A month or so ago in this column I wrote about America’s first celebrity chef and media darling Julia Child, ‘America’s favourite Culinary Granny’ I called her, going on to compare her to Elizabeth David and pondering, which of them had had the greater influence on the way we cooked and ate in the last half of the 20th century. At the time I came down on the side of Julia Child, mainly because she did in the US what David had done in the UK, thereby influencing more people.
I’ve since changed my mind. Over the past few weeks both women, their lives and times, stayed in mind. If Julia Child was instrumental in bringing America out of culinary barbarity, teaching countless American women the ABC’s of how to cook in the French way, David not only performed the same function in Britain a decade earlier but her role was broader and more universal. David did not teach people how to cook. She gave recipes yes, but her’s was a scholarly and literary, even lyrical approach to food and as such, she influenced the entire English-speaking world, generations of chefs and countless men and women as to the sheer life and libido of food. It was she in fact, who introduced us to what is now the mature cult of the Mediterranean Diet, with all the pleasure, and now health benefits, the phrase implies.
It’s not Italian, it’s Genovese….
A very private person, Elizabeth David refused to become a TV personality, but in English Vogue was the first to combine culinary/travel features with authentic and original photography that has since evolved into what is now inelegantly termed ‘gastro-porn’. For David it was not about grande cuisine, it was all about fresh ingredients and regional variations of cooking. There was no such thing as Italian food to her, it was the food of Genoa, Venice, Tuscany or Naples. It was she more than anybody, along with cheap travel and immigration from Southern Europe, who introduced the English-speaking world to the joys of regional cooking from France, Italy, Greece and the Levant. Her influence did not stop with the food. In 1964 she opened the Elizabeth David Cookshop in Bourne St., Pimlico, containing every type of pot, pan, spoon, mould and knife. Not only did this introduce generations to the accoutrements of the kitchen as effective and aesthetic implements but also the essential rustic and Mediterranean appearance of countless kitchen and dining areas world over.
She later fell out with her partners and quit because they started introducing fashionable but inauthentic items like a garlic crusher. Her later books on real bread and rehabilitation of pre-industrial English cooking also were to have huge influence.
An Interesting Provenance
Both Elizabeth David (1913-92) and Julia Child (1913-2004) had interesting provenance. Born Elizabeth Gwynne of a privileged upper-class, reasonably dysfunctional English family, granddaughter of a Viscount, David kicked over the traces. She was, you could say, a bit of a cross between Nancy and Jessica Mitford, Nancy’s hauteur and Jessica’s radical runaway ways, with the literary flair of both. Having studied at the Sorbonne and then become an actress in rep, she quit England in 1937 on the eve of WW2 in the company of an unsuitable East End actor, conman, sexual charmer and general bad lot, Charles Gibson Cohen. Expelled from Italy, the lovers decamped to Antibes, where she fell under the lifelong influence of that old reprobate and hedonist, writer Norman Douglas. As well as his great love of simple but good food she took to heart Douglas’s Rabelaisian credo “Do what thy wilt”. “Always do as you please”, he told her, “send everybody to Hell, and take the consequences.”
In 1940 as France fell, they departed for Skyros. As Greece in turn fell to the Germans, parting company with Cohen, she ended up in Egypt, via Crete, in 1944 where she sat out the rest of the war, enjoying an active social life in Alexandria and Cairo, working for the Ministry of Information and on her Mediterranean and Levantine recipes. These were to become the body of her work.
The 26-year old David was a beauty: 5”8’ with brown hair, high cheekbones and extraordinary heavy-lidded eyes, her high-handed ways caused even the affable and understated Paddy Leigh Fermor, writer and war-hero, to observe of her in those days, “she was a terrible handful”.
Capital of Big Freeze & Austerity
Losing an inconvenient husband, an Indian Army colonel she had married for security, she returned to Britain in 1946 to the cold sunless world of rationing and smog that was London until 1951. Desperately missing the sun, the aromas and the food of the Mediterranean, she holed up in a hotel with George Lascelles, another unsuitable lover and friend from Cairo days where, appalled by the food and needing money, she wrote her first work “A Book of Mediterranean Food”. Published in 1950 in hardback and later in Pemnguin the book, superbly illustrated by artist John Minton, was greeted with rapturous enthusiasm, touching a national nerve among all those pining for the fresh seafood, eggs and butter, herbs and olive oil, pimentos, figs, almonds and melons – all almost impossible to obtain at the time (apocryphally, olive oil was only available as prescribed medicine from Boots it was said). David, who continued to live a chequered but very private life, went on to a long and distinguished career as a food writer, though she disliked and avoided TV appearances. Her wit and laconic prose not only inspired thousands of cooks and restaurateurs but expanded and revolutionised both the look and the approach to good food throughout the entire English-speaking world.
Elizabeth David died in London in 1992. Two biographies of her colourful life, an unofficial and authorised version, were written in the mid-1990’s by Lisa Chaney and Artemis Cooper respectively, as well as a recent alas uninspired BBC television docu-drama in 2006. ”Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes”.
To the end she hated the thought of ‘food as fashion’ and loathed pretension. Her likely comments on ‘foodyism’ and hi-camp TV cookery are an interesting speculation. She liked to keep it simple, “an omelette and a salad and a piece of cheese - we will have no fuss, but what we have will all be well chosen, and go nicely with a glass of wine”.
