Elizabeth David bibliography

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.

[6] 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.

"[8]Returning to England after the Second World War and her years of access to superior cooking and a profusion of fresh ingredients, David encountered terrible food: "There was flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles; dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad in the hole.

If every kitchen contained a bottle each of red wine, white wine and inexpensive port for cooking, hundreds of store cupboards could be swept clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic aids to flavouring.The remaining chapters of the book follow the pattern of Mediterranean Food: soups; fish; eggs; luncheon, supper and family dishes; meat; poultry; game; vegetables; salads; sweets; sauces; and preserves.

[31] The Times Literary Supplement said, "More than a collection of recipes, this is book is in effect a readable and discerning dissertation on Italian food and regional dishes, and their preparation in the English kitchen.

Yet she refused to participate in what she called the "censorship" of assuming English cooks were too timid or stupid to try anything different; she included recipes for wood pigeon and squid-ink pasta alongside aromatic marinades, wholesome soups and delicious breads.

[41]In addition to those subjects like soups, fish and meat common to all her books to date, David included chapters about hors d'oeuvre and salads, preserves, buffet food, and "Improvised cooking for holidays".

[42] Among her recipes are asparagus with Parmesan cheese, cold roast duck on a bed of fresh mint, paupiettes of sole in lettuce leaves, broad beans with bacon, and aubergines à la Provençale.

[50] A typical example of David's approach in this book is her section on pot-au-feu, which covers six pages, with sub-sections on the choice of meat, the vegetables, the saucepan, quantities, preparation, cooking, serving, using leftovers, and regional variations of the dish.

In these chapters, David writes about the background of the herbs and spices and condiments that came into use in British kitchens over the previous centuries, and sketches the history of their adoption from Asia and continental Europe.

"[56] As David remarked in this section, her approach to measuring out ingredients had changed since her early days: "By temperament a non-measurer, I have myself, first through the wish to communicate recipes and now by force of habit, become the reverse.

I find that the discipline of weighing and measuring does one's cooking nothing but good, provided that one does not waste time messing about with quarter-saltspoons and five-eighths of pints, nor, above all, expect that precision will eliminate the necessity to keep one's head or train one's eye and palate.

"[58] The author does not conceal her dislike for some much-used herbs: sage "deadens the food with its musty dried blood scent" and rosemary "acrid taste … the spiky little leaves get stuck between your teeth.

In The Observer, Hilary Spurling called the book "a scathing indictment of the British bread industry" and also "a history of virtually every development since Stone Age crops and querns".

Spurling rejoiced in the range of David's recipes: "It contains directions for baking anything from the common cob and Coburg to Peggy-tub or Flowerpot bread, Sussex Plum Heavies, Scotch bun and Selkirk bannock, not forgetting splits, baps, muffins, crumpets, wiggs and chudleighs.

Compiled with the assistance of Jill Norman, it consists of David's selections from her essays and articles published since 1949 in publications "from the Sunday Times to Nova, from Vogue to the Spectator, from the long defunct travel magazine Go to Cyril Ray's Compleat Imbiber, Peter Dominic's Wine Mine and a quite a few others.

[73] The food writer Alan Davidson spoke of David's "intellectual vitality, her amazing memory for detail, her passionate interest in getting everything right, her feeling for style in the larger sense," qualities that the chef Rowley Leigh found demonstrated in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine.

[86] Reviewing the work, Candice Rodd wrote: Harvest of the Cold Months is not a cookery book but an awe-inspiring feat of detective scholarship, the literally marvellous story of how human beings came to ingest lumps of flavoured frozen matter for pleasure.

You sense the writer's quiet triumph as she turns the musty, fragile pages of yet another ancient memoir or book of receipts and sees one more piece of the fascinating global jigsaw slip satisfyingly into place.

[85]In The Times, Nigella Lawson wrote that although the book deserved a place on the shelves of anyone who cared about food, it revealed a waning of the author's energies, and "lacks her customary, high-spirited, if fierce, readability".

Cooks and restaurateurs who contributed included Terence Conran, Simon Hopkinson, Prue Leith and Alice Waters; among the writers were Derek Cooper, Paul Levy, Richard Olney and Katharine Whitehorn.

There are more than 200 recipes, organised in the customary way with sections on courses and ingredients – eggs and cheese, fish and shellfish, meat, poultry and game, vegetables, pasta, pulses and grains, sauces, sweet dishes and cakes, preserves, and bread – interspersed, as in David's earlier works, with articles and essays.

[93] The title of the book comes from an essay published in 1964 and reprinted in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, and is a reference to South Wind, a novel by David's greatly loved friend Norman Douglas.

[96] Articles aimed at the domestic cook include "Do not Despair over Rice", "Making Ice Cream", and one propounding a view for which she was famous: "Garlic Presses are Utterly Useless".

Among the papers was an introduction that David had written for the projected volume, in which she said that one of her motives for writing a book about Christmas cooking was to head off the annual last-minute requests for recipes from her friends and relations.

Together with some Christmas recipes from Mediterranean Food, French Provincial Cooking, and Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, and revised articles published in previous years in magazines, they were turned into a 214-page book.

[99] The book reprints one of David's most quoted sentences, first printed in Vogue in 1959, and included in Is there a Nutmeg in the House in 2000: "If I had my way – and I shan't – my Christmas Day eating and drinking would consist of an omelette and cold ham and a nice bottle of wine at lunchtime, and a smoked salmon sandwich with a glass of champagne on a tray in bed in the evening.

"[100] The pattern of the book follows that of earlier ones, with recipes interspersed with more discursive essays on subjects such as avocado pears, persimmons, historical menus, and Christmas hampers, and extracts from prose by writers whom David admired, including Sybille Bedford and George Eliot.

With prefatory contributions from several prominent British chefs including Jamie Oliver, Rose Gray, Simon Hopkinson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, it assembles recipes and essays from David's previously published works.

These chapters are interspersed with reprinted essays and articles from earlier books: "Fast and Fresh"; "Fresh Herbs"; "Confort Anglais, French Fare"; "Pasta Asciutta"; "The Markets of France: Cavaillon"; "My Dream Kitchen"; "Italian Fish Markets"; "Dishes for Collectors"; "Wine in the Kitchen"; "Para Navidad"; "Banketting Stuffe"; "The Baking of an English Loaf"; and "The Italian Pizza and the French Pissaladière".