Elizabeth Craig (chef)

Elizabeth Josephine Craig, MBE, FRSA (16 February 1883 – 7 June 1980) was a Scottish journalist, home economist and one of the most notable British writers on cookery of the twentieth century, whose career lasted some sixty years.

Elizabeth Craig was born in Linlithgowshire (now West Lothian, Scotland) to John Mitchell Craig (then a student of Divinity) and his wife, Catherine Anne Craig (died 3 March 1929). Elizabeth was one of eight children and her father was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. The family lived at the Manse in Memus, Kirriemuir, Scotland.

After having her engagement announced in The Times (a London newspaper) on 11 August 1919, she married American war correspondent and broadcaster Arthur Mann of Washington, D.C. (died 9 June 1973), at St Martin in the Fields Church, Trafalgar Square.

Craig's writing career began in Dundee where she studied journalism. She first published a cookery feature in the Daily Express in 1920, following comments from the Daily Mail's then film editor who declared she was "the only woman in Fleet Street who could cook". Craig was a founding member of the International P.E.N., and at the request of the founder, Catharine Dawson Scott, attended the first meeting of the association at the Florence Restaurant in London where John Galsworthy was elected its first president

Craig started to cook when she was six years old and began collecting recipes from age 12. She declared that the only formal training she had in cookery was a "three months course in Dundee". She began publishing cookery books after the end of World War I and proceeded through World War II and into the 1980s. She began writing in times when food was scarce and rationing was heavily relied upon, and her career ended when the majority of households had a refrigerator and an opportunity to access a much wider variety of foods: this can be observed in her writing as more diverse dishes appear in her later books.

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