In my previous career incarnation the books of Elizabeth David were immensely influential on me and not least because of my desire to hold on to classic restaurant dishes which had fallen out of fashion in a wave of fleeting experimental styles. Elizabeth David embodied the importance of proper cooking be it at home or in a restaurant. She understood both thrift and extravagance and her books were a lesson in both.
French Country Cooking was first published in 1951 by John Lehmann Ltd with cover artwork and illustrations by John Minton. It is important to remember the period in which this book was published, Britain was still recovering from a World War in which real poverty, food shortages and a battered infrastructure still existed. What David brought to the British household was a no-nonsense approach to household food management using the French method of utilising every scrap of the animal, fish or vegetable to create simple, nutritious food.
In her previous book, A Book of Mediterranean Food, she gave a much needed sense of colour to a drab Britain but in this book she inspired her readers to cook from the heart of the terroir and today, many of these dishes, sadly long since lost, still hold a nostalgic appeal.
The food culture of Britain was never aligned with its European neighbours, long, lazy lunches followed by a nap never made it to these shores but the sense of making the most of what little food was available was a shared culture albeit the French, overall, made a better job of it.
What David gave her readers was a sense of both extravagance and, for those who couldn’t afford it, a means to add value to their everyday meals. All of the dishes in the book are written in French, the recipes, mercifully, in English and are a wonderful reminder of a time in Britain when restaurants wrote menus in French: Quennelles de Brochet, La Soup aux Fèves, Civet de Lièvre Landais, Poulet à l’ Estragon. From simple soups to complex fish and game dishes it is a remarkable book of its time. Professional chefs will tell you cookery methods have changed and in some aspects, refined since David’s book was published. Fish, in particular, gets a more ‘sympathetic’ treatment these days but what is undeniable is her influence on a generation of chefs to follow her. To this day, her books are reprinted and whilst the dishes may be outdated, the philosophy should be embraced more now than ever.
Further reading
Remembering Harvey’s Restaurant
Categories: The Reading Room
retroculturati 