[3] 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.

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.

He considers the opening section to contain "perhaps the most evocative and inspirational passage in the history of British cookery writing":[1] The cooking of the Mediterranean shores, endowed with all the natural resources, the colour and flavour of the South, is a blend of tradition and brilliant improvisation.

The ever recurring themes in the food throughout these countries are the oil, the saffron, the garlic, the pungent local wines...[1]Lehmann commissioned a coloured dust-jacket painting and black and white internal illustrations from his friend the artist John Minton.

For example, his port scene shows a sailor[a] drinking and conversing with a young woman beside a table laden with food; in the background is a street restaurant and boats in a harbour.

[14] The eggs and luncheon dish section likewise balances the concise and simple such as ratatouille aux oeufs against the detailed and discursive three-page consideration of omelettes.

[18] Mutton, by contrast, was more often served then than in more recent decades, and David gives four recipes for it, one of them disguising the flavour to taste like venison by long marinating and highly seasoned saucing.

"[28] The celebrity cook Clarissa Dickson Wright comments that the book was "a breath of fresh air in the years of austerity that followed the Second World War, and [David's] espousal of excellent, well-prepared ingredients has become the hallmark of English food at its best.

"[30] Caroline Stacey, writing in The Independent, calls the book "her hymn of longing to the cooking around the southern shores", noting that it "changed what the British middle classes ate", and that she "ushered not only olive oil and garlic, but also aubergines, courgettes and basil on to the stripped-pine tables of 1960s kitchens.

She comments that the cookery writer Jane Grigson, a "devotee", said "Basil was no more than the name of bachelor uncles, courgette was printed in italics as an alien word, and few of us knew how to eat spaghetti ... Then came Elizabeth David, like sunshine."

McDonagh adds that David "was one of the first and much the classiest of the personality food writers, even though she was never a telly chef: paving the way for Jamie, Nigella, Nigel and Hugh F-W."[32] Dissenting from the general acclaim, Tom Norrington-Davies, also writing in The Telegraph, argues that the book "reached only a very small section of the population", but at once qualifies this, stating that these readers were "undergoing a dramatic upheaval.

He cites Jane Grigson's observation, introducing a collection of David's writing, that "Elizabeth didn't so much restore [middle-class women's] confidence in cooking as invent it".

"The ration-weary English could barely buy enough to eat but they were enchanted by her descriptions of meals that included eggs, butter, seafood, tomatoes, olives, apricots, ingredients that were difficult, or impossible, to obtain.