Oxford Foodie

The first time I saw Alan Davidson (and quite a few times since), he was wearing a royal decoration around his neck and a dozen ratty strings around his left wrist. The decoration, the Order of St. Michael and St. George, is often given to British diplomats on retiring; he was the last British ambassador to Laos. The strings are part of a Laotian friendship ceremony to which he scarcely ever refers.

I didn’t imagine that 20 years later he’d publish an encyclopedic work titled “The Oxford Companion to Food” (in bookstores starting later this week). But if you’d asked, I’d have voted for him to be the one to do it.

He was neither the typical food writer nor the typical scholar. His house in London was crowded with the colorful bits of world folk art that people tend to accumulate during a diplomatic career. The stairwell was lined with paintings done in the placid, meditative, not quite naive style of the early Italian Renaissance.

Above all, the place was awash with books. There were bookshelves everywhere, with more books stacked on top and piled beside them on the floor. He had already published studies of Mediterranean, Southeast Asian and North Atlantic seafood, but his interests were truly omnivorous: insects and kitchen implements, fermented products and historical cookbooks, everything related to food.

At that moment in 1980, he was planning to expand his basement to accommodate all the books, though it meant reducing the size of his backyard. In England, where puttering in the garden is a national obsession, this seemed the limit of eccentricity.

The books he’d written were full of well-researched scientific information on fish species, as well as their local names in all the relevant languages (very handy) and detailed cooking tips. But they were written for the general reader, and there was a playful streak, an eye for the odd or charming fact, that ensured that they were never dry.

He’d recently published “Petits Propos Culinaires,” a pamphlet of short essays by food writers such as Richard Olney and Elizabeth David, which struck much the same note of serious but genial scholarship. It was intended as a one-shot charity fund-raiser but soon turned into a regular magazine, although a tiny one that has never carried advertising, published by Alan and his American-born wife, Jane, out of a study in their basement. Its recently published 62nd issue included both a farewell to the late Olney and the announcement of a Web site (https://members.tripod.com/rdeh/index.html).

In 1980, Alan had recently chaired a small symposium at Oxford for people interested in food and cookbooks, and this also took on a life of its own, beginning with the first public Oxford Symposium in 1981. Between the magazine and the annual Symposiums, a loose worldwide network of people with rare knowledge about all aspects of food coalesced around him. He drew on this network when he started work on “The Oxford Companion to Food” that year.

That book turned into a huge project--at one time, he considered suggesting that Oxford University Press publish it as two volumes. And, of course, it meant acquiring more thousands of research books. About 10 years ago, he started renting a flat in his Chelsea neighborhood for “Oxford Companion” purposes, and it soon turned into a maze of bookshelves. At times, you’ve had to walk sideways to get down the hallway.

Now, after 18 long years of work, the book is done, and Davidson is talking about taking a rest from food writing--by writing a book about another interest of his, American screwball comedies of the 1930s. Which will require putting up more bookshelves, I expect.