An ode to one of our greatest food writers. Another to her favorite food writer. Vintage menus she would have loved. A recipe. And time traveling on the radio.
Thank you, Ruth. You’ve, once again, hit a tender spot. Elizabeth David is but one of many reasons why, at age 85, I'm unwilling to whittle down my treasured tomes. My library, incidentally, includes five (maybe more) Reichl titles, beginning with your 1972 "....mmmmm A Feastiary." My brain exercise comes not with Sudoku puzzles in Assisted Living who-knows-where, but by triggering strong memories the mere sight of each cover evokes. These covers bind not merely recipes (many with kitchen stains and marginal notes) but memories of how, why, when and where I acquired the book. Just yesterday, I opened the first cookbook I ever knew: leatherette-covered 1936 Household Searchlight Recipe Book with its unique twenty-size tabs. It fell open to page 185 where "Seven-Minute Icing" carried me back to our Iowa farm kitchen where I could hear the sounds when bent blades of Mom's "eggbeater" (with its chipped red-painted handle), hit metal sides of our dented Wear-Ever aluminum double boiler acquired at a traveling salesman's demonstration supper. She and I took turns licking the blades after we frosted the still-warm devil's food cake. Then I yelled “supper’s ready” to call my dad and four brothers to join us at the kitchen table.
Thank you Ruth for the wonderful article, and thank you Marcie. Your comments hit a tender spot for 87 year old me! Someone else that treasures their cookbooks,. and the memories they bring back of the wonderful meals that were prepared.
I too still have my chipped red-painted kitchen utensils that have served me well!
Reassuring to know those lead-based paints and aluminum pots didn't kill us, isn't it? Thank you, Ruth, for setting a table allowing us to create these connections! Thank you, Alyce, for adding a smile to my day. Stay well and keep staining those cookbook pages!
i read every word of what you wrote and so enjoyed it. i have well over a thousand cookbooks but sadly not hers. i am donating most of my books to Cambridge Culinary School library but i would have kept her! thank you for sharing this.
That is a great idea! I have well over a thousand also - including yours (love them all, but, oh, the cookie book ❤️❤️❤️). I will see if anyone is interested.
I am mesmerized with your writing today (and always) introducing me to the great food writer, Elizabeth David, and also the French writer, and the radio show! Although I just ate breakfast, I want to rush to the kitchen and reimagine my simple scrambled eggs with mushrooms and toasted bakery fresh sourdough with fig/apricot jam. Your amazing writing fills a need deep within me that I don't often respond to. I have enjoyed reading most of your great books, and of course your LA Times and NYTimes, restaurant reviews, and amazing Gourmet magazine articles. Thanks so much for allowing me to continue reading and drooling over my unpaid subscription to your newsletter where I continually feast and learn so much. I used to go out and dine alone or with a friend at amazing restaurants in Los Angeles and now I do it vicariously through your writing . I truly do appreciate you. I have this card in my kitchen with a gigantic crane hovering over the Virginia Wolf line: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." Thanks again from an old, really old food lover in Iowa.
My 1967 reprint of "Italian Food", has a delightful nine page intro by David. The days of chatty readible Cook(ery) Books! .....e.g. "..I do ask, although diffidently, that readers unfamiliar with Italian ingredients, or in doubt as to what to buy, should summon up the courage and the patience to have a look at the chapter in this book which is entitled The Italian Store Cupboard.."
Even the simple monochrome illustrations are lovely.
Aldo Renato Guttuso was an Italian painter and politician. He is considered to be among the most important Italian artists of the 20th century and is among the key figures of Italian expressionism. His art is characterized by social and political commentary..
Lots of ED fans on this side of the Atlantic! We have her to thank for influencing the wonderful Delia Smith, who taught so many of us in the UK to cook. I found it so interesting to compare David’s discoveries in France to mine when writing my book Amuse Bouche, I referenced how much easier it is to find the dish aligot is today than in her era - thankfully!
I am always fascinated that with people like Nigella and Jamie being known by first names in the US, most people don’t know Delia Smith. Her recipe for meatball goulash is in my repertoire - it’s more paprikas than goulash - and it’s nice enough for a dinner party. It’s in Winter Cooking and on Delia online.
I was supposed to co-run a food and wine event for the NYRB on their Classics re-release of "Summer Cooking" two summers ago but they ended up not having the budget unfortunately. I was fortunate, however, a few months ago, when Frank Prial's family invited me into his house ahead of an estate sale and offered me any of the books in his collection. I grabbed a couple of her books from his shelves along with many others.
You've reminded me how much I miss Frank! There was nobody like him: absolutely unpretentious and a wonderful writer. He was just about to give up the wine column - he'd had enough - when David Shaw wrote a long expose about newspaper wine writers for the LA Times. David wrote that Frank was one of the few genuinely honest ones (the man who wrote for the LA Times was a scandal), and after that Abe Rosenthal refused to let Frank leave the post.
Thank you for sharing that...it's greatly appreciated. After his wife died, the family put the house for sale. Through some mutual connections, his son reached out to me and asked if I wanted any of the books Frank had amassed. I was flattered. He then asked me to have any wine left in the cellar, most of which I am going to use for a fundraising wine dinner in his honor, donating proceeds to his local library. I also told the family I want to do a story of some sort discussing his influence on wine journalism, and they are excited about it. I am speaking with Robert Caro, who was friends with him, among others. I'd love the opportunity to talk more with you about what I am hoping to do, if you are open to it.
We had Elizabeth David in our house long before Julia Child was on the scene. A first edition of Mediterranean Food sits on my bookshelf next to X. Marcel Boulestin, another earlier influential chef from the 30s and 40s. I am not sure why I filed him after Julia but there you go.
I didn't know anything about Édouard de Pomiane, and am really enjoying Radio Cuisine. Thanks! And how funny to write a cookbook featuring dishes that give you gout -- all the tastiest, of course.
Ruth, I just picked up, at auction, at least 5 food-history/cookbooks that were heavily annotated by Elizabeth David. They are on their way and I cannot wait to get a look at them. I was so very lucky as the auction was taking place at 6am on Thanksgiving morning (my US competition may still have been sleeping). I hope to be bringing them to the rare book fair in Pasadena in February if anyone wants to get a first hand look at them.
What an amazing find! Her notes are priceless; I keep thinking someone should publish a book of them. (I have to say that every time I think about writing in a book I feel my father's eyes on me and cannot bring myself to do it.)
Oh, you should write in them. Your comments are priceless too. I got a used copy of Gourmet’s Old Vienna Cookbook, and I treasure the beautiful script written in pencil noting favorite recipes and suggestions.
As an impoverished grad student getting books from UC Berkeley in the 70s, I'd stop in at a little kitchen shop on Shattuck, where I was smitten by, and could afford, little paperback editions of hers (Summer Cooking, Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking, etc). Along with Peter Gray's The Mistress Cook, they overthrew Betty Crocker and her ground beef casseroles for me forever.
Oh, yes, I remember Elizabeth David well. Soon after I got married in 1970, I acquired a paperback copy of her "French Provincial Cookbook." It included a recipe for orange chocolate mousse, which I volunteered to try to make as a dessert for a small dinner party. The recipe, which can still be found online, included just five ingredients: "Good quality bitter chocolate;" egg yolks; butter; juice of one orange; and egg whites.
My wife took one look at the recipe and said there must be a mistake or omission in the recipe. If you use bitter chocolate, she said, there needs to be sugar to sweeten the mousse. A strict recipe follower who was not about to improvise, I argued that it must be the orange juice that provides the sweetening. She laughed and insisted that could not be right. But forced to choose between my wife and Elizabeth David, I unfortunately opted for the latter. The mousse that resulted was, of course, bitter and inedible, and I had to rush out to Baskin-Robbins to get an ice cream cake before the guests arrived. Thanks, Ruth, for reminding me of this anecdote from half a century ago!
I'm guessing that the problem was that you used unsweetened baking chocolate as opposed to a bitter chocolate bar - which contains a fair amount of sugar.
Yes, that is exactly what I did! (The only chocolates I knew of back then were Hershey's milk chocolate and semi-sweet, and baking chocolate.) Thanks for clearing that up!
Now that I know what the problem was, maybe I'll give it another try 55 years later! (Fortunately, Baskin-Robbins is still around in case of emergency.) Thanks for encouraging me!
Happy New Year. What a lovely piece and the lovely comments that follow. You have amassed a true community here at a time when it's especially nice to find like-minded friends. I know the day will come when I need to pare my cookbooks down. I have recently gone through them and put a gold star on the spines of the books that have recipes that made it into my repertoire, so if someone ends up trying to figure out what to keep, they will look at those first. The recipes I use are written inside the front cover. Inside the cover of At Elizabeth David's Table are the words Piedmontese Peppers Page 24! It's an excellent eminently usable book, deserving a space on anyone's shelf.
Marvelous ideas! I am going to order Gold Stars right now. I, too, wrote what I wanted to try (or did try) IFC.
Gold Stars trigger another childhood memory. Piano teacher placing Gold Star on pieces in my red-covered John Thompson Modern Course for the Piano books based upon her judgment of how well I played. No Gold Star? For sure, I practiced more the next week. FYI, yes, I still have the books. Similar are good sellers on eBay and Etsy.
Thank you, Ruth. You’ve, once again, hit a tender spot. Elizabeth David is but one of many reasons why, at age 85, I'm unwilling to whittle down my treasured tomes. My library, incidentally, includes five (maybe more) Reichl titles, beginning with your 1972 "....mmmmm A Feastiary." My brain exercise comes not with Sudoku puzzles in Assisted Living who-knows-where, but by triggering strong memories the mere sight of each cover evokes. These covers bind not merely recipes (many with kitchen stains and marginal notes) but memories of how, why, when and where I acquired the book. Just yesterday, I opened the first cookbook I ever knew: leatherette-covered 1936 Household Searchlight Recipe Book with its unique twenty-size tabs. It fell open to page 185 where "Seven-Minute Icing" carried me back to our Iowa farm kitchen where I could hear the sounds when bent blades of Mom's "eggbeater" (with its chipped red-painted handle), hit metal sides of our dented Wear-Ever aluminum double boiler acquired at a traveling salesman's demonstration supper. She and I took turns licking the blades after we frosted the still-warm devil's food cake. Then I yelled “supper’s ready” to call my dad and four brothers to join us at the kitchen table.
Thank you Ruth for the wonderful article, and thank you Marcie. Your comments hit a tender spot for 87 year old me! Someone else that treasures their cookbooks,. and the memories they bring back of the wonderful meals that were prepared.
I too still have my chipped red-painted kitchen utensils that have served me well!
Reassuring to know those lead-based paints and aluminum pots didn't kill us, isn't it? Thank you, Ruth, for setting a table allowing us to create these connections! Thank you, Alyce, for adding a smile to my day. Stay well and keep staining those cookbook pages!
i read every word of what you wrote and so enjoyed it. i have well over a thousand cookbooks but sadly not hers. i am donating most of my books to Cambridge Culinary School library but i would have kept her! thank you for sharing this.
That is a great idea! I have well over a thousand also - including yours (love them all, but, oh, the cookie book ❤️❤️❤️). I will see if anyone is interested.
I am mesmerized with your writing today (and always) introducing me to the great food writer, Elizabeth David, and also the French writer, and the radio show! Although I just ate breakfast, I want to rush to the kitchen and reimagine my simple scrambled eggs with mushrooms and toasted bakery fresh sourdough with fig/apricot jam. Your amazing writing fills a need deep within me that I don't often respond to. I have enjoyed reading most of your great books, and of course your LA Times and NYTimes, restaurant reviews, and amazing Gourmet magazine articles. Thanks so much for allowing me to continue reading and drooling over my unpaid subscription to your newsletter where I continually feast and learn so much. I used to go out and dine alone or with a friend at amazing restaurants in Los Angeles and now I do it vicariously through your writing . I truly do appreciate you. I have this card in my kitchen with a gigantic crane hovering over the Virginia Wolf line: "One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well." Thanks again from an old, really old food lover in Iowa.
My 1967 reprint of "Italian Food", has a delightful nine page intro by David. The days of chatty readible Cook(ery) Books! .....e.g. "..I do ask, although diffidently, that readers unfamiliar with Italian ingredients, or in doubt as to what to buy, should summon up the courage and the patience to have a look at the chapter in this book which is entitled The Italian Store Cupboard.."
Even the simple monochrome illustrations are lovely.
Aldo Renato Guttuso was an Italian painter and politician. He is considered to be among the most important Italian artists of the 20th century and is among the key figures of Italian expressionism. His art is characterized by social and political commentary..
It said a lot about how the effect of WWII and post-war rationing affected the availability of produce in England without discussing the issue.
Lots of ED fans on this side of the Atlantic! We have her to thank for influencing the wonderful Delia Smith, who taught so many of us in the UK to cook. I found it so interesting to compare David’s discoveries in France to mine when writing my book Amuse Bouche, I referenced how much easier it is to find the dish aligot is today than in her era - thankfully!
I am always fascinated that with people like Nigella and Jamie being known by first names in the US, most people don’t know Delia Smith. Her recipe for meatball goulash is in my repertoire - it’s more paprikas than goulash - and it’s nice enough for a dinner party. It’s in Winter Cooking and on Delia online.
That's true. Perhaps because she was from the pre-social media generation. That sounds delicious... I'll look it up! Thanks! :-)
I was supposed to co-run a food and wine event for the NYRB on their Classics re-release of "Summer Cooking" two summers ago but they ended up not having the budget unfortunately. I was fortunate, however, a few months ago, when Frank Prial's family invited me into his house ahead of an estate sale and offered me any of the books in his collection. I grabbed a couple of her books from his shelves along with many others.
You've reminded me how much I miss Frank! There was nobody like him: absolutely unpretentious and a wonderful writer. He was just about to give up the wine column - he'd had enough - when David Shaw wrote a long expose about newspaper wine writers for the LA Times. David wrote that Frank was one of the few genuinely honest ones (the man who wrote for the LA Times was a scandal), and after that Abe Rosenthal refused to let Frank leave the post.
Thank you for sharing that...it's greatly appreciated. After his wife died, the family put the house for sale. Through some mutual connections, his son reached out to me and asked if I wanted any of the books Frank had amassed. I was flattered. He then asked me to have any wine left in the cellar, most of which I am going to use for a fundraising wine dinner in his honor, donating proceeds to his local library. I also told the family I want to do a story of some sort discussing his influence on wine journalism, and they are excited about it. I am speaking with Robert Caro, who was friends with him, among others. I'd love the opportunity to talk more with you about what I am hoping to do, if you are open to it.
Happy to talk to you. You should definitely try to find David Shaw's series on wine writers, which ran in the LA Times in August 1987.
We had Elizabeth David in our house long before Julia Child was on the scene. A first edition of Mediterranean Food sits on my bookshelf next to X. Marcel Boulestin, another earlier influential chef from the 30s and 40s. I am not sure why I filed him after Julia but there you go.
I didn't know anything about Édouard de Pomiane, and am really enjoying Radio Cuisine. Thanks! And how funny to write a cookbook featuring dishes that give you gout -- all the tastiest, of course.
Ruth, I just picked up, at auction, at least 5 food-history/cookbooks that were heavily annotated by Elizabeth David. They are on their way and I cannot wait to get a look at them. I was so very lucky as the auction was taking place at 6am on Thanksgiving morning (my US competition may still have been sleeping). I hope to be bringing them to the rare book fair in Pasadena in February if anyone wants to get a first hand look at them.
What an amazing find! Her notes are priceless; I keep thinking someone should publish a book of them. (I have to say that every time I think about writing in a book I feel my father's eyes on me and cannot bring myself to do it.)
The only books I feel completely comfortable writing in is my cookbooks!
Oh, you should write in them. Your comments are priceless too. I got a used copy of Gourmet’s Old Vienna Cookbook, and I treasure the beautiful script written in pencil noting favorite recipes and suggestions.
Lizzy, will you give your Preferred Customers first dibs on these? Just askin' -
Then you wouldn't have to pay freight to California (wink wink)???
Absolutely Marcie! I will send a list when I get my hands on them.
As an impoverished grad student getting books from UC Berkeley in the 70s, I'd stop in at a little kitchen shop on Shattuck, where I was smitten by, and could afford, little paperback editions of hers (Summer Cooking, Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking, etc). Along with Peter Gray's The Mistress Cook, they overthrew Betty Crocker and her ground beef casseroles for me forever.
An amazing intro is South Wind Through the Kitchen — Many of the recipes and excerpts here were chosen by David's friends and by the chefs and writers she inspired (including Alice Waters and Barbara Kafka). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/110976.South_Wind_Through_the_Kitchen
Oh, yes, I remember Elizabeth David well. Soon after I got married in 1970, I acquired a paperback copy of her "French Provincial Cookbook." It included a recipe for orange chocolate mousse, which I volunteered to try to make as a dessert for a small dinner party. The recipe, which can still be found online, included just five ingredients: "Good quality bitter chocolate;" egg yolks; butter; juice of one orange; and egg whites.
My wife took one look at the recipe and said there must be a mistake or omission in the recipe. If you use bitter chocolate, she said, there needs to be sugar to sweeten the mousse. A strict recipe follower who was not about to improvise, I argued that it must be the orange juice that provides the sweetening. She laughed and insisted that could not be right. But forced to choose between my wife and Elizabeth David, I unfortunately opted for the latter. The mousse that resulted was, of course, bitter and inedible, and I had to rush out to Baskin-Robbins to get an ice cream cake before the guests arrived. Thanks, Ruth, for reminding me of this anecdote from half a century ago!
I'm guessing that the problem was that you used unsweetened baking chocolate as opposed to a bitter chocolate bar - which contains a fair amount of sugar.
Yes, that is exactly what I did! (The only chocolates I knew of back then were Hershey's milk chocolate and semi-sweet, and baking chocolate.) Thanks for clearing that up!
Have you tried again? Your Baskin and Robin ice cream reference made me smile as I grew up on those cakes for birthdays.
Now that I know what the problem was, maybe I'll give it another try 55 years later! (Fortunately, Baskin-Robbins is still around in case of emergency.) Thanks for encouraging me!
Happy New Year. What a lovely piece and the lovely comments that follow. You have amassed a true community here at a time when it's especially nice to find like-minded friends. I know the day will come when I need to pare my cookbooks down. I have recently gone through them and put a gold star on the spines of the books that have recipes that made it into my repertoire, so if someone ends up trying to figure out what to keep, they will look at those first. The recipes I use are written inside the front cover. Inside the cover of At Elizabeth David's Table are the words Piedmontese Peppers Page 24! It's an excellent eminently usable book, deserving a space on anyone's shelf.
Marvelous ideas! I am going to order Gold Stars right now. I, too, wrote what I wanted to try (or did try) IFC.
Gold Stars trigger another childhood memory. Piano teacher placing Gold Star on pieces in my red-covered John Thompson Modern Course for the Piano books based upon her judgment of how well I played. No Gold Star? For sure, I practiced more the next week. FYI, yes, I still have the books. Similar are good sellers on eBay and Etsy.
Love this Elizabeth David piece. I treasure her books and , even more, her writing. Thanks Ruth! You’re a treasure yourself.
I have an original copy of one of her store booklets. You and the season have me feeling inspired to prepare some “potted meats” a la Elizabeth David.
I have had her books for years and years and years. Love her.