In the original dust jacket. Navy cloth binding with silver title on the spine.

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For conditions please view our photographs. In the 1950s, Elizabeth David helped transform British attitudes to cooking and eating with the publication of “Mediterranean Food”. This book takes the reader behind the hints of autobiography in her own titles, and reveals the cookery writer’s life.

Review: The immense allure of the late Elizabeth David’s writings–at least in the early books of the 1950s with which she made her name–rests not so much in the recipes which are their ostensible subject as in the vividly rendered evocations of the landscapes, the harbours and marketplaces of the Mediterranean where she gathered them and which so dazzled in the austerity of post-war Britain. The introductory sections of French Provincial Cooking, for example, describing the regions of France and their cuisines, are seductive travel writing of the highest order. Yet the author herself, though present, remains elusive. There are hints of the details of a life: she was, after all Mrs David (but who was Mr David?); there are the habitual references to “we” in the accounts of the travels; there is the intriguing friendship with the raffish Norman Douglas. Lisa Chaney’s Elizabeth David exhaustively fill the gaps between these biographical scraps. The picture that emerges is a mixture of the expected and the unexpected. The expected includes the patrician, cosmopolitan upbringing, the travelling, the wide circle of artistic, bohemian friends. The unexpected might include rebellion against her family, and an early (unsuccessful) attempt at a career on the stage; flight from England and all it represented; greyness and failure; on a yacht with a rather exotic lover just before the outbreak of war. The wartime Mediterranean exile that followed was what crystallised, on her return to England at the end of the war, into the writing career we are more familiar with. Lisa Chaney brings an impressive richness of detail and a fine empathy to bear on the this life of a complex, often troubled woman who was unquestionably the finest food writer in English of the 20th Century. —Robin Davidson

Elizabeth David CBE (née Gwynne, 26 December 1913 – 22 May 1992) was a British cookery writer. In the mid-20th century she strongly influenced the revitalisation of home cookery in her native country and beyond with articles and books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes.

Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. In the 1930s she studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated. They reached Greece, where they were nearly trapped by the German invasion in 1941, but escaped to Egypt, where they parted. She then worked for the British government, running a library in Cairo. While there she married, but she and her husband separated soon after and subsequently divorced.

In 1946 David returned to England, where food rationing imposed during the Second World War remained in force. Dismayed by the contrast between the bad food served in Britain and the simple, excellent food to which she had become accustomed in France, Greece and Egypt, she began to write magazine articles about Mediterranean cooking. They attracted favourable attention, and in 1950, at the age of 36, she published A Book of Mediterranean Food. Her recipes called for ingredients such as aubergines, basil, figs, garlic, olive oil and saffron, which at the time were scarcely available in Britain. Books on French, Italian and, later, English cuisine followed. By the 1960s David was a major influence on British cooking. She was deeply hostile to anything second-rate, to over-elaborate cooking, and bogus substitutes for classic dishes and ingredients. In 1965 she opened a shop selling kitchen equipment, which continued to trade under her name after she left it in 1973.

David’s reputation rests on her articles and her books, which have been continually reprinted. Between 1950 and 1984 she published eight books; after her death her literary executor completed a further four that she had planned and worked on. David’s influence on British cooking extended to professional as well as domestic cooks, and chefs and restaurateurs of later generations such as Terence Conran, Simon Hopkinson, Prue Leith, Jamie Oliver, Tom Parker Bowles and Rick Stein have acknowledged her importance to them. In the US, cooks and writers including Julia Child, Richard Olney and Alice Waters have written of her influence.