Food - Never mind Elizabeth David's private life; it's her books that matter, argues Bee Wilson
The story of Elizabeth David has been told many times, but usually it is the same story. The Englishwoman transfigured by the Mediterranean, who in turn transformed the English diet; the admirer of figs and ripe tomatoes and olivey mayonnaise who balked at the drab ration-book diet of the postwar years and encouraged us to eat Suleiman's pilaff instead; the tempestuous lover who concealed her stormy inner-life behind a carapace of restrained prose and authentic French cookware. These familiar legends are being circulated yet again to advertise Writing at the Table, Artemis Cooper's official biography of the woman who hated to be called "the doyenne of cookery writers".
Some people are under the impression that olive oil was never so much as sniffed in England before David's limpid prose wrote it into existence. Others think she was unanswerably right in every particular, incapable of error, possessed of an innate perfect pitch of the taste buds. I hope it won't be thought disrespectful to her magnificent legacy if I prod these notions a little.
Cold chicken mixed with grapefruit pulp and piled back into the pithy shell; drop scones; crushed almonds spiced up with Sharwood's chutney and baked in the oven on cheese biscuits (Bengal Croutes); cheese loafers; prunes a l'Indienne. These homely offerings were among the entries in Elizabeth's first cookery book written in an exercise book in 1937, a present for her friend Marian Butterworth. They sound like quaint titbits at a Tupperware party. Juvenilia are meant to be juvenile, but these recipes remind us that an appreciation of aubergines and daubes perfumed with orange peel and bay is not a natural but an acquired attribute. She worked hard at it.
Nor was the mature Elizabeth David always sitting down to the perfect moules a la Marseillaise. In later years, according to Cooper, "she lived on Roka cheese biscuits, omelettes, Parma ham and the occasional delivery of oysters or smoked salmon". After a cerebral haemorrhage in 1963 she didn't entirely trust her sense of taste and never enjoyed cooking as much; like a deaf Beethoven, she struggled brilliantly and instinctively to find the necessary formulae. Occasionally she got it wrong. The quantities of salt in her English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977) are excessive, even allowing for spreading the bread with fine unsalted butter. She wrote in praise of ready-grated parmesan, despite having been taught by Norman Douglas always to carry a hunk of the real thing about one's person when dining out in France. Her tolerance of raw garlic and onion was considerable. And she never quite saw the point of real coffee, happily drinking flasks of Nescafe as she wrote.
These blips only stand out, though, because her writing as a whole was so perfectly judged, whether she was sceptical (on food processors and nouvelle cuisine), informative (on how to prove bread or make hollandaise) or passionate (on seafood in a Venetian market or glowing apricots or the "ointment" of aioli). But as for the notion that her oeuvre moulded our daily diet - if only! We are still in the thrall of what she called "wrapped, sliced loaves from the factory" at home and "finicky and often inept arrangements" when dining out. David's recipes for Potage Crecy and cream of turnip soup are still much rarer suppers than tinned and packeted sludge. As for introducing the English to olive oil and saffron, these ingredients were known in this country for centuries before A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950), as its scholarly author well knew. The greatest debt we owe to David is not for oils on a supermarket shelf or some hackneyed story of wartime lovers in the Mediterranean, but simply for her books.
"Writing at the Table" is published by Michael Joseph, £20
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