Italian Food

"She was crucial. This was before my time as I didn’t come to England until 1970. Certainly if you asked my business partner Rose [Gray] or anyone who is really interested in cooking, they would say that the influence of Elizabeth David is phenomenal. She took ingredients, she took seasonality and she used olive oil. Apparently, before Elizabeth David you had to buy olive oil from the chemist. She introduced recipes that people had never heard of before. She wrote about it beautifully, and she cared. She was amazing. She loved to travel and live in other places, and she was a great writer. You can take any of Elizabeth David’s cookbooks to bed and read them as you would a novel. She’s telling you, when you get a lemon or a tomato or have a piece of veal, this is how you should think about it, not just here’s a recipe for it. I love her introductions to each chapter – especially the one on pasta, and also rice which leads you to all the different kinds of risottos. It’s so full of knowledge and passion. I think it’s a really inspirational book."