Elizabeth David Classics

"Which is why one of the books I chose is a cookery book, Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food . Eating is fundamental to life and to some extent defines you. You don’t look good if you live off McDonald’s and Diet Coke. There’s a huge difference between the Mediterranean style of taking time over meals as opposed to just throwing it down or getting takeout. And I think being able to cook well gives a woman a great sense of confidence. “It is hard to be in a bad mood when you are wearing exquisite La Perla underwear.” I also chose that book because Elizabeth David was extremely glamorous, and I think she injects a bit of her glamour into everything she does. She left England in 1939, with her lover, intending to travel around the Mediterranean. Then World War II broke out, and she had to leave France. She arrived in Italy only to end up being deported to Greece. And I think she spent the war living a Bohemian kind of lifestyle on one of the Greek islands along with Lawrence Durrell. It was only after the war that she went back to England and started writing about cookery. Mediterranean Food was her first book and it made her famous. And to give you an example of how groundbreaking it was, at that time, in the early 1950s, the use of olive oil in cooking was so uncommon in England that she advised her readers to look for it in pharmacies, where it was stocked as a remedy for earache. For a start, it’s so refreshing to be able to find a cook book that focuses on the actual food rather than the person writing it. Nowadays everything is so celebrity chef-oriented, so terribly hyped up, but in Elizabeth David’s day there was no such thing as a celebrity chef — what joy. She was a terribly low profile person, and she did extremely well. Her cookbook is very simple and devoid of any hype or any nonsense around it. She uses very simple ingredients, very classic ingredients, and that’s in a way the person she was – she was very simple and very elegant and very classic. And I think that elegance comes across in her cooking. So Mediterranean Food is extremely straightforward and very good. It’s filled with the sort of classic recipes that never go out of style, classic dishes that are also easy to cook. And it’s also Mediterranean food. Nowadays you can get Mediterranean food anywhere, there’s an Italian theme to cooking everywhere. The ingredients aren’t hard to get hold of any more. So really it’s a classic book, yes, written many decades ago, but it seems to reflect very much the way we eat now. The recipes in it are is still very good. Her manner is very stylish, she has a great appreciation for the simple things in life. For example, one of her other books is called An Omelette and a Glass of Wine which really sums up her approach. An omelette and a glass of wine is a very simple meal, but actually it’s one of the great combinations, one of the great things in life. It’s important to have a cookbook that you know you can rely on for the basic things you want to eat, compared to most of the cookbooks that come out these days, where you kind of lose sight of what the basics are, in favor of trying to be too clever by half . I like the pasta ones, because I’m mad about pasta. One I particularly love is with tomatoes and basil. It’s classic, simple and always delicious."

"Last year my husband and I finally bought our own home in the British countryside and in it was an AGA stove. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s an old-fashioned cooker which is always on. That’s useful in the cold, damp British climate. Many people turn theirs off in summer, but we found we didn’t need to—it was still cold enough in July for it to be nice to have a warm kitchen hearth. We had no idea how to use it but Sarah, Mary’s daughter-in-law, gave us a copy of The Complete Aga Cookbook as a present, and that helped me figure out what to do. Having got used to it, I now feel I couldn’t live without an AGA (at least in a cold climate. If I lived in Rio de Janeiro I’d probably feel differently). I use my Complete AGA Cookbook a lot. A final word on Mary: She was born in 1935 and is now in her 80s, but her global success came late. I think there’s inspiration there for all of us: whatever we’re doing now, there’s still wonderful opportunities ahead to do something new and make a success of it. —Sophie Roell"