Elizabeth David
Elizabeth David, CBE was a British cookery writer. In the mid-20th century she strongly influenced the revitalisation of home cookery. Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms. She studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man.
About Elizabeth David in brief
Elizabeth David, CBE was a British cookery writer. In the mid-20th century she strongly influenced the revitalisation of home cookery in her native country and beyond. Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. She studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated. They reached Greece, where they were nearly trapped by the German invasion in 1941, but escaped to Egypt. She then worked for the British government, running a library in Cairo. While there she married, but she and her husband separated soon after and subsequently divorced. In 1946 David returned to England, where food rationing imposed during the Second World War remained in force. Dismayed by the contrast between the bad food served in Britain and the simple, excellent food to which she had become accustomed in France, Greece and Egypt, she began to write magazine articles about Mediterranean cooking. In 1950, at the age of 36, she published A Book of Mediterranean Food. Her recipes called for ingredients such as aubergines, basil, figs, garlic, olive oil and saffron, which at the time were scarcely available in Britain. By the 1960s David was a major influence on British cooking. She was deeply hostile to anything second-rate, and to over-elaborate cooking and bogus substitutes for classic dishes and ingredients. In 1965 she opened a shop selling kitchen equipment, which continued to trade under her name after she left it in 1973.
Between 1950 and 1984 she published eight books; after her death her literary executor completed a further four that she had planned and worked on. David’s influence extended to professional as well as domestic cooks, and chefs and restaurateurs of later generations such as Terence Conran, Simon Hopkinson, Prue Leith, Jamie Oliver, Tom Parker Bowles and Rick Stein have acknowledged her importance to them. David was of English, Scottish and Welsh or Irish descent and, through an ancestor on her father’s side, also Dutch and Sumatran. She and her sisters grew up at Wootton Manor in Sussex, a seventeenth-century manor house with extensive, early twentieth-century additions by Detmar Blow. Her father, despite having a weak heart, insisted on pursuing a demanding political career, becoming Conservative MP for Eastbourne, and a junior minister in Bonar Law’s government. She found her Sorbonne studies arduous and in many ways uninspiring, but they left her with a love of French literature and French culture. She lodged with a Parisian family, whose fanatical devotion to the pleasures of the table she portrayed in her French Provincial Cooking… Nevertheless, she acknowledged in retrospect that the experience had been the most valuable part of her time in Paris: “I realized in what way the family had instilled their task of instilling French culture into their charges.”
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This page is based on the article Elizabeth David published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 02, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
