Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

`Writing at the Kitchen Table' is the `Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David' by Artemis Cooper. Biographer Cooper, by great sympathy with his subject, with access to great sources, and by superior narrative has given us a superior biography of one of the three great female English language culinary writers of the twentieth century.

It is revealing to compare the lives and careers of Ms. David with the other two greats, Julia Child and M.F.K. Fisher. She stands roughly between Child, the great teacher and Fisher, the great gourmand and explorer of appetites. Her recipe writing was less pedagogical and more analytical than Child, and less subjective but more attentive to details of other peoples works than Fisher.

In their personal lives, it is interesting to see that while David and Fisher were certifiably beautiful women through much of their lives, their success with husbands was poor to dismal by the standards of their day and ours. In contrast, the very tall and warbly voiced Julia Child was attractive by the same standards one may have used with Eleanor Roosevelt, yet her family life with husband, Paul Child was one of the world's great enduring love stories.

A fascinating parallel with Child and David is that they both served in their country's intelligence organizations overseas during World War II. While Child was with the OSS in India and Burma, David was with British Intelligence in Cairo, where she landed at the beginning of the war after a literally hair raising flight from the Italians and Germans in 1940, across the Mediterranean just as the Germans were invading Greece. Also, Ms. Child and Ms. David both met their future husbands during the war.

One small problem I have with the biographies of both Ms. David and Ms. Fisher is that neither does a really good job of identify the spark that ignited their interest in food. Unlike these two, Julia Child's epiphany is obvious when she found herself with a husband who liked to eat well, and she did not really know how to cook. Necessity took over and Julia dove into the subject with what became a lifelong passion.

With Elizabeth David, the interest seems to creep up on her as a result of really dismal food in her nursery as a child, followed by the revelation of very good food while living and studying in Paris and Munich. While Ms. Fisher started writing before World War II, Ms. Child and Ms. David both started their careers around 1950, although Ms. David was first published `Mediterranean Food' seven years before Julia Child et al's `Mastering the Art of French Cooking'. In fact, by 1962, after publishing `French Provincial Food' and `Italian Food', Ms. David was quite the authority compared to newcomer Child.

This is another interesting parallel in that the most famous works from all three authors came early in their careers. While Ms. Fisher's greatest fame came in the 1960's, it was largely based on reissues of works she did in the 1940s. And, neither Ms. Child nor Ms. David ever topped the popularity of the works in their first five years.

Oddly, Elizabeth David's very best work of scholarship was probably published near the end of her career, and it is probably her least known major work. This is `English Bread and Yeast Cookery', which lead to her achieving her highest official recognition's from the Crown and from English intellectual society. What is surprising is that this great scholarly work may have as much in common with Rachael Carson's `Silent Spring' as it does with Peter Reinhart's books on bread baking. Along with great information on home and commercial practice, it was a revelation of how poor English commercial bread baking could be.

In addition to her unfortunate romantic live and her James Bondean experiences at the opening of World War II, Ms. David's life in general seems to have been less happy than that of Ms. Fisher and far less happy than the `too good to be believed' life of Ms. Child. Ms. David's father died young and her mother did not have a great deal of interest in her four daughters. Early in life, Elizabeth made up for her family's alienation by living beyond her means, with the knowledge that her family's estate would bail her out of her debts.

Her relations with her family and many friends seemed to be perpetually bumpy. Elizabeth could be both very reserved and very prickly, with a blindness to seeing the other point of view in a lot of cases, leading to more than one very long term alienation from former friends. She was, for example, very difficult to interview and had a great aversion to seeing her name in print in contexts other than as author of her own works.

Her business dealings tended to the difficult as well, although not entirely through her doing. Her relations with publishers of books and magazines seemed to be especially difficult, leading to serious legal entanglements. Her problems with the cookware store, `Elizabeth David, LTD', of which she was just one of five shareholders were largely her own doing, as she ignored good business sense and ran things largely to suit her personal tastes. Then, she took serious offense when her business partners brought in a manager with good marketing skills.

While Elizabeth David's influence was not great in the United States, it did have a great effect on the general direction of American cuisine in her friendship with American expatriate, Richard Olney and their joint influence on Chez Panisse movers and shakers, Alice Waters and Jeremiah Tower, plus the tiny San Francisco eatery, Zuni Café, soon to be the second best known San Francisco eatery, after Panisse.

This book was more enjoyable to read than the recent Fisher biography, `Poet of the Appetites', but not quite as much fun as the Child biography, `Appetite for Life'.

If you consider yourself a card-carrying foodie, you should read this book.

It was with great curiosity and interest that I read Artemis Cooper's biography of Elizabeth David, "Writing at the Kitchen Table". I had the good fortune (through my mentor) of meeting Elizabeth's mother Stella (Gwynne) Hamilton, becoming her friend and maintaining a correspondence with her for nearly four years. She was in her seventies and I was in my twenties which was very similar to the age arrangement of Elizabeth David and Norman Douglas. During those years I was with Stella for the three visits she made to Washington DC and Virginia and on two visits that I made to UK so in addition to the correspondence I was on the receiving end of a lot observations she made about her own life and about her family. It is was a somewhat preposterous friendship but we shared a love of history, art, furniture and gardens and of course her dear friend Cecil Wildes(who was my mentor and my lover so our love of him was another bond). I was an eager student and she had a lot to teach.

As to Artemis Cooper's assertion(from dependable sources no doubt) that Stella was cold, aloof and distant from her children was probably true. What Ms Cooper does not say or give adequate attention to is that many women of Stella's social status were cool and removed from the rearing of their children. If a woman at child bearing age were naturally unmaternal, as one of Stella's cousins asserts, and the house was filled with servants, nannies and a nursery what do you expect she would do? That is a fashion of child rearing that was (and probably still is) commonplace in the aristocratic class in Great Britain to which Stella (and Elizabeth) clearly belonged. Ms Cooper, since she seemed determined to cast a shadow, might at least have given some context. Additionally she gives very short shrift to the relationship between Stella and her brother-in-law Roland and the issue of the settlement of Rupert's estate and the manor house in Sussex which was Stella's home and which she dearly loved. A few more paragraphs or another page could have given or might have given a more balanced perception of her predicament. It was primarily the nature of that relationship that left Stella really unable to cope during that period in her life. Did she have a breakdown at that time or what happened that other people had to rise to care for her family? Stella told me more than once that she knew people were very critical of her at that time but that she couldn't have handled it any other way. There was always a note of self presevation in that telling. It was however my feeling as I read the biography that it was Ms Cooper's intention to cast Stella in the cold -unloving mother role which indeed she may have been but there is another side to it.

Regarding Elizabeth, Stella was extraordinarily proud of her. Please remember that Elizabeth David dedicated her first book "To My Mother" so their relationship at that time must have been satisfactory since Elizabeth David was hardly one for empty gestures. Equally Stella was proud of all of her daughters marvelling at Pricilla's broad range of talent and of coping and managing a complicated life and of Miss "F", Felicite, she always spoke of with great affection and marvelled at her knowledge of books and authors (since she herself was very well read and proud of it but she felt Miss "F" put her to shame). The only time I saw Stella cry was when she spoke of Diana's death & I'm sure suffered from that tragedy for the rest of her life. Stella spoke frequently of and with great affection about her grandchildern although I know some of them frustrated her but it was the 1960s and times were changing rapidly and Stella was a conservative from the 19th Century. Her correspondence ( as was her conversation) to me is filled with affection for her family and I feel Ms. Cooper did not in anyway capture that spirit and on the contrary chose to flesh out, in her portrayal of Stella, an uncaring and unfeeling woman which was contrary to my experience with her vis a vis her family.

As to Elizabeth I only met her twice. Both times at her kitchen table (the very table) at Halsey street. One time with Stella at mid-day (we ate fresh baked bread) all very relaxed and cordial and another time with her niece Sabrina in the evening. We drank red wine at the famous table, her cat sat on my lap (which pleased ED) then she took us to dinner at a little restaurant called the Iron Horse. She ate bread and drank red wine while the host plied us with dishes from the kitchen ( a boon for the hungry twenty somethings) but she only picked at them. I remember she said "this happens to me everywhere I go, how much do they think I can eat?". She was very charming to me but I do know the family stood in some terror of her moods and I think that suited Elizabeth perfectly. As to all of the unkind observations that people make about ED upon reading this authorized biography by Ms Artemis Cooper I would say they are all more or less meaningless because in the end Elizabeth David will be judged by her body of work which is powerful and beautiful. If she stuggled in her human realtionships it is a price that is often extracted from artists who are devoted to the creation of their work (if not consummed by it). As to Stella Hamilton I had never met anyone like her and have never since and will not ever again. I write this in her memory with great respect and love. As to the book it was filled with great anecdotes and information but it was not a masterful telling which was what Elizabeth David deserved.

I found this book fascinating if chock-full of minute details, but then I am a Mrs. David fan. She was a product of her era and her class, so of course she was a bit of a snob. Anyone who'd expect her to be some Miss Marple-like character probably doesn't know much about history, nor about England! And, many strongly determined people with high standards who are really good at what they do can be difficult at times.

The fact is, after the war and in the middle of rationing, she changed the way Britain looked at food. This is no small feat, and presaged the success that Julia Child found in the States with Mastering the Art of French Cooking and her first television show. To Elizabeth David and to Julia Child we owe, among other things, the arugula and fresh herbs we can buy in the supermarket today.

My only wish is that I'd met Elizabeth David.

This book shows what an interesting life Elizabeth David led. She was independent before it was fashionable for women to be so. I do think the book only touched the surface of what her life was all about. She had a real talent for manipulating people. I think what she wanted most was to escape everything her life represented.

This is a poorly written laundry list of a book with plenty of unnecessary filler facts such as the names of Elizbeth David's myriad friends. I suspect that nobody edited it.

To correct a comment in a review on this site - the brilliant, talented Olivia Manning was not a friend of the thoroughly unlikable, secretive Elizabeth David. Read the book to find out why. As for David herself, a graphologist summed her up when she was 17 - "she does not shine, she absorbs". A taker, not a giver in other words, and this book certainly does not contain any examples of her alleged charm.