French Country Cooking

"Well, Elizabeth David is the first proper cookery writer I ever came across, as opposed to someone who just writes recipes. My granny gave me her copy of French Country Cooking, which she had for 40 years. The book is full of sensible advice and also makes you feel you could enjoy reading it as much as cooking from it – it’s very well written. It’s got lots of interesting passages, including a lovely bit about Gertrude Stein coming back to Paris after the war and seeing an etching of a chicken done by Raoul Dufy in the window of a butcher’s shop. And how wonderful it was, when there was no chicken in the shops, that somebody had the generosity and imagination to draw a chicken and cheer everybody up like that. Well, it worked for Gertrude anyway. What worked for Gertrude Stein didn’t always work for everybody else. Yes. French Country Cooking has got briefly written recipes that are encouraging but also kind of improving, if you know what I mean. It makes you feel like you need to try harder, which is a good thing, but then Elizabeth David says something like, ‘The merit of food, all different kinds of food, is less important than the spirit with which cooking is approached.’ As opposed to being determined to do it in a spirit of martyrdom, you see? She’s just such a sensible person. Cooking is part of her life. She’s the opposite of someone who’s obsessed with food. It’s part of her life and it’s completely woven into her life: cooking and eating well. But it’s not the sole purpose of her life. The exact opposite of an eating disorder, in the sense that food is part and parcel of enjoying every bit of your life, every day."

"My edition has a lovely frontispiece with people toasting each other with a glass of wine. There’s a château behind them, and a great haunch of ham and artichoke. This seemed so attractive to me because this was just after the War, when we had really quite miserable food. People didn’t really know about cooking. This book really gave me a kind of an idea about how cooking could be. And I think most of the cooking that I do now has come from reading these kind of books. Elizabeth David is rather a good writer, so, as well as being good cook books, they are readable. Also, she didn’t make us scared. Lots of cookery books, I find, are concerned with all manner of measurements, making sauces very carefully in double saucepans and all that kind of stuff. Elizabeth David never talks about that; she just talks about the basic things that you need to make things delicious. And she suggests the things you might serve with it, which are not to do with sort of rows and rows of different ingredients, but just the basic things that you really need to make delicious food. The one recipe of hers that inspired me to begin with was her cassoulet. Absolutely, and loads of other things too. Because, just looking through it—I’m skipping through it now—it makes your mouth water, doesn’t it? And it’s just so funny and charming. In her time, Elizabeth David inspired people. She inspired people to cook for fun, and not take it too seriously. This book appeared when I was growing up in the 1940s. Things were tough—in the 1950s, it was all a bit grey. She brought a spark of sunlight into people’s houses and into people’s homes. I think she was very essential to our recovery after the War."