Allergy-Free »

Alice Sherwood is a writer and multimedia producer whose son has serious allergies to nuts and eggs. She lives in London and spends vacations on the family farm in Wales where she is inspired by the delicious local produce to spend hours in the kitchen.

Discovering one of her sons had a life-threatening allergy to nuts and eggs catapulted Alice Sherwood into the bewildering world of "food allergies." How can you make a birthday cake without flour? What happens to family meals when packaged foods, which may contain traces of nuts, along with pasta, bread, and peanut butter become forbidden? Suddenly it became crucial to find alternatives, but most "cooking without" recipes lacked taste or contained unfamiliar ingredients that were hard to find. So Alice, armed with a lifelong love of food, got to work in the kitchen and devised her own recipes.

The Allergy-Free Cookbook is unique. There are no dismal, "special diet" versions of recipes, which don't work. Instead there are dishes from around the world that center on ingredients other than eggs, dairy, gluten, and nuts. Throughout, Alice gives several variations for each recipe. So a nut-free cake that uses butter, for example, may be adapted for the dairy-free crowd by using soy spread.

The Allergy-Free Cookbook has more than 100 recipes for meals, snacks, and lunchboxes as well as for suppers and birthday parties. All the crowd-pleasing favorites are here. By experimenting with polenta and potato flour, for example, Alice has invented a gluten-free crunchy shortcrust pastry that's superb in apple tarts, while rice, potato, and tapioca flours combine to form a dough that works a treat for French bread. With the Allergy-Free Cookbook, everyone's invited to dinner!