At the Table with Elizabeth David

Elizabeth David, who I think is the Julia Child of Britain, was an inspirational writer who brought French and Italian cooking into the British home. She discovered her taste for good food and wine when she lived with a French family while studying history and literature at the Sorbonne.

Most of her early food journeys and experiences in the culinary world were during the onset of the second world war. From fleeing the German occupation of France; leaving Antibes for Corsica and then onto Italy; eventually being deported to Greece; living on the Greek island of Syros; fled to Crete when the Germans invaded Greece; rescued by the British and evacuated to Egypt, where she lived firstly in Alexandria and later in Cairo. Elizabeth David had travelled all around the Mediterranean and she even went to India for awhile.

Living what can only be described as an extraordinary life, Elizabeth David discovered the joy and pleasure of cooking. Her encounters with food were sensual, exciting and honest. These were included in her first book 'Mediterranean Cooking', published in 1950, a time when rationing was still going on in Britain and essential ingredients for a good meal were pretty much unattainable. Reading David's book was a way to free the British from the frustration of not being able to get what they wanted. It brought them warmth & comfort thinking about real food cooked with butter, olive oil, eggs and dishes flavored with all kinds of herbs, spices, garlic and onions.

Browsing through Hager Books in Kerrisdale (Vancouver) last summer, I was very lucky to have found the second revised edition (1965) of this book, now called 'A Book of Mediterranean Food'. After only reading the first chapter of this book on 'Soups', I knew right away that Elizabeth David is going to give me the true essence of Mediterranean cooking - unpolished, authentic and striped to its core. Every chapter begins with a quote, an excerpt from an article or a letter to a friend, giving you a taste of what's to come next.

Here's a glimpse of the introduction to get you started:

"It is honest cooking, too; none of the sham Grande Cuisine of the International Palace Hotel. ...The ever recurring elements in the food throughout these countries are the oil, the saffron, the garlic, the pungent local wines; the aromatic perfume of rosemary, wild marjoram, and basil drying in the kitchens; the brilliance of the market stalls piled high with pimentos, aubergines, tomatoes, olives, melons, figs and limes; the great heaps of shiny fish ... the butchers' stalls are festooned with every imaginable portion of the inside of every edible animal (anyone who has lived for long in Greece will be familiar with the sound of air gruesomely whistling through sheep's lungs frying in oil)."

The book is divided into 11 sections, filled with delightful dishes. The recipes are delivered in a way that is informal and very approachable even when Elizabeth David is talking about how to tackle and stuff an entire sheep. Some recipes were left untranslated, such as Gigot a la Provencale - left in its original French. Since each chapter is filled with a repertoire of recipes from all over the Mediterranean, you can easily see the difference between an Italian beef stew (Boeuf a l'Italienne) and a Greek ragout/stew (Stiphado). Sometimes the difference is just whether lard was used in place of olive oil or whether the recipe called for thyme or marjoram.

For more classic dishes, such as the Bouillabaisse, Elizabeth David took the time to detailedly explain the origins of the dish and what the traditional ingredients were, as she said, "We have rather prolonged this article but this demonstration was necessary; out of ten cookery books nine will give it incorrectly".

One of my favourite recipes in this book is the Cassoulet Toulousain, in the 'Substantial Dishes' chapter. This is a great dish which French regional cookery has produced and Elizabeth David has eloquently told the story behind it. It is perhaps the most typical of true country food, the genuine, abundant, earthy, richly flavoured and patently simmered dish of the ideal farmhouse kitchen. This is a dish that I don't think I will be able to make as "tinned beans and sausages served in an earthenware casserole do not, alas, constitute a cassoulet". But just reading about it makes me happy in this cold and rainy day.

I can go on and on about this wonderful book and can't wait to read the rest of her works. With a total of 9 published books, Elizabeth David has changed the outlook of English cooks forever.