Elizabeth David Book

The immense allure of the late Elizabeth David's writings--at least in the early books of the 1950s with which she made her name--rests not so much in the recipes which are their ostensible subject as in the vividly rendered evocations of the landscapes, the harbours and marketplaces of the Mediterranean where she gathered them and which so dazzled in the austerity of post-war Britain. The introductory sections of French Provincial Cooking, for example, describing the regions of France and their cuisines, are seductive travel writing of the highest order. Yet the author herself, though present, remains elusive. There are hints of the details of a life: she was, after all Mrs David (but who was Mr David?); there are the habitual references to "we" in the accounts of the travels; there is the intriguing friendship with the raffish Norman Douglas. Lisa Chaney's Elizabeth David exhaustively fill the gaps between these biographical scraps. The picture that emerges is a mixture of the expected and the unexpected. The expected includes the patrician, cosmopolitan upbringing, the travelling, the wide circle of artistic, bohemian friends. The unexpected might include rebellion against her family, and an early (unsuccessful) attempt at a career on the stage; flight from England and all it represented; greyness and failure; on a yacht with a rather exotic lover just before the outbreak of war. The wartime Mediterranean exile that followed was what crystallised, on her return to England at the end of the war, into the writing career we are more familiar with. Lisa Chaney brings an impressive richness of detail and a fine empathy to bear on the this life of a complex, often troubled woman who was unquestionably the finest food writer in English of the 20th Century. --Robin DavidsonRead More