigans with snails, and who recommends warm Coca-Cola for tummy upsets; the children learn to dance the sevillana and to fight young bull-calves; at Whitsun, they hire a cart from the gypsies and join a long wagon-train, sleeping by camp-fires and drinking the manzanilla of Sanlucar on a pilgrimage across the marshes and dunes of the vast Guadalquivir estuary to visit the shrine of Our Lady of the Dews. The prose becomes dreamy, the recipes increasingly resourceful.

Back in the forest and needing local transport, they acquired Bernardo, a donkey of class but uncertain character, who cost a fortune to equip with fancy tack and who was markedly less successful as beast-of-burden than as ass-about-town. The doughty mother soon learned to kill poultry and geese and to live off the land, though she draws a merciful veil over her experience of pig-sticking. Even she had her limits. Watching her cack-handed attempts to make black puddings out of the house-pig, her neighbour Maria exclaimed in exasperation: "Didn't your mother teach you anything?"

Nobody could say that to her children. Perhaps because they were so all willing to experiment, or perhaps, simply, because of eating the same things and so "smelling right'' to their neighbours, they were quickly absorbed into the community. At Christmas, every visiting or curious child came to take part in their Nativity play, each speaking his own language. The script was flexible - with children arriving dressed as cowboys, ballet- dancers or urban guerrillas, it had to be - and the fiercest competition was for the role of Herod, sometimes decided by bare-knuckle fights. The child who insisted on full mili- tary camouflage became Herod's chief child-murderer and was kept under strict surveillance whenever they had a real new-born baby for the crib.

Regretfully, they decided to return home for the sake of more conventional schooling, but paused in France for a year's acclimatisations, staying in "Maison Wog'', the draughty Languedoc holiday home of Auberon and Theresa Waugh. This gave all the children another language, their son a chance to play chess with the French Foreign Legion, and the mother the excuse to provide some alluring French recipes (though you can't help wondering about the one for Pot-au-Feu that seems to use 4lbs of beef to feed two people).

She was undoubtedly a formidable mother to them all, ready to turn her hand to anything and encouraging them to do the same. Her book is rich in handy, unsentimental hints - often, encouragingly, very politically incorrect. Whisky on the gums of a teething baby works as well as kummel for its wind; to avoid the endless unravelling of inter- sibling rows, and to teach the lesson that life isn't fair, create a Victim of the Week who is blamed for everything, and then gets off scot- free for three weeks; only administer culture to a child with a full stomach, and follow it with a real treat; try a drop of gin in mayonnaise, or cold tea to colour gravy. Some suggestions she could find nobody to follow, like the very appealing idea of swapping your teenagers with someone else's, as they seldom seem quite so vile.

Back in England again, her motherhood was put to the supreme test, and this is where her writing and her character are revealed at their unforgettable best. The recipes abruptly stop. Her eldest daughter Francesca, at the age of 29, died of Aids. It would be impossible to read this chapter, prefaced by Francesca's own diary, without weeping. Yet, if such a thing has to be, then the Luards seem to have handled it in the finest way imaginable. Francesca's sister Poppy defies the self-important specialist to allow them to support her through her last days. The dying girl talks of the serenely beautiful pictures - visions, really - that sustain her. At the last, her mother cradles her as she slips away: "Afterwards, I cannot tell the exact moment when her breathing stops, when her spirit leaves her body. I only know that I am permitted to carry her across, to give her into gentler arms than mine, that there is not a single instant when she is alone. No time of fear, or pain, or loss".

And, gently, the book ends with the parents facing the future together with the kind of serenity that only comes from such honesty and courage as they seem always to have displayed. She has been an unconventional parent, but one whose philosophy is based on advice from Sydney Smith, to take a short view of the dangerous business of life - to look no further than dinner or tea.