This visual narrative tells the story in woodcuts and linocuts of how British artist David Esslemont literally grew a pizza on his farm in rural Iowa. Wholly embracing the farm-to-table movement, he grows wheat, garlic, tomatoes and basil; designs and builds an adobe clay oven (scale plans included); gives instructions on how to make the dough, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese; fire up the oven, assemble the pizza and cook it in less than three minutes
“Pizza farms” are not uncommon in the Midwest, and in 2011, Esslemont built an oven to explore the feasibility of such a venture. Unfortunately, the oven burned down the following year. Two years passed before he built a second oven, this time on a plinth of reinforced concrete. As he documented its construction, he conceived a new book – Pizza from Scratch.
“There is something magical about cooking in a wood-fired oven: the rolling flames, searing heat and tantalizing aromas are quixotic. If you’ve grown the ingredients, and harvested the tomatoes and basil that afternoon – the flavors will be out of this world.” - David Esslemont
Edition details
Forty copies, hand printed from the original blocks. Thirty-six images,
printed on rectos only, except for one double-page spread and a separate
plan (folded). 10.5 x 15 inches, landscape, 68pp.
Five deluxe copies – $4800 (Sold Out)
Bound in white alum-tawed goatskin with a design painted in acrylic ink based on one of the pizzas, created with toothbrushes and stencils, with gold tooling. Sewn on linen tapes with hand-sewn headbands and leather-jointed Italian handmade-paper endleaves, in a felt-lined cloth-covered drop-back box.
Thirty-five regular copies in cloth-covered boards, presented in a printed cloth-covered drop-back box – $2400.
PRINTS
All the images are available separately as individual prints. Printed in editions of no more than fifty copies they vary in price from $120 to $700. Please enquire for availability and pricing.
