Elizabeth David: An Appreciation

I had known Elizabeth David well in London but it was in California that I got to know her best. While she was staying at my apartment, her daily routine was to read and write in bed in the mornings while I worked alone in a secluded office hidden behind my kitchen. But we always sat for an hour or two over a late lunch, either at home (usually little more than a slice or two of a local prosciutto, some cheese, a few olives and a bottle of wine) or at one of the two or three San Francisco restaurants she most liked. She appreciated the calm, the light, the views across the city’s hills and the bay.

Though she didn’t seem much impressed by California’s home-grown cheeses, she enjoyed California wines and took a great interest in the young restaurateurs among whom she had long been a cult figure. (Judy Rodgers, the chef at Zuni, one of San Francisco’s best and most popular restaurants, was asked once in an interview whether her cooking style was more French than Italian. After a second’s thought, she replied that it wasn’t really either: It was Elizabeth David.)

It is difficult to exaggerate the part Elizabeth David played in everything and anything to do with food over the last 40 years. More than two million copies of her books have been sold, but even those who never read them have nonetheless been affected by her influence on restaurateurs and on food writers; and, most obviously, by the fresh herbs we now take for granted, by the abundance of spices available in any supermarket, by the ease with which we buy vegetables once considered exotic, and by the good cooking-pots and sharp knives in our kitchens. When we travel we are now likely to spend as much time browsing a country’s markets and charcuteries as we do its museums and cathedrals. For all this we can thank Elizabeth David.

Born in Britain in 1913, Elizabeth David was one of four daughters of Rupert Gwynne, Conservative MP for Eastbourne, and Stella, daughter of the first Viscount Ridley.

Sent straight from boarding school at 16 to live with a French family and study at the Sorbonne, she was later to describe her hosts, the Robertots, as “both exceptionally greedy and exceptionally well-fed.” She realized, though, once she had returned to England, that they had been only too successful in imbuing her with the essential spirit of French culture.

“Forgotten were the Sorbonne professors and the yards of Racine learnt by heart, the ground-plans of cathedrals I had never seen, and the saga of Napoleon’s last days on St. Helena,” she wrote in her book “French Provincial Cooking.” “What had stuck was the taste for a kind of food quite ideally unlike anything I had known before. Ever since, I have been trying to catch up with those lost days when perhaps I should have been more profitably employed watching Leontine (her hosts’ cook) in her kitchen rather than trudging conscientiously round every museum and picture gallery in Paris.”

A dazzlingly beautiful young woman, she worked for a while as a vendeuse for the great couturier Worth, and after a spell at the Oxford Rep acted at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. In the late 1930s, by way of Capri and a visit to the writer Norman Douglas, she went to live, not unaccompanied, on a Greek island and was in due course evacuated with a clutch of other British expatriates--it included Lawrence Durrell, Xan Fielding, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Olivia Manning. She escaped to Egypt as Crete fell to the Germans and spent the war years there as librarian to the Ministry of Information’s Cairo office.

In 1944 she married Anthony David, a British Army officer whom she followed to India in 1945. The marriage didn’t last, and she returned to a very cold and severely rationed Britain in 1946.

“A Book of Mediterranean Food” (John Lehmann, the publisher, had wanted to call it “Le Train Bleu” or some such) was as much a reaction, an act of revolt, as anything else. It was published, with evocative woodcuts by John Minton, in 1950 and was followed in rapid succession by “French Country Cooking” (1951), “Italian Food” (1954), “Summer Cooking” (1955) and “French Provincial Cooking” (1960). Together with her articles in Vogue, House & Garden, the Sunday Times and the Spectator, those books did more than remind postwar Britain of a world beyond Dover, margarine and a diet originally pulled together to meet siege conditions. In sharpening British appetites for olives and apricots and much else long forgotten, she succeeded in expanding, indeed reviving, a taste for life itself.

A natural and scrupulous scholar, Elizabeth David also used to good effect the painter’s eye with which she was blessed. Capturing the look of a dish or the atmosphere of a town in a few words, she could seize her readers’ attention and lead them deeply into her subject--a technique reinforced, in any case, by her fresh, informed and irresistibly forthright views. Just one passage, taken from her introduction to Languedoc cooking, shows how she composed what she wrote, much as a shrewd cook builds a menu in tempting steps from amuse-gueule to piece de resistance.

“A bottle of cooled white wine is already in front of you,” she begins tantalizingly, “and from the big table in the centre of the restaurant a waiter brings hors-d’oeuvre to keep you amused and occupied while more serious dishes are being prepared . . . quantities of little prawns, freshly boiled, with just the right amount of salt, and a most stimulating smell of the sea into the bargain, heaped up in a big yellow bowl, another bowl filled with green olives; good salty bread; and a positive monolith of butter, towering up from a wooden board.”

From the appeal of the bowls and the confidence she thinks anyone might place in whoever had had the taste to choose them, she moves deftly into a careful review of the dish that followed: langouste in a garlic-scented sauce of tomato and brandy. Her scholarship, enhanced by entertainingly appropriate digressions, is impeccable; her sources are cited elegantly (“these facts are all on record and can be read in M. Robert Courtine’s book, ‘ Le Plus Doux des Peches’ ”), and her clarity and wit engage even those with, as yet, no intention of surrendering their can openers. Then, inevitably and willy-nilly, even they catch her enthusiasm as she pokes around for the origin of the dish, holding its name to the light to unravel its history; they too share her curiosity about the restaurant’s own version of it; and then, with interest fully piqued, their fingers will fly through the pages to find the actual recipe at the merest mention of where it might be.

Her activities broadened. In 1965 she had opened a kitchen shop in Pimlico--a model for hundreds that have followed, both in Britain and in the United States--and by the time “Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen” (1970) and “Bread and Yeast Cookery” (1977) were published, the scholar had taken over from the traveling journalist--as, by then, was to be expected. Elizabeth David had severed all connection with the shop by 1973, but she was still there on the day in 1970 when I dropped in to say goodby, literally on my way to the airport. I was leaving London to live and work in New York and I knew I would miss her.

Our meetings over the next several years were indeed few and brief, but in 1982, by which time I was living in San Francisco, she came to stay for a while. It was her first visit to California, and I took her to Yosemite and the old gold-mining towns of the Sierra, where she was quick to uncover remnants of the 19th-Century ice trade. She was enchanted by California and returned again every year--sometimes for a month, sometimes for two--until a badly broken leg last year made travel impossible.

She enjoyed the enormous choice of fruits and vegetables we have on the West Coast. I remember how amused she was once when we had driven down the coast to lunch at Pescadero, a fishing village between Half Moon Bay and Santa Cruz. It was November, very bright but chilly, and we ordered the hot pumpkin soup of the day. Knowing that the farms around Half Moon Bay were well known for their pumpkins (there is a Pumpkin Festival there every year), she was curious to find out what variety of pumpkin would have been used for the soup. The waitress had no difficulty telling her. “Oh, that was our Halloween pumpkin,” she said brightly and whisked busily away.

Though Elizabeth David’s reputation was bound up with the Mediterranean (“Let’s look it up in Braudel”--Ferdinand Braudel’s “The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Phillip II”--was her answer to most questions) and her favorite dishes, at least in these last few years, were Lebanese, she was just as much an enthusiast for British food. The treats she most enjoyed recently were good Scotch smoked salmon and farmhouse Cheddar.

On the Thursday before she died I was in London and spent most of the day with her. It was a visit much like any other except that she couldn’t move very much. We ate a little together (“I think there’s some caviar in the downstairs fridge,” she said); we drank a little (“I need a bottle of good Chablis”); and we laughed quite a lot.

She was surprised that I couldn’t pick up an allusion she made to Sir Philip Sidney. “Look it up,” she said. “I might not have got it right.”

I pulled the “Chambers Biographical” off the shelf. “It doesn’t help much,” I told her. “There’s nothing here about a glass of water.”

We were both still wondering about Sir Philip Sidney’s glass of water when I kissed her before leaving. She knew I would be coming back to see her on Tuesday. “I’ll look it up before then,” I promised.

Elizabeth David, born Dec. 26, 1913, died in London, May 22, 1992.