A Book of Mediterranean Food
Front cover of the first edition
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| Author | Elizabeth David |
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| Illustrator | John Minton |
| Country | England |
| Subject | Mediterranean cooking |
| Genre | Cookery |
| Publisher | John Lehmann |
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Publication date
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1950 |
A Book of Mediterranean Food was an influential cookery book written by Elizabeth David in 1950, and published by John Lehmann. After years of rationing and wartime austerity, the book brought light and colour back to English cooking, with simple fresh ingredients, from David's experience of Mediterranean cooking while living in France, Italy and Greece. The book was illustrated with quotations from famous writers.
At the time, many ingredients were scarcely obtainable, but the book was quickly recognised as serious, and within a few years it profoundly changed English cooking and eating habits.
Returning to postwar England, still with food rationing, after years living in the Mediterranean with its wealth of fresh ingredients, Elizabeth David found life grey and daunting. The food was terrible: "There was flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles; dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad in the hole. I need not go on."
Partly to earn some money, and partly from an "agonized craving for the sun", David began writing articles on Mediterranean cookery. Her first efforts were published in 1949 in the British magazine Harper's Bazaar. From the outset, David refused to sell the copyright of her articles, and so she was able to collect and edit them for publication in book form. Even before all the articles had been published, she had assembled them into a typescript volume and submitted it to a series of publishers, all of whom turned it down. One of them explained that a collection of unconnected recipes needed linking text.
With this selection...of Mediterranean dishes, I hope to give some idea of the lovely cookery of those regions to people who do not already know them, and to stir the memories of those who have eaten this food on its native shores, and who would like sometimes to bring a flavour of those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees into their English kitchens.
David took this advice, but, conscious of her inexperience as a writer, she kept her own prose short and quoted extensively from established authors whose views on the Mediterranean might carry more weight. In the published volume, the sections are linked by substantial extracts from works by writers including Norman Douglas, Lawrence Durrell, Gertrude Stein, D. H. Lawrence, Osbert Sitwell, Compton Mackenzie, Arnold Bennett, Henry James and Théophile Gautier. She submitted the revised typescript to John Lehmann, a publisher more associated with poetry than cookery, but he accepted it, agreeing to an advance payment of £100. A Book of Mediterranean Food was published in 1950. Lehmann had suggested it be named "The Blue Train Cookery Book", since he supposed that the romance of Mediterranean countries was to be found in the exciting train journeys to reach them.
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