Product Description

A collection of recipes made by the author when she lived in France, Italy, the Greek Islands, and Egypt, doing her own cooking and obtaining her information at first hand.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #206639 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
When David first published this book in 1950 (with John Minton's delightful illustrations, also reproduced in this edition), she changed British gastronomic habits forever. Written as a 'personal antidote' to the bleak conditions and acute food shortages she found on her return to England in 1946, this collection of recipes is Elizabeth David's hymn to the sun. In her simple, elegant prose she evoked all the colours, aromas and flavours of the cuisine of Mediterranean lands, put its sun on our Formica tables and cast Yorkshire pudding and spotted dick into doubt. English readers, starved of such pleasures, found her recipes, interwoven with sharp details of Mediterranean peoples and customs, irresistible. Nearly 50 years on, the book remains just as contemporary. David's chatty prose, peppered with quotes and opinion, is as readable as good fiction, and her recipes are all so tantalizing that the book makes for good cover-to-cover reading. Every self-respecting cook should have one. (Kirkus UK)

Synopsis
A collection of recipes made by the author when she lived in France, Italy, the Greek Islands, and Egypt, doing her own cooking and obtaining her information at first hand.

About the Author
Elizabeth David discovered her taste for good food and wine when, as a student at the Sorbonne, she lived with a French family for two years. After returning to England she made up her mind to learn to cook, so that she could reproduce for herself and her friends some of the food that she had come to appreciate in France. Subsequently Mrs David lived and kept house in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India, learning the local dishes and cooking them in her own kitchen.

Customer Reviews

Not just a cookery book-an insight into the pleasure of food
"Elizabeth David discovered her taste for good food and wine when she lived with a French family while studying history and literature at the Sorbonne.
A few years after her return to England she made up her mind to learn to cook so that she could reproduce for herself and for her friends some of the food that she had come to appreciate in France.
Subsequently Mrs David lived and kept house in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India, as well as in England.
She found not only the practical side but also the literature of cookery to be of absorbing interest and studied it throughout her life."

This, her first book, appeared in 1950:-

'With this selection of Mediterranean dishes, I hope to give some idea of the lovely cookery of those 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 the flavour of those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees into their English kitchen' E.D. London 1950.

Interspersed with charming black and white illustrations, the ED notes make this a hard book to put down, as it is such a delight to read. It is so easy to get absorbed into the life of this fascinating woman.
This is not just a 'cookery book', but an insight into the pleasure to be found in food.
Definitely worthy of a place on the kitchen bookshelf!

Better to read than cook from
This is the book that apparently lifted the spirits of all the 1950s foodies fed up with rationing. It is more interesting to read in its context than useful as a recipe book, many of the quantities are very sketchy for a start.

Very much worth reading though