Elizabeth David changed our attitudes to food, drawing on Mediterranean influences to enliven the British palate. Jill Norman, pays tribute.
I first met Elizabeth David in the mid Sixties, when as a new commissioning editor at Penguin Books, I was assigned the cookery titles. I went to her house in Chelsea to discuss the paperback edition of Summer Cooking. The tall, elegant woman who opened the door led the way to the kitchen - a comfortable room, cool and light, painted a restful pale blue. Around the walls were old English dressers and a French armoire; a chaise-longue stood in front of French windows. In the middle was a large, scrubbed table, covered with books and papers, a breadboard with an upside-down crock that served as a bread bin, and a bowl of lemons. Our first conversation, sitting at the table and working through the amendments she wanted to make to the book, set the pattern for later encounters.
Elizabeth David started writing in the winter of 1946, when she was in her early thirties. She'd spent the war years in Egypt working for the Ministry of Information, and on her return to a UK stricken by the postwar deprivations, she scribbled down her recollections of the food of the Mediterranean.
At the age of 19, she had been given her first cookery book, The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel, who wrote of her own love affair with the food of the Levant. It was a book that made her receptive to the spiced charcoal-grilled meats, oniony salads and scented sweetmeats of Egypt. "If I had been given a standard Mrs Beeton instead of Mrs Leyel's wonderful recipes," I recall her saying, "I would probably never have learned to cook."
It's lucky for us that she did because, when her first book, Mediterranean Food, appeared in 1950, it was completely different to anything that had gone before. Not only did it describe little-known ingredients and aromatic dishes, but its style was quite new. I, like so many others, was drawn to the grace of her writing and the ease with which she evoked markets and restaurants, or described the forms and textures of food. Cookery writing had previously centred on recipe formulae, but Elizabeth described "the bright vegetables, the basil, the lemons, the apricots, the rice with lamb and currants and pine nuts, the ripe green figs, the white ewe's milk cheeses of Greece, the thick aromatic Turkish coffee, the herb-scented kebabs, the honey and yoghurt for breakfast, the rose-petal jam..." (Mediterranean Food).
She read widely all her life, particularly travel and history, and always put food in context, using literary material to illustrate where dishes came from and what was good about them. She wrote extensively as a journalist, too, and the pieces on French markets she did for Vogue in the Fifties were the first examples of food-travel journalism as we know it today.
From the beginning, Elizabeth's books were perceived as important, serious and well-researched. In the postwar years, when people were beginning to travel again and middle class women found themselves doing their own cooking, her books were crucial in the shift towards the Mediterranean-influenced food that informs the way we eat today.
One of my roles, as commissioning editor, was to test some of Elizabeth's recipes and I particularly enjoyed her salads and vegetable dishes - a favourite was a Turkish dish from Summer Cooking (1955), of aubergines baked with garlic, allspice and tomatoes. These, more than anything, epitomise her legacy: the move to something new and exciting, away from the old English way of boiling veg to death.
Initially, readers had to imagine the pleasures of soupe au pistou, or Circassian chicken with its sauce of nuts, paprika and cayenne. Many of the ingredients she used simply weren't available in Britain, where rationing persisted until 1954. It was only after publication of her first book that Elizabeth realised the frustration she caused by writing of apricots and figs, olives and wild thyme. But the demand she created was instrumental in persuading suppliers to source these foods.
By the late Sixties, when Mediterranean Food was in its second edition, these ingredients were more widely available and her recipes were the height of fashion. Dinner parties were cooked from her books, and a number of enthusiasts even started restaurants, armed with little more than a few pans and Elizabeth's books, which also included Italian Food (1954) and French Provincial Cooking (1960).
Elizabeth's own cooking was unpretentious and honest, based on the best ingredients. She hated "food tormented into irrelevant shapes". She liked to discuss her work as it developed, and so eating in her kitchen, at what she called her 'picnic lunches', was always a delight. She usually provided small dishes of whatever she was working on - Spanish tortilla or pâté perhaps, and always homemade bread and a glass of wine. The piles of books and papers on the table were pushed aside to make room to eat.
Elizabeth wrote slowly and always by hand. When she was happy with a recipe, she would often sign and date copies and give them to friends, a reminder of a dish eaten at lunch a few days earlier. She wrote in the same way she cooked: simply, with respect for tradition, with passion and knowledge. Hers is the best kind of cookery writing; it encourages the reader to make discoveries and interpret dishes, instead of simply follow a set of instructions.
As a friend, she was generous, witty, irreverent and formidably intelligent. She loved conversation and to laugh, and hated fuss and pretension - in food and in life; authenticity and self-effacing authority are the characteristics of her books and we owe to her the roots of our enthusiasm for the flavours of "those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees".
3 tbsp chopped fresh coriander
