Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David [Hardcover]

Artemis Cooper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2000

Elizabeth David's reputation as one of the most influential food writers of the twentieth century rests primarily on her first five books. Mediterranean Food appeared in 1949 when England was still on wartime rations. Before long every self-respecting cook had a copy of it in the kitchen; between 1955 and 1985, more than a million copies of her book were sold. Elizabeth's aim was to bring flavor of these blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees" into English homes, and her books transformed a generation of cooks by demystifying unfamiliar ingredients like garlic, red peppers and olive oil that have since become everyday cooking staples.

Born in 1913 to a wealthy, well-connected family, Elizabeth Gwynne was privately educated until the age of sixteen, when she was sent to France to learn the language and study at the Sorbonne. After being "finished" in Paris and Munich, she returned to London and worked briefly as an actress, but left again to explore Europe. At the age of twenty-six, she and her married lover, Charles Gibson-Cowan, set-off on a boat bound for Greece. Trapped in Antibes by the war, Elizabeth came under the spell of Norman Douglas, one of the most important influences in her life. She and Charles set sail again just as Italy entered the war, only to find themselves interned in Messina, accused of espionage. Eventually they reached Athens. They spent the winter in 1940-41 on a Greek Island, where Elizabeth first started to cook Mediterranean food.

The German invasion of the Balkans forced them to join refugees fleeing to Egypt. In the raffish Fortunes of War of Alexandria and Cairo, Elizabeth flourished and came to know writers such as Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor. She also met Tony David, an officer in the Indian army. He proposed to her by letter from Italy and, to the astonishment of her friends, she accepted. After the war and a few months in India, Elizabeth returned to gray rationed England.

Exasperated by the bleakness of English food, she put pen to paper and wrote Mediterranean Food, a book that caught the imagination of a generation was soon followed by French Country Cooking, Italian Food, French Provincial Cooking, and many other titles. In the course of the next decade, the happiest of her life, Elizabeth's books and articles inspired a cookery revolution.

Working from an extensive archive of personal papers, Artemis Cooper reveals the powerful tensions between Elizabeth David's private world and the image of the successful woman she presented to her public. It is a story that even some of her closest friends never knew.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Although Elizabeth David was the very opposite of a recluse, she was famously reluctant to divulge information about herself to her readers, claiming that everything that needed to be said could be found in her books. In light of Artemis Cooper's Writing at the Kitchen Table, this assertion looks more doubtful than ever: the more that is revealed about David, the more interesting she becomes. Cooper is the "authorized" biographer, writing with access to a mass of personal papers, but this is no hagiography. Mrs. David, crisply but sympathetically drawn in these pages, was a fascinating egotist, beautiful with a hard sensuality, generous but capable of furious rages and lasting grudges. She learned a valuable lesson in self-centeredness from the quintessentially louche Norman Douglas, who in many ways seems to have been a key influence. Clearly she was not exactly a nice person, although it is encouraging (and not entirely surprising) to discover she had a really dirty laugh--more of a cackle, it appears.

The story is well told: the patrician background she flouted (but not too much); the flight from England, grayness, and failure; the rackety wartime years spent knocking around the Mediterranean in the company of high bohemians such as Lawrence Durrell; the marriage of convenience in Cairo that gave her the status of a married woman but was soon abandoned; the lovers; the return to London and the start of a dazzling writing career; the fame and the status; the shop; the stroke that affected both palate and libido; the troubled later years. On none of this need she be judged, and Cooper does not. In a sense, David was right. The best of her is in the writing--namely, in her precise, attentive, sensual appreciation of food and cooking. She was above all an exquisitely skillful cook, whose influence, though mostly indirect, has been incalculable. It's all the more moving, then, to learn at her funeral, "among the wreaths and baskets of flowers, and the violets she loved, someone had left a loaf of bread and a bunch of herbs tied up in brown paper." --Robin Davidson

From Publishers Weekly

Elizabeth David's vibrant writing and elegant recipes have earned the respect of famous gourmets like Alice Waters and Julia Child, but acolytes of the doyenne of cookbook writers may be disappointed by the dry prose of this authorized biography. David earned her reputation in the 1950s when, with books such as Mediterranean Food and French Country Cooking, she brought strong and simple flavors to the austere palates of postwar England. David was perhaps the first cookbook writer not to specialize in haute European cuisine, but rather to aspire to bring the flavors of the farmhouse to home tables. Although her books were and continue to be recognized as well organized and thorough, David's personal life was something of a shambles, with love affairs that didn't pan out, an unhappy marriage and an odd relationship with her sister Felicit?, who served as her typist. Cooper, however, marshals these facts into chronological order and uses a straightforward tone that strips the anecdotes to their bare bones. David's childhood, for example, is dutifully chronicled ("Like most children Elizabeth hated vegetables"), but provides little hint of her later adventures. David was an avid traveler, and her early trips to France, Italy and Greece are obviously key, but they are reduced here to lists of people she met and places she stayed. Excerpts from David's own beautifully crafted books easily show up the dull prose that surrounds them, but fans looking for the stories that did not make their way into David's own books will find only facts to savor here. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; First Ecco Edition edition (August 22, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060198281
• ISBN-13: 978-0060198282
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #681,848 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The joy of cooking......, September 27, 2002

By 

Dianne Foster "Di" (USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David (Hardcover)

When friends and relatives and acquaintances gathered together Sept. 10, 1992 to memorialize Elizabeth David, they shared bottles of Macon Prisse 1991 and Morgan Chateau Gaillard 1991, as well as conversation. Artemis Cooper, author of `WRITING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE: THE AUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY OF ELIZABETH DAVID suggests David would have approved. In the space of several decades, David had revolutionized cooking and meal preparation in Britain and introduced the British to really fine wines. Like her counterpart in America-Julia Child-David had no idea she would cause such a stir when she began to write articles about French, Italian, and other Mediterranean cuisines after WWII. David's notion that one could cook and eat other people's food-a multiethnic moment if there ever was one-was downright avant garde in the 1950s.

Cooper covers David's (nee Elizabeth Gwynne) life from her early days on the family estate in Wales, through WWII when she worked for the British in Egypt, to her amazing career as an author of books on food and food preparation. Before, during, and after WWI, David lived in Italy, the Levant, Egypt, and India where she learned how to make many local dishes and to appreciate "home grown" foods we call organic today. When Ms. David began to write about her dishes on her kitchen table, rationing was in still in force in Britain. Nevertheless, her first book on French country cooking was a hit. She then went on to write a number of books and many articles focused on what various people grow, cook, and eat.

Elizabeth David certainly lived in interesting times. A most intriguing aspect of Cooper's biography is her skillful placement of David within her age, a period during which the social mores of the UK changed somewhat dramatically. David had many interesting friends, including the writers Lawrence Durrell and Norman Douglas. Her book agent was Paul Scott, author of the RAJ QUARTET, and Olivia Manning, who wrote the Balkan and Levant trilogies known collectively as THE FORTUNES OF WAR was a friend from her days in Egypt. If you enjoy biographies as social history, I recommend ELIZABETH DAVID.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Surprising Mrs. David, December 26, 2000

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David (Hardcover)

My mental picture of Elizabeth David was of a fastidious purist, living in spartan elegance with a summer home in Provence and a huge garden. I saw a kindly, tolerant, gracious lady.

Well--not exactly. Ms. Cooper does a very even-handed, non-obtrusive job. I was somewhat put off by the "authorized" biography part, thinking it might be only what the family saw fit to print. Happily, Ms. Cooper had a free rein to use any and all materials. The brief section dealing with Mrs. David's childhood sets the scene of a very well connected family who are not anyone's idea of favorite relatives. I didn't get a clear picture of Elizabeth, and wondered if perhaps the author didn't depend too much on one person's casual comment to attempt to define a large part of Elizabeth's character. She did not seem like a particularly happy child. When she was 17, she embraced life and never looked back. By turns an actress, student, stage manager; she had very little direction and non-existant discretion. She had a series of lovers, spent WWII very precariously mostly because of her own poor planning and finally when she was in her late 20's found she could write passionately about food--and the rest is history. Though the author is sympathetic, Mrs. David was not a pleasant person. She was egocentric, morbidly suspicious, overbearing and very conscious of class (her own). But was was an excellent teacher and drew acolytes to her all of her life. She was beautiful and not particularly discriminating so had a romantic life that was hectic, but not particularly fulfilling. I admired her scholarly dedication and her lifelong disdain for the second rate effort. There is no question she deserved all her success. She worked at it and earned it.

An excellent read you won't forget. For anyone interested in food or food writing, this is one you will want for your library. For general interest readers, it is well done about an interesting subject.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Revealing look into a place and time, January 25, 2002

By 

Suzanne P. Thomas (Colorado, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David (Hardcover)

When I purchased this book, I had no idea who Elizabeth David was, but as a writer I couldn't resist reading about such a successful cookbook author. Artemis Cooper sorted through an immense amount of material and produced a wonderful story of a woman and the times that created her.
Born well-to-do in Britain, Elizabeth David started life basically ignored by her parents, and grew into a dilettante. With some bad judgement she ended up in the wrong place (Italy) toward the beginning of World War II, and spent years being exposed to a completely different kind of food than she had known in England. So one of the "bad" events in her life helped guide her to cookery writing.
The biographer has a lovely writing style, and fills in the bits quoted from letters and interviews very smoothly with narrative explanations. For example, Artemis writes "Robin Fedden invited Elizabeth to Chantemesle, some fifty miles northwest of Paris, where his parents lived. On one side of the house was the River Seine, winding between little green islands alive with birds, and on the other, the abrupt ascent of a dry limestone escarpment. Cherry and apricot trees stood about the house. 'It was beautiful there. I have never forgotten it,' Elizabeth wrote. Perhaps it was then that Robin proposed to her; many years later, she admitted to Robin's daughter Frances that she and her father had been engaged." The biographer does this throughout the book, turning one little quote into a lyrical paragraph (though if you think this sample was overdone, then you probably won't like this book).
By following Elizabeth's life, I learned that food rationing remained in place in England until the mid 1950's, and what horrible things can happen to an author when the rights to her books pass to other publishers than the ones she originally signs with (shudder!). While the story lagged for me when she returned home and began writing cookbooks, other readers who are more familiar with her and the people in her life will likely disagree.
On a personal note, I resolved to learn from some of Elizabeth's mistakes. Much of the unhappiness in her life stemmed from her personal weaknesses. A very rigid woman, she had trouble seeing things from another person's perspective. This allowed her the joy of being right, but separated her from other people.
Although a rather dense read, this book is overall very enjoyable.