Elizabeth David: The Writer Who Brought Mediterranean Cooking to Britain

Elizabeth David: The Writer Who Brought Mediterranean Cooking to Britain

In 1946, the food writer Elizabeth David moved in with her pregnant sister in London after years spent in wartime Egypt. One day she came home with a pound of fresh tomatoes tucked among ration-book staples — and her sister burst into tears. She had been trying, and failing, to find fresh tomatoes for five years. Her literary executor, Jill Norman, told the story decades later.

David (born Elizabeth Gwynne, 26 December 1913, Folkington, East Sussex; died 22 May 1992, Chelsea, London) became one of the most influential British food writers of the twentieth century. Her books carried olive oil, garlic, aubergines and fresh herbs into a country still eating on ration books — first on the page, and only gradually in the kitchen.

Writing Against Rationing

David returned to Britain in 1946 — having gone out to join her husband in India that January, before a severe bout of sinusitis that summer forced her home — after years spent in France, Greece and Egypt. Wartime rationing was still in force: meat, fat, bread, sugar, cheese, milk and eggs remained rationed for years after the war, and meat itself was not freed from rationing until 1954.

Stranded in a hotel in November 1946 during bad weather, and repelled by the food she was served, David began writing descriptions of Mediterranean cooking as a private consolation. Those early pieces, published from 1949 in the British edition of Harper's Bazaar, grew into her first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food, published in June 1950 when she was 36.

From the Mediterranean to France and Italy

A Book of Mediterranean Food (John Lehmann, 1950) called for olive oil, garlic, aubergines, figs and saffron — ingredients scarcely available in Britain at the time. French Country Cooking followed with the same publisher in 1951, and Italian Food, largely unfamiliar territory for British readers, appeared from Macdonald in 1954.

Summer Cooking came in 1955, and French Provincial Cooking — widely considered, per the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the book for which she is best remembered — in 1960. Cheap Penguin paperback editions eventually carried her books past a million copies sold between 1955 and 1985.

A Narrative Voice, Not a Recipe List

An early publisher told David that a collection of disconnected recipes needed linking text. She took the advice, threading her first book with passages from nine other writers, from Henry James to Théophile Gautier, between eleven chapters of recipes.

As her confidence grew, she wrote her own connecting essays and market sketches instead. Reviewing French Provincial Cooking in 1960, the Times Literary Supplement said the book "needs to be read rather than referred to quickly" — an unusual claim for a cookery book at the time, and a fair description of David's method.

The Later Turn to English Food, and Its Limits

After a cerebral haemorrhage in 1963, David increasingly turned her attention to English cooking. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970) was meant to open a planned series on English food; only English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), five years in the writing, followed it, winning the 1978 Glenfiddich Writer of the Year award.

Her work was not universally embraced. Critics, including the American food writer Craig Claiborne, noted that her terse instructions assumed a reader who already knew how to cook; the historian Janet Floyd argues she showed little interest in reaching an audience outside a social elite. In the United States, a comparable role was played by Julia Child, who wrote the foreword to a Penguin edition of Italian Food and counted herself among David's admirers.