Traveling with Elizabeth David

Published in the Radcliffe Culinary Times

I first encountered Elizabeth David when I was an English PhD student in California, where I spent five years researching and writing about David’s devotion to culinary pleasure. In particular, I was drawn towards David’s rebellious nature, towards her celebration of sensual pleasure during a time when women were taught to renounce their own appetites. The longer I pored over David’s prose, cooked her recipes and read those authors she most admired, the more I appreciated her as a culinary tourist, who could not only savor the subtle, mysterious, and unfamiliar flavors of a foreign land but also digest them in such a way that they became firmly embedded in her approach towards life. She was a true culinary tourist a half century before the term was even coined by folklorist Lucy Long.

Just reading David’s cookbooks and magazine articles enabled me to travel to distant shores and to taste the flavors of the way of life she so evocatively captured in her prose. Even on those days when I never set foot outside my home, I journeyed well beyond the confines of the small university town where I worked and slept. I spent hours each day voyaging throughout the Mediterranean, tasting dishes in my mind. Each weekend, I’d jot down the ingredients of the most mysterious and unfamiliar recipes and drive to the local Davis, California, farmers’ market, to Sacramento, even into San Francisco to gather the materials needed to cook those dishes that most haunted my imaginationSo, each time I found myself flagging, unable to churn out the next sentence, or even the next word, I rose from the computer, walked the three small steps it took to enter my kitchen, and found sustenance in washing, chopping, sautéing, braising, and flambéing my way through A Book of Mediterranean Food.

As those who’ve cooked from Mediterranean Food know so well, the recipes more often provide an engaging sketch of a dish, its spirit so to speak, than a detailed description of the steps needed to reproduce it in a manner befitting the company we’d like to keep. At the best of times, I shuddered with delight on tasting my translation of a dish, at middling times I jotted notes on how to revise my approach the next go around, and on two occasions, I howled “dinnie time” to my canine companion, Julep, before ceremoniously plating her dog dish with the failed experiment. Regardless of the outcome, David proved an incisive instructor.

Translating David’s recipe “sketches,” even those that I mangled into dog food, taught me invaluable lessons. Each of these hands-on encounters expanded my American perspective on a recipe into a more Mediterranean one, encouraging me to be less bound to follow instruction and more reliant on instinct. By composing rather than formatting recipes, David engages the reader’s imagination, requiring the cook to participate in the creation of a dish. David likewise provides instruction on the attitude towards cookery, and the way of life that give rise to the dishes she so evocatively describes.

The inspiration provided to home cooks and chefs alike by David’s recipes arises largely from her uncanny attunement to place; the importance of place to the flavor of a dish and its ingredients constitutes one of the key messages in David’s writing. David first learned the connection between flavor and terroir from her mentor, Norman Douglas, who studied “the original sources of his food and wine.”David illustrates one of the most important lessons Douglas taught her.

Once during the last summer of his life, on Capri, I took him a basket of figs from the market in the piazza. He asked me from which stall I had bought them. “The one down nearest the steps.” “Not bad, my dear, not bad. Next time, you could try Graziella. I fancy you’ll find her figs are sweeter; just wait a few days if you can.”

He knew, who better, from which garden those figs came; hewas familiar with the history of the trees; he knew their age and inwhat type of soil they grew; he knew by which tempests, blights, invasions, and plagues that particular property had or had not been affected during the past three hundred years, how many times it had changed hands, [...] that the son now grown up was a man less graspingthan his neighbors and was consequently in less of a hurry to pick and sell his fruit before it ripened. (An Omelette and a Glass of Wine,New York, Lyon’s 1997, p. 123).

David colors her cookbooks and journalism with just such particulars of place, but her focus lies less in the details of the growing process than it does in the details of flavor imparted by a particular terroir. Thus, when David described the most exquisite fruits, vegetables, or prepared dishes she encountered, the place where she ate them and where the ingredients were gathered inevitably come into play.

In addition to the importance of terroir, David’s early cookbooks convey the regional attitude towards food and cookery from which a given recipe derives; these attitudes invariably reflect the regional rhythms of life. For example, she closes the recipe for “Pan Bania” (a Provençal sandwich) in Mediterranean Food as follows:

Pan Bania is served in Provençal cafés with a bottle of wine when agame of boules is in progress. The ingredients vary according to what is in season, or what is available. There may be anchovies, gherkins, artichoke hearts, lettuce. Probably it is the origin of salad niçoise which is made with the same variety of ingredients, but without the bread (Elizabeth David Classics, New York: Knopf, 1980, pp. 159-160).

With this simple sketch of a Provençal sandwich, David conveys the improvisation that accompanies the relaxed café lifestyle. By concluding the recipe with the remark that the French prepare the pan bania according to what is in season and within easy reach, David encourages her readers to do the same. And, while the pan bania prepared in England or in the United States will never have the same flavor as one created in Provence, it can be concocted with the same improvisational flair; the taste may be different, but by replicating the relaxed, intuitive manner with which it is prepared and eaten, David’s readers can bring a bit of the Provençal approach towards cookery as well as towards life into their home kitchens.

By conveying the attitudes towards cookery as well as the daily rhythms of the Mediterranean, David provides her readers with far more than a reliable recipe; she demonstrates the power of culinary tourism to reconfigure our inherited belief system. For David, this meant honing a more reverent approach towards food and the body than that practiced in her home country; she exercised a reverence for the pleasures of good food and wine. David so skillfully captured the sensual pleasures, the aromas, and the flavors of Mediterranean life that she has provided sustenance to generations of readers – from her compatriots of the 1950s, who hungered for the flavors of fresh ingredients unobtainable on their war-ravaged shores, to a twenty-first century American student eager to imbibe the wisdom embodied in her luscious prose.