Elizabeth david bio

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There’s no shortage of talented cooks and cookery writers to have come from Sussex.  Perhaps the one who has had the most influence on how we eat today is Polegate born Elizabeth David, CBE, (1913 – 1992)

Perhaps fitting for someone who was going to change a nation’s eating habits, David was a rebel.  Although a grand-daughter of a viscount with a wealthy upbringing at Wootton Manor in Folkington (her father was Conservative MP for Eastbourne, Rupert Sackville Wynne) she pushed back against convention, traveled, and dabbled in several careers.  Studying art in Paris, experimenting with acting in London, and even spending a brief time as a shop assistant at Worth fashion house, adventure seemed to follow her.  Running away on a boat with a married actor, she was detained in Italy as a suspected spy, trapped in Greece at the start of the Second World War, and eventually found herself in Cairo in the Second World War where she worked in a library for the British government.

In 1946 she returned to an England that was very different to the one she had left. Scarred by the war and a series of hard winters, the country was still under the heavy yoke of austerity and food rationing.  With butter, cheese, margarine, cooking fats and meat still to be rationed until 1954 and such delights as tinned apricots cooked in bacon fat, fake marzipan made from beans mashed with almond essence passing as the delicacies of the day, David was appalled by the contrast to the simple, healthy vegetable based diet she had encountered during her years in the Mediterranean.  Friends suggested she take out her frustration by writing about it.

Various magazine articles duly followed and in 1948 she was invite

British cookery writer (1913–1992)

Elizabeth DavidCBE (néeGwynne, 26 December 1913 – 22 May 1992) was a British cookery writer. In the mid-20th century she strongly influenced the revitalisation of home cookery in her native country and beyond with articles and books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes.

Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. In the 1930s she studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated. They reached Greece, where they were nearly trapped by the German invasion in 1941, but escaped to Egypt, where they parted. She then worked for the British government, running a library in Cairo. While there she married, but she and her husband separated soon after and subsequently divorced.

In 1946 David returned to England, where food rationing imposed during the Second World War remained in force. Dismayed by the contrast between the bad food served in Britain and the simple, excellent food to which she had become accustomed in France, Greece and Egypt, she began to write magazine articles about Mediterranean cooking. They attracted favourable attention, and in 1950, at the age of 36, she published A Book of Mediterranean Food. Her recipes called for ingredients such as aubergines, basil, figs, garlic, olive oil and saffron, which at the time were scarcely available in Britain. Books on French, Italian and, later, English cuisine followed. By the 1960s David was a major influence on British cooking. She was deeply hostile to anything second-rate, to over-elaborate cooking, and bogus substitutes for classic dishes and ingredients. In 1965 she opened a shop selling kitchen equipment, which continued to trade under her name after she left it in 1973.

David's reputation rests on her articles and her books, which have been continually reprinted. Between 1950 and 1984 s

Artemis Cooper. Ecco, $27.5 (384pp) ISBN 978-0-06-019828-2

Elizabeth David's vibrant writing and elegant recipes have earned the respect of famous gourmets like Alice Waters and Julia Child, but acolytes of the doyenne of cookbook writers may be disappointed by the dry prose of this authorized biography. David earned her reputation in the 1950s when, with books such as Mediterranean Food and French Country Cooking, she brought strong and simple flavors to the austere palates of postwar England. David was perhaps the first cookbook writer not to specialize in haute European cuisine, but rather to aspire to bring the flavors of the farmhouse to home tables. Although her books were and continue to be recognized as well organized and thorough, David's personal life was something of a shambles, with love affairs that didn't pan out, an unhappy marriage and an odd relationship with her sister Felicit , who served as her typist. Cooper, however, marshals these facts into chronological order and uses a straightforward tone that strips the anecdotes to their bare bones. David's childhood, for example, is dutifully chronicled (""Like most children Elizabeth hated vegetables""), but provides little hint of her later adventures. David was an avid traveler, and her early trips to France, Italy and Greece are obviously key, but they are reduced here to lists of people she met and places she stayed. Excerpts from David's own beautifully crafted books easily show up the dull prose that surrounds them, but fans looking for the stories that did not make their way into David's own books will find only facts to savor here. (Sept.)

Details

Reviewed on: 09/04/2000

Genre: Nonfiction

Elizabeth David, the British cookery writer, published eight books in the 34 years between 1950 and 1984; the last was issued eight years before her death. After David's death, her literary executor, Jill Norman, supervised the publication of eight more books, drawing on David's unpublished manuscripts and research and on her published writings for books and magazines.

David's first five books, particularly the earlier works, contained recipes interspersed with literary quotation and descriptions of people and places that inspired her. By the time of her third book, Italian Food, David had begun to add sections about the history of the cuisine and the particular dishes that she wrote about. Her interest in the history of cooking led her in her later years to research the history of spices, baking, and ice.

Many of the recipes in David's early books were revised versions of her articles previously published in magazines and newspapers, and in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1984) she collected her favourites among her articles and presented them unedited with her afterthoughts appended. A second volume of reprinted articles was published after her death. David's biographer, Artemis Cooper, wrote, "She was hailed not only as Britain's foremost writer on food and cookery, but as the woman who had transformed the eating habits of middle-class England."

Background

David's interest in cooking was sparked by a 21st birthday gift from her mother of The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel, her first cookery book. She later wrote, "I wonder if I would have ever learned to cook at all if I had been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from, instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel with her rather wild, imagination-catching recipes."

In 1938, David and a boyfriend travelled through France to Antibes, where she met and became greatly influenced by the ageing writer Norman Douglas, about whom she