Product Description

Long acknowledged as the inspiration for such modern masters as Julia Child and Claudia Roden, A Book of Mediterranean Food is Elizabeth David's passionate mixture of recipes, culinary lore, and frank talk. In bleak postwar Great Britain, when basics were rationed and fresh food a fantasy, David set about to cheer herself --and her audience-- up with dishes from the south of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the Middle East. Some are sumptuous, many are simple, most are sublime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #143528 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

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