20 Books of Summer: Writing at the Kitchen Table by Artemis Cooper

Writing at the Kitchen Table is the authorised biography of Elizabeth David, a woman who is credited with having revolutionised cooking in post-war England. Modern food writers, from Nigella Lawson and Nigel Slater to Delia Smith, regularly cite her as one of the greatest influences on their practice; her books are still popular, her journalism is still praised. Elizabeth David lived an exciting and unconventional life, not only by the standards of her day but also by ours. She was beautiful, talented and successful, and yet she was in some ways an unhappy, disappointed person who, at the age of seventy, was described as;

'a white-haired woman.....whose elegance and rather washed-out beauty was sadly upset by an unhappy expression and the abstracted air of someone who would obviously prefer to be somewhere else..' (Jeremy Lewis: Kindred Spirits: Adrift in Literary London)

Elizabeth's father inherited an engineering firm; her parents were quite affluent, but her mother Stella was an independent woman whose interests lay more in business and travel than children. Elizabeth and her sisters were, according to Cooper, starved of maternal affection from an early age.  They were expected, however, to conform to the traditional role laid out for young women of their class. Despite their father's early death and their mother's constant complaints about lack of funds, she herself travelled widely in Europe, and the girls were all privately educated.  

At the age of 16 Elizabeth was sent to the Sorbonne; she and her friend Marian lived as pensionnaires with the Barette family, and it was here that Elizabeth first tasted good food and discovered French couture. After France she moved to Munich to learn German before being brought back to spend a season as a debutante and be 'brought out' at court, an experience she loathed;

'Trying to make jolly conversation with Elizabeth must have been uphill work for the young men who tried; she hid behind an icy reserve, smoked incessantly, and tried to look bored and sophisticated.'

Elizabeth had little money in her own pocket and later wrote about how impoverished her family had become, but it was clearly a very upper class kind of poverty. If girls like her worked, they did so only while waiting for a suitable husband to appear. In the meantime Elizabeth had an allowance, no qualms about living on credit - and an Uncle Jaspar who had been a director of Coutts (her bank) since 1921. So although she rebelled against her upbringing, and especially her mother, in many ways, she did so always with the knowledge that a financial cushion was available, that she would be bailed out every time. 

Elizabeth - as much to annoy her mother as anything else - got a job as assistant stage manager with the Oxford Repertory Company (needless to say, Stella knew the manager; this was how such girls got jobs in those days, and in some circles probably still do...) She then moved to London, where she opened an account at Selfridges, had food for herself and her friends at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre sent round, and started an affair with an actor, Charles Gibbon Cowan. She still wanted to see herself as a rebel, and it was Cowan's unconventional lifestyle (he was already married but conducting several affairs at once) that attracted her as much as his sex appeal - but of course she also enjoyed her creature comforts;

'In her case the problem was how to achieve independence and reject the conventions that irked her, while maintaining the security of an influential family, indulgent bankers, and an account at Selfridges.'

Throughout her twenties, the 'impoverished' Elizabeth travelled widely in Europe and beyond, often staying with family friends in their villas and holiday homes. By 1939 she was back in London, reunited with Charles, and extracting a bank loan from Uncle Jaspar to enable them to buy a yacht and sail it to the Mediterranean. Everywhere they stopped off she met more friends of the family, friends of friends of the family, and comfortably-off expats, including the writer Norman Douglas, 46 years her senior, who became a close friend and mentor. 

Norman Douglas

War had broken out; when Charles and Elizabeth arrived in Sicily they were interned, but when they were finally escorted back to Rome via Venice, she still managed to have dinner at Florian's en route. They ended up living in a cottage on the island of Syros; when Germany invaded Greece, Elizabeth's friend Robin Fedden invited her to Egypt. She and Charles arrived there in May 1941, and soon met up with Lawrence Durrell and his frst wife Nancy. 

Florian's, Venice

Fedden found Elizabeth a job as a cypher clerk with the navy in Alexandria, and she was asked by another English friend, Mike Cumberledge, to keep house for him in his (staffed) grandiose appartment in the rue des Pharaons. Before long she was tasked with setting up a reference library for the Ministry of Information, an experience that she found very rewarding.

David enjoyed an immensely active social life in Egypt, and from her suffragi (servant) Sulieman she contrived to learn a great deal about the local cuisine, and also to share with him the cooking for her huge lunch parties. Using only a portable charcoal grill and two primus stoves they made everything from kebabs to pilaffs, soups, salads, fellahin and ice creams. She stayed in Egypt until, in 1944, she met Tony David, an Indian Army Officer. 

'He admired her fearlessness, her wit, her sensual beauty, the line of her long neck as she smoked or drank. She gave a sharp edge to life, and in her he saw the colour and the sparkle that he himself lacked. As for Elizabeth, her restless and abrasive character probably found his uncomplicated devotion rather restful.'

Despite knowing that she did not really love him, despite her dislike of the institution of marriage, and despite the disapproval of her friends, Elizabeth married him;

'..she yearned for stability, and was also a pragmatist. It was a fact of her world that until a woman married, she had very little status, and once married, she could command a respect that was seldom granted to a spinster. If she did not accept Tony, who was at least kind and devoted, might she ever be asked again?'

In 1944, even confident, unconventional, and relatively affluent women were still defined by their husbands (or lack of one..)

'It is significant that no photograph of their wedding exists, or has survived.'

Soon she and Tony were living in Delhi. Elizabeth loathed British India, but it was there that she first met Peter Higgins, who was to become the (largely unrequited) love of her life. By the end of 1946, however, she was back in London by herself. She soon had a flat in Kensington where, appalled but undaunted by the dismal state of food supplies and the continuation of rationing, she started to cook in earnest. She felt no solidarity whatsoever with cooks like Marguerite Patten, who had encouraged a generation of women to support the war effort and create 'appetising' dishes from fake mince and dried egg; Elizabeth wanted the food she had eaten in foreign climes - garlic, wine, apricots, olives, butter, rice, lemons, almonds and olive oil. 

When she got too cold in London, Elizabeth and her then lover George Lassalle took themselves off to stay in a warm hotel in Ross-On-Wye, where - the meals being just as bad as everywhere else - she first started writing notes about food. (She also came upon a copy of the pre-1939 version of the Trust House Forte catering manual, which was supposed to be kept in the hotel safe, and which revealed some tricks of the trade that she might well have preferred never to know..)

When Tony came back, they bought a Rolls Royce and drove it round France, then returned to London and bought the house in Halsey Street, Chelsea, that was to be Elizabeth's home for the rest of her life.

Blue plaque at Halsey Street

Whilst she had always been bailed out financially by her family, Elizabeth did not at first realise how disastrous Tony's careless attitude to money was. He rarely held down a job, started a night club venture that incurred vast debts but never opened, and bought things for the house with gay abandon. Elizabeth eventually discovered the extent of their borrowing; when she confronted him he merely suggested they sell the house and go and live 'abroad' - where and on what he had no idea. They had both lived very entitled lives, but she drew the line long before he did. She started to write again, and had her journalism accepted by Harper's Bazaar (needless to say, although her writing was excellent, she got the commission through contacts...); A Book of Mediterranean Food, (which she described as 'a love letter to the Mediterranean') was accepted by John Lehmann Limited and published in June 1950.

Artemis Cooper;

'After the war everyone who had ever been abroad was longing to go again....it was not only warmth and colour they wanted: those little white villages clustering in front of the sea, with the olive groves beyond, represented a world that had not yet lost its innocence.'

And for me, these words encapsulate one of the issues with the received wisdom that Elizabeth David 'revolutionised' British cooking. 

The vast majority of people had then never been further than Southend; to them, her cooking was completely irrelevant. The metropolitan elite and the chattering classes of the Home Counities may well have lapped up her descriptions of eating freshly stuffed mussels on a boat off Marseille, but most women were still following the likes of The Stork Wartime Book of Cooking. They had years of boiled cabbage and semolina pudding to look forward to before 'foreign' cooking became popular. 

Elizabeth, of course, wrote many more books, and all are much loved. She is brilliant at conjuring up the taste of a food, or of a recipe; she vividly describes the place in which she first ate a dish, and the way it would be served in a French country kitchen or an Italian home. Her recipes are notoriously vague about quantities and methods; she expects her readers to work things out for themselves. (Whether this is arrogance or intelligence is debatable - it is probably a combination of both.) 

Elizabeth continued to write for magazines and newspapers - her articles were just what the readers of The Sunday Times wanted. She worked very hard, and was exacting about the publication of her work, brooking few editorial changes. She always did personal research, and travelled around France to source material for her next book French Country Cooking, after the publication of which she took herself off to live in Provence, not only for more research but because 'away from Paris, one could live far more cheaply than one could in England.' 

'There was never any lack of what Elizabeth would have regarded as the necessities of life: bread, olives and wine.'

Hmm. This would of course depend on just how one lived in England...

Having permanently separated from Tony in 1952, she had several relationships, the most important being with 'the elusive, charming' Peter Higgins, who loved horse racing, hunting and the high life in London. She was obsessed with him, jealous of anyone else he saw, and wanted to control every minute of his days. Meanwhile her professional life carried on in the same pattern of writing, travelling and cooking, though it was increasingly marred by ill health (she had been a heavy smoker and drinker for most of her life), family problems, difficulties with publishers, unwise legal battles over the ownership of illustrations...Cooper attributes Elizabeth's increasingly combative nature to Peter Higgins' ending of their relationship;

'This case (a legal suit against Macdonald publishers) took up an enormous amount of her time and energy, and she talked about it to anyone who would listen. It was a way of channelling the anger that burned inside her, the real cause of which could never be mentioned; the loss of Peter Higgins.'

Elizabeth felt that her life had been ruined by Higgins' abandonement, and that she would never write another book again. 

Needless to say, another useful friend (the photographer, art collector and interior designer Anthony Denney) came to her aid and whisked her off to his estate in Spain. She loved the food, and started writing articles about her impressions of this 'new-born world.' At La Alfarella, she developed an idea she had had for some time about opening a shop. Terence Conran had just opened his first Habitat; Madame Cadec's, the only other French kitchen utensil shop in London, was about to close (Elizabeth bought the stock, and also took many trips to France to buy more), and Anthony Denney agreed to design the new premises. 

In the kitchen at Halsey Street

It was a joint project with five partners, and initially it went very well. It became a huge part of Elizabeth's life; she was devoted to it, and loved to meet the customers. Princess Margaret visited (one can't help thinking the two women had quite a lot in common). But several of the partners had invested larger sums than its namesake in the venture; they were not seeing much return on their money. 

Elizabeth was predictably autocratic about how the shop should be run and what it should and should not (no garlic presses, no wall-mounted knife sharpeners...) stock. Large amounts of equipment (including things other partners had ordered that she didn't like, and even things that she herself had ordered, but didn't like when they arrived) never even saw the light of day, being stored in a warehouse in Vauxhall. She controlled the publicity with an iron grip, refused interviews, argued with suppliers, and wanted everything done her way. She fell out with Pam Pugh, one of the partners, over her cavalier attitude to bills and money in general. 

In 1970 the other partners brought in a business manager to try to turn the shop around and make it profitable. There followed two years of acrimonious battles, with Elizabeth fighting the proposed new direction of the shop (from retail into mainly wholesale, as this was more lucrative) 'with every ounce of her determination'. She would not compromise, but on 13 June 1973, at an EGM held while she was attending her mother's funeral, a vote was taken and passed, giving formal approval to the partnership's new business model. In 1972  Elizabeth's sister Diana had committed suicide. Her own personal and professional lives were falling apart. She resigned from the shop, and was furious that she was unable to prevent her name remaining on the sign over the door. And she apparently never forgave one of the partners, her close friend Renee Fedden, for what she saw as her betrayal - when a mutual friend tried to persuade her to make it up, she replied;

'Friendship betrayed is friendship slaughtered.'

Elizabeth threw herself into research for her new book English Bread and Yeast Cookery; in 1976 she was awarded the OBE for her contribution to cultural life, and a year later France made her a Chevalier de l'Ordre du Merite Agricole.

She became close to her nephew, Johnny Grey (then an architecture student), and was in the process of redesigning her London kitchen with him when they were involved in a serious car accident, made much worse for Elizabeth by her refusal to wear a seat belt. Although, once out of hospital, she continued to work, write and travel, visiting friends in Tangier in 1979 and fellow writer Gerald Asher in San Francisco annually between 1981 and 1990, she never really recovered her health. She still had many close friends, but further blows came with the deaths of some of them (including Jane Grigson, a cookery writer whom she held in very high regard) and of family members. She suffered a series of strokes (although she had given up smoking, she steadfastly refused to give up drink), the final one of which killed her in May 1992. At her funeral;

'..among the wreaths and baskets of lilies and blue iris, and the violets she had loved, someone had left a loaf of bread and a bunch of herbs tied up in brown paper.

Elizabeth David's grave at Folkington

Writing at the Kitchen Table is a well written and well researched book; the vivid details that Cooper has dug out bring Elizabeth David and her world alive. However, although most people who knew her agree that she could be difficult, some argue that Cooper paints too negative a picture. In a 2013 Guardian article, The Enduring Legacy of Elizabeth David, Rachel Cooke quotes Elizabeth's great friend and fan, chef Simon Hopkinson;

'...I had huge respect for her. She was so learned and intelligent, and I loved the way she looked.  Those eyes. She was so delicate. I remember seeing her tucked up in bed, recuperating, Post-it notes everywhere - all the things she wanted to moan about - and the room full of beautiful things.'

Hopkinson was one of three chefs who cooked for Elizabeth's memorial service - 'Piedmontese peppers, and spiced aubergine salad, a particular favourite of hers.' 

Simon Hopkinson's Roasted Piedmontese Peppers, a favourite dish

David's nephew Johnny told Cooke;

'I hate this portrayal of her as a drunken. cross person, but (if she were about to join us now) I would be quite nervous, yes.'

Both Cooke and Johnny Grey are unable to explain David's all-encompassing interest in food, given that she ate very little. If Mediterranean food brought back happy memories for her (she once referred to her writing in Ross-On-Wye as having been 'an agonised craving for the sun') why did she not go and live in France or Spain? 

Grey;

'I think it must have been that she didn't want to be an expat, to be identified with that kind of posh, idle person.'

Both Grey and others describe Elizabeth as very funny, 'hilarious, when she put her mind to it', 'good fun' and 'the sort of person you wanted to please.'

And to her long-time editor and friend Jill Norman, Elizabeth was a;

 'beautiful, elegant, reserved, witty, friend.'

So Elizabeth David remains something of an enigma; nonetheless she lives on through her books, and through the careers and kitchens of her devotees, as a significant and valued contributor to English cultural life.