Summer Cooking

By Elizabeth David
Foreword by Molly O'Neill

For the great English food writer Elizabeth David, summer fare means neither tepid nor timid. Her stress is always on fresh, seasonal food—recipes that can be quickly prepared and slowly savored, from Gnocchi alla Genovese ("simply an excuse for eating pesto") to La Poule au Pot to Gooseberry Fool. Divided into such sections as Soup, Poultry and Game, Vegetables, and Dessert, her 1955 classic includes an overview of herbs as well as chapters on impromptu cooking for holidays and picnics. Chockablock with both invaluable instructions and tart rejoinders to the pallid and the overblown, Summer Cooking is a witty, precise companion for feasting in the warmer months.

Read the foreword (PDF)

Reviews

Decorated with a portrait of twin cherries, yellow runner beans, and the sweet, petite wild strawberries known as frais de bois, to urban eyes starved of July's sensual delights, the sunny cover of Summer Cooking seems to promise a storybook world...Summer Cooking is a wonderfully subversive volume—every bit as unexpected and enchanting to read today as it must have been 50 years ago...The purest thrill of Summer Cooking, as in all of David's volumes, is the nearly pugilistic punch of pleasure her food delivers, and the graceful way her bright, well-mannered prose captures the artist's fleeting delight...Whether read in bed in a baking tenement or at the breezy desk of a lolling barge, her words still ring like hypnotic prayers.
— Salon.com

David studies and analyzes cooking the way a scholar analyzes literature, and, as a result, her titles are far more than just cookbooks.
— Library Journal

Savor her book in a comfortable chair, with a glass of sherry.
— Bon Appetit

For Elizabeth David, summer cooking implies a sense of immediacy, the ability to capture the essence of a fleeting moment, and her dishes bring the savour of garden, field and sea into the dining room.
— Taste

Britain's most inspirational food writer who ranks among the world's gastronomic greats . . . Elizabeth David's writing shows no sign of losing its potent appeal, attracting as much respect now as when it was first published.
— Independent

Not only did she transform the way we cooked but she is a delight to read.
— Jennifer Paterson

Elizabeth David stood for: excellence of ingredients, simplicity of preparation, respect for tradition and for region. She stood against: fuss, overdecoration, pretentiousness; 'heaps of vegetables' and 'food tormented into irrelevant shapes'; the castellated radish, the limply supportive lettuce leaf, the worm cast of potato salad.
— Julian Barnes, The New Yorker

Also see:

A Book of Mediterranean Food By Elizabeth David Foreword by Clarissa Dickson Wright Long acknowledged as the inspiration for such modern masters as Julia Child and Claudia Roden, A Book of Mediterranean Food is Elizabeth David's passionate mixture of recipes, culinary lore, and frank talk.

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