Alan Davidson (food writer)

Alan Eaton Davidson CMG (30 March 1924 – 2 December 2003) was a British diplomat and writer best known for his writing and editing on food and gastronomy.

After leaving Queen's College, Oxford, in 1948, Davidson joined the British diplomatic service, rising through the ranks to conclude his career as ambassador to Laos, from 1973 to 1975.

[2] While the Davidsons were living in Tunis, Jane asked her husband to look for a cookery book on fish because she did not recognise any of the local varieties and was unsure how they should be cooked.

[1] Not being able to find one he wrote one himself: Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean "a handbook giving the names of 144 species in 5 languages, with a list of molluscs, crustaceans, and other marine creatures, and notes on cooking".

The British cooking guru Elizabeth David gave it a good review in The Spectator and introduced Davidson to Jill Norman, her editor at Penguin Books; in 1972 Penguin published his Mediterranean Seafood, described by his biographer Paul Levy as "a revolutionary combination of scientific taxonomy along with the vernacular names of the fish, visual illustrations of them, and recipes for cooking them".

"[9] Davidson died on 2 December 2003 at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, of heart failure, aged 79; he was survived by his wife and their three daughters.

[1][2] Davidson accepted the award of the CMG on his retirement, but later regretted it, deleted mention of it from his Who's Who entry and refused further offers of official government recognition.