There is no more celebrated cookbook in Ireland than Maura Laverty's Full & Plenty and now Mercier brings this selection of recipes to a new audience. The original 500-page text with its 300 recipes has been edited to a short, usable and practical 160-page book. Food and cooking are at the centre of any home. Society's values may have changed greatly since the 1960s when this book was first published, but the recipes, advice and love of good food will never go out of fashion. Maura Laverty was a journalist and writer, and she wrote exten-sively on food. In the late 1950s, The Irish Flour Millers Association commissioned her to write Full & Plenty, which was published in 1960. Subsequently, Anvil Press acquired the rights to the book and republished the text in both a full edition and in two smaller, edited volumes. Today Maura's work retains a freshness and one of the most charming aspects of her original text was the short prose pieces she wrote to accompany each chapter and we have included extracts of these at the start of some chapters. Maura's literary writing produced a much praised novel, Never No More, and several other works including No More Than Human and Alone We Embark. She died in 1967.