A Book of Mediterranean Food

Elizabeth David (1913-1992) was brought up in an outwardly idyllic seventeenth-century Sussex farmhouse, Wootton Manor, and her interest in cooking may well have been a response to the less-than-stellar meals on offer there. During World War II she lived in France, Italy, Greece, and Egypt (where she worked for the Ministry of Information), and spent much of her time researching and cooking local fare. On her return to London in 1946, David began to write cooking articles, and in 1949 the publisher John Lehmann offered her a hundred-pound advance for A Book of Mediterranean Food. When it came out the following year, it proved a revelation to Anglo-Saxon appetites. Summer Cooking (1955, also published by NYRB Classics) consolidated her position as the foremost food writer of her day. David continued to be a student of her art throughout her life. Always an innovative force, she even persuaded Le Creuset to extend its range of cookware colors by pointing at a pack of Gauloises. "That's the blue I want," she said. Elizabeth David was awarded a CBE, made a Chevalier de l'Ordre de Mérite Agricole, and—the honor that pleased her most—elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. »

Clarissa Dickson Wright is best known as half of TV's Two Fat Ladies duo and cowrote that series' cookbooks. Her other books include The Haggis: A Little History (1996) and Food: What We Eat and How We Eat (1999). »

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. In bleak postwar Great Britain, when basics were rationed and fresh food a fantasy, David set about to cheer herself—and her audience—up with dishes from the south of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the Middle East. Some are sumptuous, many are simple, most are sublime.

Read the foreword (PDF)

Reviews

When you read Elizabeth David, you get perfect pitch. There is an understanding and evocation of flavours, colours, scents and places that lights up the page.
— Guardian Weekend

Mediterranean Food changed forever the way my parents' generation thought about cooking. It was as though everything before then had been in black and white; now it was in color. And even today, a half-century later, anyone truly interested in food has a well-thumbed and spotted copy of that book on the kitchen shelf.
— The New York Observer

Quite simply a love story. It tells, in the most beautiful words, of a woman's passion for the warmth of the sun, the peoples of the Mediterranean, and the pleasure to be found in food.
— Daily Telegraph

Every time I reread one of Elizabeth David's books, I discover details to inspire me anew. Her words reach all my senses. The life around the table, the setting, the conversation—not just the food—are all part of her inimitable aesthetic.
— Alice Waters

Elizabeth David was a liberator; perhaps it is not absurd to compare her effect on a certain sector of tired, hungry, impoverished fifties Britain with Kinsey's effect on America. She wrote as she cooked: with simplicity, purity, color, self-effacing authority, and a respect for tradition.
— Julian Barnes, The New Yorker

Also see:

Summer Cooking
By Elizabeth David
Foreword by Molly O'Neill

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.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.95
Price: $11.21 (25% off)

Apr 30, 2002
222 pages
ISBN: 1590170032
9781590170038
NYRB Classics
Food & Wine

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