Tasting Language: The Aesthetic Pleasure of Elizabeth David

Published in Food, Culture, and Society, 7:1 pp. 37–45

Generations of upper- and middle-class English were raised on nursery food—fare variously described by the more literary of its ingesters as “disgusting,” “spiteful,” “monstrous,” “hateful,” “frightening,” and “repugnant.”[i] Nursery food, along with its philosophical twin, educational food, arose from the widely held Victorian belief that the body must be tamed and its desires strictly controlled or, more ideally, quashed altogether. Thus, from the mid-1800s up through the Second World War, children were made to eat dishes that chastened willfulness and were easily digested. [ii]  By using children’s food as a tool for “control and subjugation,” Victorians not only encouraged fear of food, but also hampered the child’s capacity to enjoy food as an adult.[iii] For those English born in the early twentieth century, the capacity to enjoy food also met with more practical limitations; their graduation from educational fare only meant propulsion into a national diet of powdered eggs and Spam, thanks to the deprivations exacted by the quick succession of two world wars.

Despite, or perhaps because of, such exposure to bleak food, the occasional gastronome would raise a rallying cry to save the English palate. One such rebel was Elizabeth David who, born in 1913, escaped her nation’s table at the age of twenty-one, setting sail with her lover for the Mediterranean. Flouting social expectations that she marry and embrace the stultifying life and the ubiquitous bland food she associated with domesticity, David spent six years eating and studying the cuisines of France, Greece, and Egypt. Upon her return to the English world of “gastronomic joylessness” at the tail end of World War II, David fortified her ravenous compatriots with prose laden with sensual pleasures.[iv]David fed the hunger and imagination of the British public by offering her war-rationed readers—accustomed to dining on oatmeal and potatoes— a recipe for the stuffing of a whole roast sheep, directions for delectable omelettes filled with exotic cheeses, and advice on preparing enormous patés slathered in pork fat.[v]

Nourishing Words

Since the publication of Mediterranean Food in 1950, the English have lauded the evocative power of David’s work, awarding her the Glinfiddich Writer of the Year award in 1977 and electing her a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982. However, scant attention has been paid to the subversive nature of her prose, a subversiveness that arises from David’s articulation of embodied pleasure and her celebration of an aesthetic firmly grounded in the senses. While David developed this aesthetic during six years living in the Mediterranean, she learned to fashion it into language upon her return to England.  Writing about the cuisines of cultures that prize and cultivate the relationship between eating and emotion allowed David to nourish psychological hungers by evoking memories of alimentary pleasure. Thus she combatted the fragmentation and alienation of returning to a war-ravaged homeland by articulating past pleasures in food. In conveying the culinary aesthetic of Mediterranean cultures, David also encouraged her readers to imagine the flavor of fresh ingredients long lost in England’s war efforts and to appreciate the soil, sky, climate, and way of life that flavored the cookery she described. This encouragement saturated her cookbooks devoted to foreign cuisines: A Book of Mediterranean Food (1950), French Country Cooking (1951), Italian Food (1954), and French Provincial Cooking (1960).

Upon returning to England in 1946, David devoted her first six months back in London struggling to gather foods for palatable meals before venturing to Ross-on-Wye for a respite. Instead of relief, however, she found herself trapped by floods and forced to eat meal after meal of “flour and water soup,” “bread and gristle rissoles,” and “dehydrated onions and carrots” (Omelette 21). Returning to her hotel room after one of these meals, David found that

[h]ardly knowing what I was doing, I who had scarcely ever put pen to paper except to write  memos to the heads of departments in the Ministry which employed me during the war, I sat down and...started to work out an agonizing craving for the sun and a furious revolt against the terrible, cheerless, heartless food by writing down descriptions of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking. Even to write words like apricots, olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds, produced assuagement. (Omelette 21)

Thus, while David was unable to eat Mediterranean and Middle Eastern foods in post-war England or to enjoy the sun-baked countryside and pleasant setting of her travels, she reconstituted these experiences in language. She did so by harnessing food’s symbolic resonance to create a sense of well-being from memory, thereby assuaging her “agonizing craving” for another land and time.

David’s self-proclaimed project in Book of Mediterranean Food was to convey “some idea of the lovely cookery of [Mediterranean] 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” (6). To encourage her readers’ connection with the Mediterranean, David saturated her work with sensory images, which—aside from being a natural component of food writing—enabled her to capture a former psychological integrity experienced in “those blessed lands,” to bring the past into the present.  By using language to recreate a previous sensory engagement, David incorporated her Mediterranean experience into her present life, reliving emotional and material plenitude in a time of scarcity. Thus, writing about the foods of foreign lands eased David’s anxiety and cohered a life that seemed fragmented in post-war England. By recreating a particular time, place and flavor through language rather than the material food itself, David used the writing process, or language, as a substitute for food.

Mediterranean Food not only “assuaged” David’s post-war anxiety, but it did wonders for the reading public as well, who responded enthusiastically when the book was published in 1950. Historian Christopher Driver helps to illuminate the enthusiastic British response to David’s recipes. In The British at Table, Driver points out that the food writer’s success depends upon his or her ability to write using language

accurate and imaginative enough to jog people’s memories back to similar tastes and occasions that they can recognise and remember for themselves. Without this sharing of sensory experience, most communication about food fails altogether, although every now and then food writers appear—in our own time notably Elizabeth David and M.F.K. Fisher—whose descriptive and reminiscent powers are more nearly self-sufficient. At their best, one reads under the illusion that one is simultaneously tasting. (130)

The power of David’s writing and the essence that allows her readers to feel that they are “simultaneously tasting” lie in the sensory impressions that saturate her prose. By describing precisely how a given food tastes, smells, and looks, as well as her own physiological response to it, David feeds her readers language filled with sensory impressions.

David began to hone such sensory engagement while living abroad, where she learned that choosing ingredients for their sensual appeal nurtures a connection to the land and its products. Thus, when David described the flavor of exquisite fruits, vegetables, or prepared dishes, she inevitably recorded the place where she ate them and where they grew; these locations were virtually one and the same, given that the most memorable foods David encountered were either eaten where they were grown or in close proximity to their place of origin. When describing her passion for figs, for example, she writes in Italian Food:

No two figs are alike. That is one of the joys of figs, for it makes the perfect one far to seek. For me, the best figs are not Sicilian, nor the flavoury little figs of the Abruzzi. They are the figs from one particular tree in a garden on the Greek island of Euboea—figs with fine skins of a most brilliant green, the fruit itself of a deep rich purple, with more body, less honey sweet, but with a more intense flavour than figs anywhere else in the world. (261)

David’s ability to enjoy the flavor of the Euboean fig and to capture such enjoyment in prose stemmed from her attunement to terroir and the nuanced differences in flavor a given region imparts. By memorializing the beauty of the fig grown by one particular tree on the Grecian island of Euboea, David not only emphasizes the relationship between the flavor of food and the region in which it was grown, but she alsoencourages her readers to taste more carefully and to learn about the origins of their food; she also foregrounds the importance of sensory engagement to eating pleasures.

Expressing Pleasure

The eating pleasures that saturate much of David’s best food writing hold an undeniably erotic appeal, as illustrated by the following three passages. The first, a description of a Toulousain Cassoulet, appears  in Mediterranean Food:

The cassoulet is . . . the genuine, abundant, earthy, richly flavoured and patiently simmered dish of the ideal farmhouse kitchen. Hidden beneath a layer of creamy, golden-crusted haricot beans in a deep, wide, earthen pot, the cassoulet contains garlicky pork sausage, smoked bacon, salt pork . . . perhaps a piece of mutton . . . or half a duck. . . . The beans are tender, juicy, moist . . . aromatic smells of garlic and herbs escape from the pot as the cassoulet is brought smoking hot from the oven to the table. (107)

David’s description largely centers around the consistency of the dish. The cassoulet is “creamy,” “tender, juicy, moist,” and “smoking hot,” adjectives that convey an erotic engagement. Like its texture, the appearance of the cassoulet is vividly depicted as  “golden-crusted”  in a “deep, wide, earthen pot” which “is brought smoking hot from the oven to the table.”

While adjectives abound in David’s description of the cassoulet’s texture and appearance, she devotes noticeably less attention to its smell, which is simply characterized by the “aromatic scent of garlic and herbs,” or to its taste, which is “richly-flavoured.”  In Remembrance of Repasts, David Sutton offers one possible explanation for David’s more cursory description of the aroma and flavor of the cassoulet: appearance is far easier to convey through language than aroma or flavor. [vi] As a result, David often describes aroma using what might be described as “self-reflexive” terms. For example, David writes of the enchantment of a “soufflé omelette aux liqueres, brought to table frothing and spilling over the dish, an aroma of fresh eggs, sizzling butter and mellow liqueur sharpening your senses” (French Provincial Cooking 449). An adjective describes each of the sensory impressions— the “frothing and spilling” texture and the “sizzling” sound— except aroma, which David writes about in a self-reflexive manner; the omelette smells of “fresh eggs.”  When David describes the aroma of a dish as like that of one or more of its ingredients, she relies on the reader’s familiarity with the food about which she is writing. In the case of the cassoulet, the reader must be familiar with  the “aromatic scent of garlic and herbs.” To imagine the omelette, the reader must know the smell of “fresh eggs.”  This self-reflexivity allows David, as Driver observes, to “jog people’s memories back to similar tastes and occasions.”

While such descriptions can trigger memories in the reader who has eaten a similar dish, David circumvents this self-reflexivity at times by foregrounding the erotic nature of a food’s aroma and flavor. The following passage depicts aroma in a way that underscores the pleasure that results from the intermingling of eater and eaten, self and other:

Now there are signs of autumn on the leaves of some of the almond trees. They have turned a frail, transparent auburn, and this morning when I awoke I devoured two of the very first tangerines of the season. In the dawn their scent was piercing and their taste was sharp.... At midday we picked small figs, dusty purple and pale jade green....The flesh is clear garnet red, less rich and more subtle than that of the main-crop fruit, which is of the vernal variety, brilliant green.... To start our midday meal we have, invariably, a tomato and onion salad, a few slices of fresh white cheese, and a dish of olives. The tomatoes are the Mediterranean ridged variety of which I never tire. They are huge, sweet, fleshy, richly red. (Omelette 94)

This scene is typical of David’s writing in its emphasis on the visual. However, it varies markedly from the passages mentioned earlier in that David does not rely on self-reflexive terms to describe the aroma and flavor of the tangerine. Rather, David describes her physiological response to food, depicting the tangerine as an agent that acts on her body. She describes her response using terms that denote penetration, showing that although scent itself may be difficult to translate into language, its effect on the body is not. Any term that denotes an intermingling—the crossing of thresholds, blending, ingestion, introjection—will work to describe the effect of the tangerine because an aroma, like a flavor, literally enters the body, crossing the threshold between self and other.  The tangerine is “sharp” and “piercing” as it enters through the mouth and nose. In turn, the ‘sharp’ and ‘piercing’ scent sediments the memory of the autumn dawn in David’s body; the Spanish morning forms a memory whose erotic pleasure David expressed years later in prose.

By focusing on the precise moment when the self and other merge—on the threshold of incorporation—David captures the aroma and flavor by describing their effect on the boundaries of her body. In so doing, she avoids the self-reflexive terminology that requires the familiarity of her reader with given ingredients. Her description of the cassoulet as “richly-flavoured” and “aromatic” may be “accurate and imaginative enough to jog people’s memories back to similar tastes and occasions that they can recognise and remember for themselves” (Driver 130). However, her depiction of the tangerine as sharp and piercing conveys the process of incorporation, thus encouraging her reader to “feel that they are simultaneously tasting” (Driver 130). Thus  David “feeds” her readers by translating her own physical pleasure into language, a capacity derived from an aesthetic firmly grounded in the body.

As Elsbeth Probyn writes, while we may be ‘articulated’ subjects in that we are “the products of the integration of past practices and structures,” we are also ‘articulating’ subjects’ as “through  our enactment of practices we reforge new meanings, new identities for ourselves” (17). This capacity for transformation was central to David’s own food writing process. In the end, David’s rebellion against the “gastronomic joylessness” of England sparked an adventure that gave her the culinary imagination and hands-on practice needed to challenge the bleak reality of her nation’s cuisine. The Mediterranean taught David to honor food as a source of pleasure and as a medium of artistic expression. In turn, by articulating an aesthetics grounded in the body, David encouraged England to dream once again about the sensual pleasures that arise from eating well-wrought and respectfully-prepared dishes. The recipes around which this dream took shape foreground an alimentary pleasure honed from a receptivity to foreign culinary beliefs and practices. This openness nourished a tantalizing body of work, marked by an astonishing attunement to sensory impressions.

The pleasures of eating and, to a certain extent, sex were a definitive source of inspiration for David, who broke with the conventional female pattern of behavior in both her written work and her personal life.[vii]  During a time when women were expected to feed others and to deny their own hungers, David intermingled with other cultures and learned to stimulate and sate her physical and intellectual appetites. She also refused to view cooking as a scientific equation or eating as a sheer necessity. Rather, she practiced cooking as an artful expression of personal taste and ate in order to stimulate both her mind and body. By insisting that her pleasures be embodied, David bridged the dichotomy which Victorians worked so hard to sustain, encouraging her readers to understand that physical pleasure is not a sin to be controlled and mastered but rather an art to be enhanced and savoured.

Notes

[i]  In Nursery Cooking, Molly Keane writes“I was born in 1904, and by 1908 I had accepted the fact that nursery food was so disgusting that greed, even hunger, must be allayed elsewhere” (7). David describes the horrors of her own experience with nursery food as follows:

Probably some of everyone’s most dismal nursery memories are connected with food. One might come to accept the stewed prunes, the hateful greens, even the tapioca pudding, as part of Nannie’s mysterious lore as to what it was necessary to eat in order to survive the perils of childhood. The miseries of fish days were harder to overcome because the food looked so terrifying even before it was on your plate. Egg sauce didn’t do much to compensate for the black skin and monstrous head of a boiled cod; fish pudding, a few spiteful bones inevitably lying in wait in that viscous mass, and whitings biting their own tails, were frightening dishes for children, and often painful too. (French Provincial 279)

Writing in 1925, cookbook author Hilda Leyel attributes “the repugnance of many English children for green vegetables” to “the dishes of stringy, watery, tasteless, tough green leaves that are sent up for the nursery dinner, a relic of the Victorian days when grown-up people ate far too much meat, and when butter was regarded as a superfluous luxury for children brought up almost exclusively on starch” (Leyel 31).

[ii] In All Manners of Food, Stephen Mennell describes the philosophy behind nursery food and its repercussions as follows:

[T]he notion of food especially suited for children...[was] a matter of making them eat what was good for them whether they liked it or not. At worst, making them eat food to which they actually felt an aversion was seen as a necessary part of breaking the child’s peevish will. . . . [T]he widespread parental anxiety and concern about giving children only very plain, simply cooked, weakly flavoured food must easily have communicated itself to children, and led some of them to remain anxious about food as adults. In the most serious cases, it may have led to the ‘anaesthetising’ of the capacity to enjoy eating.  (296)

[iii]  In The Psychology of Food and Eating, John Smith quotes from V. Mars’ “Parsimony amid Plenty: views from Victorian didactic works on food for nursery children,” in G. Mars and V. Mars (eds), Food Culture and History. Volume I. London: The London Food Seminar, 1993. The cited quote appears in full as follows: “As the nineteenth century progressed…nature [was] increasingly seen as subject to man’s control and subjugation. Children’s food similarly became the vehicle in its turn for heir control and subjugation” (152).

[iv]E. M. Forster uses the phrase “gastonomic joylessness” in the following recollection:

I was returning to England, my country, by one of her boat trains. . . . We sat in a vacuum waiting, waiting for breakfast. . . . At last . . . the attendants came in crying ‘Porridge or Prunes, sir? Porridge or Prunes?’

 . . . .  That cry still rings in my memory. It is an epitome—not, indeed, of English food, but of the forces which drag it into the dirt. It voices the true spirit of gastronomic joylessness. Porridge fills the Englishman up, prunes clear him out, so their functions are opposed. But their spirit is the same: they eschew pleasure and consider delicacy immoral. That morning they looked as like one another as they could. Everything was grey. The porridge was in pallid grey lumps, the prunes swam in grey juice like the wrinkled skulls of old men, grey mist pressed against the grey windows.

[v] When David departed in 1939, the middle and upper class had been “protected by its domestic servants from kitchen tasks” (Driver xi), but by the time she returned, the war had forced housewives to “depend on more modest resources. They . . . learnt quickly how to compose and cook meals for their families after their cooks and kitchen maids had vanished into factories” (Driver 14).  They were aided, in part, by the government, which published educational materials, such as the pamphlet that cautioned women to keep dinner conversation off food shortages and to avoid mentioning the ingredients of the meal before their family had already eaten. This last piece of advice would have been indispensable when serving such dishes as Hasty Pudding with its “six tablespoons of oatmeal, three tablespoons of suet, a pint of cold water and one onion or parsnip” (Minns 91) Other equally bleak dishes printed in cookbooks and pamphlets during this time include a “Mock Fish” made from two ounces ground rice, one-half pint boiling milk, and a teaspoon each of leek, margarine, and powdered egg spread out on a “flat dish” to look like “fish filets” (Minns 140). For dessert, the English had such delicacies to relish as “Mock Marzipan,” with its one-half pound haricot beans which have been soaked overnight in water, placed “on a tin in a warm oven to get dry and floury,” and rubbed through a sieve (Minns128). The cook then added sugar, ground rice, almond essence, and margarine.

[vi] In Remembrance of Repasts, Sutton explains why aroma (and, by extension, flavor) is more difficult to describe than appearance: smell evokes memories which are less cognitive in nature than those evoked by sight. “[S]mells more easily connect  with ‘episodic’ than ‘semantic’ memories (i.e., life-history memories as opposed  to ‘recognition of a phenomenon’ memories)” (89).

[vii] As biographer Lisa Chaney writes of David’s relationships with men: “Her forte lay more in the arena of courtesanship than in the sometimes duller but more enduring one of conjugality” (261).

References

Burnett, John. Plenty & Want: A Social History of the Diet in England from 1815 to Present Day. Rev. ed. London: Scolar, 1979.

Chaney, Lisa. Elizabeth David. London: Macmillan, 1998.

David, Elizabeth. French Country Cooking. 1951. Elizabeth David Classics. New York: Knopf 1980.

            —. French Provincial Cooking. 1960. New York: Penguin, 1999.

            —. Italian Food. 1954. New York: Smithmark, 1996.

—. Mediterranean Food. 1950. Elizabeth David Classics. New York: Knopf, 1980.

            —. An Omelette and a Glass of Wine. 1984. New York: Lyon’s, 1997.

Driver, Christopher. The British at Table: 1940-1980. London: Hogarth, 1983.

Forster, E.M. ‘Porridge or Prunes, Sir?’ We Shall Eat and Drink Again. Eds. Louis Golding and André L.  Simon. Plymouth, Mayflower Press, 1944. 56.

Hardyment, Christina. Slice of Life: The British Way of Eating Since 1945. London: BBC Books, 1995.

Keane, Molly. Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking. London: Macdonald, 1985.

Leyel, Hilda and Olga Hartley. The Gentle Art of Cookery. 1925. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983.

Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle  Ages to the Present. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1996.

Minns, Raynes. Bombers and Mash: The Domestic Front 1939-45. 1980. London: Virago, 1999.

Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Smith, John L. The Psychology of Food and Eating. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Sutton, David. Remembrance of Repasts.  New York: Berg, 2001.