A. Davidson, 79; Diplomat, Food Writer

Alan Davidson, a food writer and the center of a worldwide network of culinary scholars, died Tuesday at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital after losing consciousness at his home a few hours earlier. He was 79.

In recent years, he had suffered from various health problems and walked with two canes, but on Nov. 5 he was able to accept the Dutch government’s prestigious Erasmus Prize in Amsterdam.

In this country, Davidson was best-known for “The Oxford Companion to Food,” which spent several weeks on the Los Angeles Times Food Section’s bestseller list in 1999 and occasionally outsold “The Fannie Farmer Cookbook” on Amazon.com, despite a $60 price tag. The 900-page book, subsequently reprinted in paperback as “The Penguin Companion to Food,” took 18 years to write and presented an immense amount of information about ingredients, food preparation and the world’s cuisines in a disarmingly light, whimsical tone.

Writing was Davidson’s second career, taken up after an earlier life as a diplomat. Around his neck he often wore the Order of St. Michael and St. George, a royal decoration regularly given to British diplomats upon retiring.

At the same time, he might have been wearing half a dozen fraying cotton strings around his left wrist. The strings derived from Laotian friendship ceremonies. As the last British ambassador to Laos, Davidson was active in settling Laotian refugees in England.

Davidson was born in what was then known as Londonderry, Northern Ireland. After serving in the Royal Navy during World War II, he studied the classics at Oxford and joined the British Foreign Service in 1948.

In 1951, while stationed in Washington, D.C., he married Jane Macatee, the daughter of American diplomat Robert Macatee, who was U.S. consul general in Jerusalem at the time of Israel’s independence.

There followed postings for Davidson to the Netherlands, Egypt and Tunisia, and stints as head of the Central Department of the British Foreign Office and as part of the United Kingdom’s delegation to NATO. His last diplomatic posting was to Laos, which he left in 1975 as Vientiane was falling to the communists.

His writing career had begun in 1963 while he was stationed in Tunisia. There, in response to his wife’s queries about the unfamiliar fish in local markets, he wrote a little pamphlet on the local seafood that included as much information about the various fish -- their biology and habits, how they are fished -- as it did recipes.

“Seafood of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean” was sold to raise money for the Tunisian Red Crescent, and the first impressions of Davidson’s five subsequent fish books were also charitable fundraisers.

The English food writer Elizabeth David eventually saw the book and encouraged Davidson to expand it as “Mediterranean Seafood,” which was published in 1972. In 1975, Davidson took early retirement and returned to London to be a food writer.

In 1979, he published a booklet with a characteristically disarming name, “Petits Propos Culinaires,” containing essays by food writers, including Elizabeth David and Richard Olney (writing as Nathan d’Aulnay).

In response to public demand, it became a quarterly publication, which the Davidsons edited for 63 issues from their home in Chelsea before handing off the duties to a colleague.

The quarterly became known for publishing offbeat contributions to food knowledge, from the use of insects as flavorings to quibbles about which 18th-century food writers had plagiarized from which.

Davidson went on to write 10 more books about food and to edit two others, the most recent being “The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy,” an anthology of writings from “Petits Propos Culinaires.” He also founded Prospect Books to reprint historical cookbooks. At the time of his death, he was working on a book about a nonfood interest of his, American screwball comedies of the 1930s.

Also in 1979, he organized the first Oxford Symposium on Food at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, where he was a senior associate member. This became an annual event drawing food scholars -- mostly eager amateurs, not academics -- from around the world.

All these activities made Davidson the center of a worldwide network of “scholar foodies.” He maintained a wide correspondence, and many of his correspondents would go on to contribute to “Petits Propos Culinaires,” present papers at the Oxford symposium or make their expertise available for “The Oxford Companion to Food.”

He is survived by his wife and three daughters.