Elizabeth David bibliography

Elizabeth David, the British cookery writer, published eight books in the 34 years between 1950 and 1984; the last was issued eight years before her death. After David's death, her literary executor, Jill Norman, supervised the publication of five more books, drawing on David's unpublished manuscripts and research and on her published writings for books and magazines.

David's first five books, particularly the earlier works, contained recipes interspersed with literary quotation and descriptions of people and places that inspired her. By the time of her third book, Italian Food, David had begun to add sections about the history of the cuisine and the particular dishes that she wrote about. Her interest in the history of cooking led her in her later years to research the history of spices, baking, and ice.

Many of the recipes in David's early books were revised versions of her articles previously published in magazines and newspapers, and in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1984) she collected her favourites among her articles and presented them unedited with her afterthoughts appended. A second volume of reprinted articles was published after her death. David's biographer, Artemis Cooper, wrote, "She was hailed not only as Britain's foremost writer on food and cookery, but as the woman who had transformed the eating habits of middle-class England."

David's interest in cooking was sparked by a 21st birthday gift from her mother of The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel, her first cookery book. She later wrote, "I wonder if I would have ever learned to cook at all if I had been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from, instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel with her rather wild, imagination-catching recipes."

In 1938, David and a boyfriend travelled through France to Antibes, where she met and became greatly influenced by the ageing writer Norman Douglas, about whom she later wrote extensively. He inspired her love of the Mediterranean, encouraged her interest in good food, and taught her to "search out the best, insist on it, and reject all that was bogus and second-rate." She continued her exploration of Mediterranean food and the use of fresh, local ingredients in Greece in 1940. When the Germans invaded Greece in April 1941, she fled to Egypt. There, she and her employer engaged a Greek cook who, she wrote, produced magnificent food: "The flavour of that octopus stew, the rich wine dark sauce and the aroma of mountain herbs was something not easily forgotten." In 1942, she moved to Cairo, where she was asked to set up and run the Ministry of Information's reference library. The library was open to everyone and was much in demand by journalists and other writers. She employed a Sudanese suffragi (a cook-housekeeper) of whom she recalled:

...
Wikipedia