The woman who got there first
Elizabeth David: The Forgotten Founder of Modern Cooking
In 1950 you could not buy an aubergine in Britain. Olive oil came in small bottles from the chemist, and you bought it for softening earwax. Rationing was still in force and would be for another four years. Meat was rationed. Eggs were rationed. This is the country Elizabeth David sat down in and wrote a book about the food of the Mediterranean.
Think about what that takes. She was describing garlic, saffron, fresh basil, ripe tomatoes, and fish pulled straight from a warm sea to readers who could get almost none of it. She was not giving people recipes they could cook that week. She was giving them something to want. She was telling a grey, exhausted, rationed country that food could be pleasure again and doing it while the shops were still empty.
A Book of Mediterranean Food was published in 1950. Hold that date.
Mastering the Art of French Cooking came in 1961. Julia Child, whom most of the internet will tell you invented the idea of bringing serious European cooking into the English-speaking home, arrived eleven years later into a rich and confident America that already had everything on the shelves. That is no criticism of Child. She was very good at what she did. But she walked into an easy room. David built the room.
The eleven years are the whole point, so I will not labour them.
What made David matter was not that she was first. It was how she wrote. She was not really a recipe writer at all, not in the modern sense of grammar and timings and a photograph of the finished plate. She was an essayist who cooked, and her prose is close to poetry. She could put you in Provence in a single paragraph, the heat coming off the stone, the smell of thyme and garlic and warm oil, and a market you had never seen but could suddenly taste. You did not read French Provincial Cooking to be told what to do. You read it to be taken somewhere, and you came back hungry.
Her recipes can be maddening if you want certainty. A handful of this. Enough oil. Cook it until it is done. She assumed you had sense. She wrote to your appetite rather than your anxiety, and the strange thing is that it works. You are inspired first and instructed second, and you find you can cook the thing anyway, better than you would have from a formula, because you understood what it was meant to be.
That is a harder skill than it looks, and it is why she still matters to people who cook for a living. Simon Hopkinson, the ‘food writer, counts her among the handful who shaped him, alongside Jane Grigson and Richard Olney. His friendship with David began after her An Omelette and a Glass of Wine came out in 1984, and you can taste her in everything he has done since: the trust in good ingredients plainly handled, the refusal to fuss. Through him and others like him she runs straight into the modern British kitchen, whether the cooks working in it know her name or not. That is what real influence looks like. It stops needing to be credited.
So when the feeds fill up with the same handful of names, remember that the woman who did it first did it in a country with nothing on the shelves and did it in prose good enough to still be worth reading seventy years on. First is not the same as best. She was both, and she has been quietly written out of a story she started.
She is also only the beginning. Over the next few pieces we are going to talk about the others, the ones who built the foundations British cooking still stands on and then slipped out of the conversation. Some you may know. Most of you will not, which is rather the point. David is where it starts because her case is the clearest. It gets less obvious and more unjust from here.
Read her. Not for the recipes. For the writing.
She wrote eight books in her lifetime, and more appeared after her death. You do not need all of them. Start here.
A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950). The one that started it, written into a rationed Britain that could not buy half of what it describes. Read it for what it was as much as what it is.
French Provincial Cooking (1960). If you read one, read this. The fullest expression of what she did, France region by region, the writing at its warmest and most transporting.
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1984). Not a cookbook but a collection of her articles and essays, and the best place to meet her purely as a writer. This is the one that began Simon Hopkinson’s friendship with her, and you will see why.
If you want more once those have you hooked: Italian Food (1954), Summer Cooking (1955), and the later, more scholarly English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), which shows the historian she became.
And if you would rather read about her than by her, Artemis Cooper’s Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorised Biography of Elizabeth David (1999) is the standard life.