The English cookery writer Elizabeth David was born in 1913, the daughter of Tory junior minister Rupert Sackville Gwynne and granddaughter, on her mother's side, of former home secretary Viscount Ridley.
The young Elizabeth was brought up in a Jacobean manor house in Sussex but, like most upper-class children of the time, she was sent away to school at an early age.
At 16, however, she was “most willingly” plucked from her English education and despatched to Paris to lodge with the Robertot family in the comfortable suburb of Passy and attend classes in literature, history and architecture at the Sorbonne. Here began her lifelong affair with European food.
The Robertots were, even by the standards of a bourgeois Parisian family with one foot still in the lush Norman countryside from which they had originated, both “exceptionally greedy and exceptionally well fed”. The household shopping was done each day by Madame and the preparation by the much put-upon family cook, Léontine.
As a normal adolescent, David found the atmosphere in chez Robertot, where a family tendency to morbidity and religiosity found dilution only in an extreme obsession with food, rather oppressive. In later life, however, she realised that she had retained more of what she learned in that odd household than from the “yards of Racine” and ground plans of the great Norman cathedrals she had been force-fed at the Sorbonne.
David was a good painter, but not, she decided, good enough to make a career of it. She dabbled in acting and, briefly, the fashion industry before decamping, in 1939, to Europe, with a married actor nine years her senior in a small boat they brought through the canals of France to the Mediterranean.
Evacuated from Greece in 1941 when the Germans invaded, David found herself in Alexandria, where she worked for a time with the army in cyphers, and then in Cairo for the Ministry of Information. In 1944 she married Lt Col Tony David, although the marriage never really “took”.
Returning after the war, she found in English cooking a dismal contrast to the plenty she had experienced over the past six years on the shores of the Mediterranean: “There was flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles; dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad in the hole. I need not go on.”
David began to write magazine articles on the topic, then largely unfamiliar to most Britons, of European cuisine. In 1950, A Book of Mediterranean Food was published. There followed, over the next decade, French Country Cooking, Italian Food, Summer Cooking and French Provincial Cooking. These were not merely collections of recipes but beautifully written explorations of the lore and culture of food and the pleasure that could be derived from cooking it and eating it in company.
When Elizabeth David began writing in the 1950s, her biographer has written, “the British scarcely noticed what was on their plates at all, which was perhaps just as well”. In her early books, words such as pasta, courgette, aubergine and pizza were so unfamiliar they were written in italics.
Over a generation, David changed the eating habits of part of a nation, serving up Europe to the English middle classes in the only form in which many of them would ever find it palatable.
She also helped establish the idea that food, like art, books and music, is a manifestation of culture and, like them, it can provide us with a welcome occasion to step back from work and “objectives” and consider the value of things.
