Elizabeth David ( Gwynne, 26 December 1913 – 22 May 1992) was a British cookery writer. In the mid-20th century she strongly influenced the revitalisation of home cookery in her native country and beyond with articles and books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes.
Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day. In the 1930s she studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated. They reached Greece, where they were nearly trapped by the German invasion in 1941, but escaped to Egypt, where they parted. She then worked for the British government, running a library in Cairo. While there she married, but she and her husband separated soon after and subsequently divorced.
In 1946 David returned to England, where food rationing imposed during the Second World War remained in force. Dismayed by the contrast between the bad food served in Britain and the simple, excellent food to which she had become accustomed in France, Greece and Egypt, she began to write magazine articles about Mediterranean cooking. They attracted favourable attention, and in 1950, at the age of 36, she published A Book of Mediterranean Food. Her recipes called for ingredients such as aubergines, basil, figs, garlic, olive oil and saffron, which at the time were scarcely available in Britain. Books on French, Italian and, later, English cuisine followed. By the 1960s David was a major influence on British cooking. She was deeply hostile to anything second-rate, to over-elaborate cooking, and bogus substitutes for classic dishes and ingredients. In 1965 she opened a shop selling kitchen equipment, which continued to trade under her name after she left it in 1973.
David's reputation rests on her articles and her books, which have been continually reprinted. Between 1950 and 1984 she published eight books; after her death her literary executor completed a further four that she had planned and worked on. David's influence on British cooking extended to professional as well as domestic cooks, and chefs and restaurateurs of later generations such as Terence Conran, Simon Hopkinson, Prue Leith, Jamie Oliver, Tom Parker Bowles and Rick Stein have acknowledged her importance to them. In the US, cooks and writers including Julia Child, Richard Olney and Alice Waters have written of her influence.
Life and career Early years
David was born Elizabeth Gwynne, the second of four children, all daughters, of Rupert Sackville Gwynne and his wife, the Hon Stella Gwynne, daughter of the 1st Viscount Ridley. Both parents' families had considerable fortunes, the Gwynnes from engineering and land speculation and the Ridleys from coal mining.Cooper, pp. 1 and 6 Through the two families, David was of English, Scottish and Welsh or Irish descent and, through an ancestor on her father's side, also Dutch and Sumatran.Chaney, pp. 5–6; and Cooper, p. 2 She and her sisters grew up at Wootton Manor in Sussex, a seventeenth-century manor house with extensive, early twentieth-century additions by Detmar Blow.Cooper, p. 8 Her father, despite having a weak heart, insisted on pursuing a demanding political career, becoming Conservative MP for Eastbourne,"Progress of the General Election". The Times, 16 December 1910, p. 7 and a junior minister in Bonar Law's government."Two New Ministers". The Times, 16 March 1923, p. 12 Overwork, combined with his vigorous recreational pastimes, chiefly racing, riding, and womanising,Cooper, p. 5; and Chaney, pp. 8 and 29 brought about his death in 1924, aged 51."Obituary—Mr. R. S. Gwynne". The Times, 13 October 1924, p. 16
The widowed Stella Gwynne was a dutiful mother, but her relations with her daughters were distant rather than affectionate.Chaney, p. 41; and Cooper pp. 14–15 Elizabeth and her sisters, Priscilla, Diana and Felicité were sent away to boarding schools.Cooper, p. 22 Having been a pupil at Godstowe preparatory school in High Wycombe, Elizabeth was sent to St Clare's Private School for Ladies, Tunbridge Wells, which she left at the age of sixteen.Chaney, p. 43 The girls grew up knowing nothing of cooking, which in upper-class households of the time was the exclusive province of the family's cook and her kitchen staff.Chaney, p. 19
As a teenager David enjoyed painting, and her mother thought her talent worth developing.Cooper, p. 28 In 1930 she was sent to Paris, where she studied painting privately and enrolled at the Sorbonne for a course in French civilisation which covered history, literature and architecture.Chaney, pp. 43–44 She found her Sorbonne studies arduous and in many ways uninspiring, but they left her with a love of French literature and a fluency in the language that remained with her throughout her life.Chaney, p. 453 She lodged with a Parisian family, whose fanatical devotion to the pleasures of the table she portrayed to comic effect in her French Provincial Cooking (1960).David (1979), pp. 26–29; and Chaney, pp. 44–46 Nevertheless, she acknowledged in retrospect that the experience had been the most valuable part of her time in Paris: "I realized in what way the family had fulfilled their task of instilling French culture into at least one of their British charges. Forgotten were the Sorbonne professors. ... What had stuck was the taste for a kind of food quite ideally unlike anything I had known before." Stella Gwynne was not eager for her daughter's early return to England after qualifying for her Sorbonne diploma, and sent her from Paris to Munich in 1931 to study German.Cooper, pp. 31–32
Actress After returning to England in 1932 David unenthusiastically went through the social rituals for upper-class young women of presentation at court as a débutante and the associated balls."Court Circular", The Times, 10 May 1932, p. 19; 28 June 1932, p. 17; and 13 July 1932, p. 17 The respectable young Englishmen she met at the latter did not appeal to her.Cooper, p. 36 David's biographer Lisa Chaney comments that with her "delicately smouldering looks and her shyness shielded by a steely coolness and barbed tongue" she would have been a daunting prospect for the young upper-class men she encountered.Chaney, p. 51 David decided that she was not good enough as a painter and, to her mother's displeasure, became an actress.Cooper, p. 37 She joined J. B. Fagan's company at the Oxford Playhouse in 1933. Her fellow performers included Joan Hickson, who decades later recalled having to show her new colleague how to make a cup of tea, so unaware of the kitchen was David in those days.Chaney, p. 54
From Oxford, David moved to the Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, London, the following year.Cooper, p. 42 She rented rooms in a large house near the park, spent a generous 21st birthday present on equipping the kitchen, and learned to cook.Cooper, p. 44 A gift from her mother of The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel was her first cookery book.David (2001), p. 5 She later wrote, "I wonder if I would have ever learned to cook at all if I had been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from, instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel with her rather wild, imagination-catching recipes."David (1970), pp. 16–17
At Regent's Park David made little professional progress. The company was distinguished, headed by Nigel Playfair and Jack Hawkins, and, in the leading female roles, Anna Neagle and Margaretta Scott."Open Air Theatre", The Times, 22 May 1934, p. 13 David was restricted to bit parts.Chaney, p. 67; and Cooper pp. 42–43 Among her colleagues in the company was an actor nine years her senior, Charles Gibson Cowan. His disregard for social conventions appealed strongly to her, and she also found him sexually irresistible. His being married did not daunt either of them, and they began an affair that outlasted her stage career.Cooper, p. 47 Chaney comments, "Cowan was the ultimate outsider. He was working class, left wing, Jewish, an actor, a pickpocket, a vagabond, who lived in caves in Hastings for a time. Her mother called him a 'pacifist worm'. He was a sexual presence, and slept with anything that moved."Treneman, Ann. "Elizabeth David's final recipe: take one culinary saint, two rival books, add wine and sex and stir to boiling point", The Independent, 2 December 1998. Retrieved 22 November 2017 David's mother strongly disapproved, and tried to put a stop to the affair.Chaney, p. 89 She arranged for her daughter to spend several weeks holidaying with family and friends in Malta in the first half of 1936 and in Egypt later in the same year, but in her 1999 biography Artemis Cooper comments that David's lengthy absence failed to detach her from her involvement with Cowan.Cooper, pp. 52–54 During her stay in Malta, David was able to spend time learning from her hostess's cook, Angela, who was happy to pass on her expertise. Although she could produce elaborate grand dinners when required, the most important lesson she taught David was to work day in, day out, with all available ingredients, showing her how to make an old bird or a stringy piece of meat into a good dish.Cooper, p. 53
France, Greece, Egypt and India
After her return to London in early 1937, David recognised that she was not going to be a success on the stage, and abandoned thoughts of a theatrical career. Later in the year she took a post as a junior assistant at the fashion house of Worth, where elegant young women from upper-class backgrounds were sought after as recruits.Chaney, p. 88 She found the subservience of retail work irksome, and resigned in early 1938.Cooper, p. 56 Over the next few months she spent time holidaying in the south of France and on Corsica, where she was greatly taken with the outgoing nature of the people she stayed with and the simple excellence of their food.Cooper, p. 57 After returning to London, and disenchanted with life there, she joined Cowan in buying a small boat—a yawl with an engine—with the intention of sailing it to Greece.Cooper, p. 60 They crossed the Channel in July 1939 and navigated the boat through the canal system of France to the Mediterranean coast.
The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 halted their progress. After stopping briefly at Marseille they sailed on to Antibes, where they remained for more than six months, unable to gain permission to leave.Cooper, pp. 68 and 70 There David met and became greatly influenced by the ageing writer Norman Douglas, about whom she later wrote extensively. He inspired her love of the Mediterranean, encouraged her interest in good food, and taught her to "search out the best, insist on it, and reject all that was bogus and second-rate".Cooper, p. 67 Cooper describes him as David's most important mentor.