Elizabeth David's works

[Priscilla]

Recently began Is There a Nutmeg in the House? a posthumously-published (2001) Elizabeth David collection.  It’s been a keen pleasure reading her again.

I consult her for recipes frequently, but have not revisited her longer prose in some time.  I ripped through her books when I was younger, including English Bread and Yeast Cookery, and Salt, Spices, and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, as well as the famous, invaluable Continental titles.  Also an earlier collection of short pieces, An Omelet and a Glass of Wine, and later, initially dutifully, the fascinating and high-quality Harvest of the Cold Months, super-dense, but so worthwhile.  Two recent biographies and that’s the whole shebang, I believe.

She is adamantly opinionated--I imagine she seems too stern for some readers, but I like all that.  Given a respectable foundation, a strong stance is something I welcome.  I like my authorities to be, well, authoritative.  Her cookbooks are, in a way, cryptic—but they are complemented perfectly by, for instance, Marcella Hazan’s or Madeleine Kamman’s thoroughgoing, teacherly detail.  

So, what has Elizabeth David’s work ever done for you?

Priscilla

[Sandra Levine]

I have never actually cooked anything from David's books, but I found them inspirational when I used to cook a lot more than I do now and I think that was close to her intention.  Her writing conveys a vivid sense of place that I greatly appreciate.  It is her attitude toward food in a very general way that was improtant, rather than the specifics of the dishes she described.  For many people, it was Elizabeth David (as well as M.F.K. Fisher, whom I like even more) who made clear the connection between food and sensuality -- the Nigella Lawsons of their time.

[John Whiting]

So, what has Elizabeth David’s work ever done for you?

"Food writing's guilty secret is its intellectual poverty," writes John Thorne, himself a notable exception to his own generalization. E. David is one of a handful of food writers (including also MFK Fisher, Waverley Root, John & Karen Hess, Richard Olney, Colin Spencer and not so many others) who can take their place in the pantheon of genuine prose stylists: those fortunate few who can structure both the form and the content of an essay as skillfully as a master chef can turn out a dish.

Julian Barnes has recently written about her in _Something to Declare_. The chapter was reprinted in The Independent, 9th Feb 2002 CLICK HERE It is so accurate and so well written that even her closest friends acknowledge that he has captured her about as well as can be done in a single short essay.

[Jinmyo]

John, thanks so much for posting that URL. I had read the article months past and was glad to see it again.

And I agree with you about her place in the pantheon.

I'd say she is not "required reading" but rather reading that one has as an undeserved and bounteous good fortune.

[Priscilla]

Julian Barnes has recently written about her in _Something to Declare_. The chapter was reprinted in The Independent, 9th Feb 2002 CLICK HERE

Glad to read the Julian Barnes article, John.  Thank you for providing the link.

I got a laugh from his heart-stopping moment of uncertainty at Elizabeth David's instruction to melt tomatoes in the recipe he was using.  The idea of melting as something that happens to vegetables, rather than only to the usual meltable suspects, is something strongly associated with her writing, for me, even though of course others use it the same way.

Priscilla

[John Whiting]

Goes with the melting prose.

[Bux]

I have only one of ED's books and haven't cooked from many of the recipes in it, but the more ambiguous terms have over time offered the most enlightenment. A french mushroom soup has been a fall classic in our family. There's only one variable in it--the soup is thickened with a slice of bread, unspecified as to size and texture. Over the years we've moved farther afield from the safe peasant white bread into ryes, whole wheats and cut the bread thicker or thinner. It never mattered. The soup was always perfect and above all it seemed that no matter how it varied, it was just the way it was supposed to be. Each version in turn convinced us it was the right one.

[John Whiting]

E. David has always been a maddening place to start in one's cooking career; she's best approached with at least a rudimentary knowledge of basic techniques. (What, for instance, does the neophyte do with the instruction, "Cook the eggs with the milk"?!) But the results can be memorable. The first time I made her sauce bolognaise from _Mediterranean Cooking_ I ended up saying, like the man in the Alka Seltzer ad, "I can't believe I ate the whole thing!"

[Adam_Balic]

E.D. is my favorite cookbook author. I read her for pleasure and I use her books extensively. I am currently on the look out for a first edition of her Italian Food. The one with all the Guttuso's illustrations (love that Facist pen and ink). Her description of the fish market near the Rialto capture exactly my own experience of the place. I read the passage a few years after my visit and it brought back amazing memories of shrimp hopping like fleas, writhing octopi and briliant blue and silver sardines. This is why she is such an amazing writer, she says all the right things to give you the perfect sense of a time/place. The recipes are also great, very instinctive, but very good.

[Gavin Jones]

I view her writing as fiction.

She can thus be counterpointed with the other kitchen sink writers of the 50's as well as compared with the lecherous mediterranean writers she liked so much such as Lawrence Durrell and Norman Douglas.

Not wild difference between Durrell's travel writing and David's food writing.

[tony h]

No pictures!

[Adam_Balic]

I view her writing as fiction.

She can thus be counterpointed with the other kitchen sink writers of the 50's as well as compared with the lecherous mediterranean writers she liked so much such as Lawrence Durrell and Norman Douglas.

Not wild difference between Durrell's travel writing and David's food writing.

Gavin - I'm not sure what you mean, when you say you regard her writing as a work of fiction, would you mind expanding? When you say "kitchen sink writers" do you mean that they are cooks rather then chefs?

I don't know who Lawrence Durrell is, but I have read Norman Douglas's "Venus in the Kitchen", but of a laugh, but I don't know how it compares to E.D.'s, except that the writing style has certain similarities.

[Gavin Jones]

The kitchen sink (more drama/film than book) was a genre which was characteristic of England in the 1950's.

It featured angry young men and women shouting at each other in bedsits in industrial/manufacturing towns.

Think Room at the Top, say.

At the time it was felt that this was a huge advance on the mannered & coded works from the 20's & 30's (Noel Coward, Terence Rattigan).

This was when food was beer - or vice versa.

Elizabeth David was sort of the opposite - instead of dramatising the emergence of a new social settlement and the conflicts and frustrations - she packaged food as desire (& not just to assuage hunger). So an early form of Gastro porn.

I could easily imagine Italian Food being published by Olympia say.

However I don't know whether I'd be more frightened of being stuck in a kitchen with John Osbourne or Elizabeth D.

Fiction - well I was only suggesting of the many ways of reading, treating her books as instruction manuals is inappropriate, so look for more interesting means of reading.

The mixture of social history, technical knowhow, and invention of a foreign world would now fit comfortably within the broader remit of, if not the novel section, at least the short story/non-fiction section of a current bookshop.

[Adam_Balic]

Gavin, I think that E.D. didn't discuss the conflicts and frustrations of the increasingly self-aware proletariat and petit bourgeois classes, because she was writing from her own experiences about food and food culture. Let's face it, she wasn't of the wonderful Industrial classes, but why is that such an issue? Food to assuage hungry? Well it doesn't make for a very interesting cookbook. "Came home from mill, ate something fried, went to pub. Noticed that the summer evening light enhanced the olive green highlights on the mushy peas. Mentioned this to Alf, Alf beat me with black pudding for being a pansy. Recipe for Boudin noir alla Alf to follow."

I would define Gastro-porn as food writing that is read for vicarious pleasure, instead of acted upon. Well, certainly there is an element of this, but if there wasn't it would be just like reading Delia Smith. Who would want to do that? Weigh, weigh, mix, mix, remove all interest and joy of the subject, there's you meal. Maybe that is what she has done is to scorch this dreadful British attitude that food = fuel at a time where it was needed the most.  I think that her books are instruction manuals for the greater appreciation of the role of food and that is exactly how they should be read.

[Gavin Jones]

None of my comments were adverse - though I am not beyond suggesting that the protagonists of the kitchen sink drama would have all moved out to the suburbs.

One eater's gastro-porn is another reader's gastro-erotica.

I think this is contingent upon the reader.

Your copy of italian food has the pages stuck together with bolognaise, mine...etc

I wouldn't even particularly claim her as a literary innovator - most innovations of the modern era seem to have been invented at least once by the time of the 18th C., typically by Laurence 'Hand Shandy' Sterne.

Alternatively I could say that reading Elizabeth David within a purely culinary tradition is to diminish both her, as a writer, and oneself as a reader.

[Bux]

E. David has always been a maddening place to start in one's cooking career; she's best approached with at least a rudimentary knowledge of basic techniques.

No doubt, and that allows her to be best read perhaps as inspiration for learning to cook or travel by novices and used as a cookbook by those who know how to cook. The nature of cookbooks has changed in the 20th century as more and more people learned to cook from books rather than from a parent or other cook.

[Adam_Balic]

Alternatively I could say that reading Elizabeth David within a purely culinary tradition is to diminish both her, as a writer, and oneself as a reader.

Diminish? . Oh, I see now, like seeing her writing as works of fiction. . This is post-modernism right? I aways bugger up post-modernism. Note to self: Next time I am cooking the Daube from "French Provincial Cooking", I must try to remember the meta-narrative.

[Wilfrid]

Let me recommend a biography of Elizabeth David by Artemis Cooper, which I think does help to locate her within the literary tradition to which Gavin refers.  Had she been a man, she might well have ended up writing something like the Alexandria Quartet rather than food books.  Not that there's anything wrong with food books.  Very interesting life...

Details here.

[Adam_Balic]

Wilfrid - have you read the Lisa Chaney biography of E.D.? Is so, have you a preference between the two?

[Wilfrid]

No.  So no.

I thought for a moment you meant a biography of E.D. Donahey, but that is not going to mean anything to you unless you receive Fox News.   :wow:

[Priscilla]

Wilfrid - have you read the Lisa Chaney biography of E.D.? Is so, have you a preference between the two?

Isn't it essential to read both--er, ALL--available biographies, if one means to survey properly?  Cooper's is the authorized, so-called, but Chaney had the cooperation of Elizabeth David's surviving sister Priscilla (Sir Terence's also got one, a Priscilla for a sister; also William F. Buckley) so how UNauthorized is THAT, not too, I would think.  Both are big, rangy, dirt-dishing, and the picture of her life that emerges is romantic and quite nearly tragic, really.

Interesting to me how the dramatic personal details are not fully exploited in her own work, but there is a dark subtextural foreboding constantly present, right from the start, when she is reminiscing about bountiful fresh foodstuffs from the Levantine, as she terms it, whilst living under post-war privation.  Puts one in mind of Stalin-era Soviet proproganda films depicting fabulous feasts, almost.  I was interested to read more about her exactly because of this undercurrent of unease.

And treating it as fiction?  Adam, don't get so hot about this idea.  For me, over here in the U.S., reading about such a rarified life as Elizabeth David's (among others, of course) can feel just fully as fanciful and exciting as fiction, and moreso than inept fiction, you know what I mean?

I mean no disrespect whatsoever.   It's just exactly the kind of thing that can introduce the blessedly corrupting idea that there are alternatives to the pre-edited few options presented by one's surrounding status quo, whether in cuisine or otherwise.

Priscilla

[Jon Tseng]

Better late than ever but thought would chuck in my paen to the divine liz dav. Thoughts (as ever) in no apparent order...

i) Elizabeth David is the most beautifully balanced cookery writer I have yet read. Two important things I've always noticed. One, she always uses the right amount of words. Never too many, never too few. Every phrase she writes has a point. This is a rare and underappreciated talent (see myself as an counter-e.g.). Two, she evokes rather than describes. Step through the pieces in Omelette & A Glass of Wine; she evokes the feel of 60's France without ever getting bogged down in turgid detail. If I could half that then I'd be twice the writer I aspire to be...

ii) As a pioneer, so far ahead of her time she could give lessons to Marty McFly. Take a flick through some of her stuff (on Italy, for example)... then cop a look at the front cover... yes, that really is the 50's... when Gavroche was a muppet out of an obscure French novel and ainsley hadn't even been born (thank god!)

iii) Yep, probably not as reliable on the recipe front (qv evokes rather than describes). Having said that her recipe for Everlasting Syllabub (do a google search) is the best way to get easy dinner-party-brownie-points yet invented.

iv) According to the bios a terrible snob; doesn't sound at all a nice person. But then again, we don't visit Gordon Ramsay for the chat, do we? (having said that, the big man is perfectly charming in the flesh)

ED rocks!

cheerio

J

[Priscilla]

"Came home from mill, ate something fried, went to pub. Noticed that the summer evening light enhanced the olive green highlights on the mushy peas. Mentioned this to Alf, Alf beat me with black pudding for being a pansy. Recipe for Boudin noir alla Alf to follow."

You are John Osborne and I claim my five pounds!

(Removed Ozzy-related pollution, if yer interested.)

[Wilfrid]

Isn't it essential to read both--er, ALL--available biographies, if one means to survey properly?

No.  Definitely not.  Well, if you mean "survey" in the sense of write an authoritative report on the state of Elizabeth David biographies, then may be.  But I don't think you have to read all or even most biographies of an individual in order to recommend one biography.  Usually plenty of clues within the four corners of the text as to quality.

Sorry if I have taken your question too seriously.  

[Priscilla]

Isn't it essential to read both--er, ALL--available biographies, if one means to survey properly?

No.  Definitely not.  Well, if you mean "survey" in the sense of write an authoritative report on the state of Elizabeth David biographies, then may be.  But I don't think you have to read all or even most biographies of an individual in order to recommend one biography.  Usually plenty of clues within the four corners of the text as to quality.

Sorry if I have taken your question too seriously.  

Oh my no, Wilfrid, no comment on your recommendation was meant in my question.  It's just where books are concerned I tend to be of the More is More mind, you know what I mean?

I am in complete agreement that a single book can confidently be recommended without having first to provide a punch-card showing the full catalogue as read.  And, there is no percentage is reading things that are a drag, either, I firmly believe.  Life is too short, for want of a less-hackneyed phrase, and there already is not anywhere near enough time to read everything that oughta be read.

I find it (however mildly) interesting, after reading a biography of some Somebody, to discover another and see how it compares.  Even the politics affecting the biographers' information-gathering is relevant.  To me, anyways.  IF I am interested in the biographee in question in the first place.

And as you probably know biography-reading as a Venn-diagram subset of plain old reading ain't for everybody, no matter the subject.

Priscilla