An Omelette and a Glass of Wine by Elizabeth David
I don’t think there’s anything I can say about Elizabeth David that has not already been said; by contemporary food writers, by reviewers, by columnists, by documentary makers or by the dramatists who depicted her as a sex-obsessed high society maverick who was careering around the restaurants of the continent while our mothers all ate powdered egg.
What I can say is that as an introduction to the works of someone so widely influential - in fact often cited as the most influential food writer of the 20th century - expressive and historically important to the culinary heritage of Britain, I can heartily recommend this book. It is charming, amusing and fascinating. It transports the reader through her life and offers a flavour of British society at the time. Michelin starred restaurants feature along with smaller family-run cafes. Her tone may seem imperious at times but Elizabeth David was no food snob.
This is a collection of articles from publications which had an upper-middle class, affluent and right of centre following - The Spectator and Vogue mostly - and as such, the writing would not jarr so much with her original following as they do today. At once, David is honest and occasionally disparaging but always entertaining. My favourite passage comes early on in the book when she describes numerous trips to a French restaurant in a well-to-do neighbourhood of London. It makes you realise how bad eating out must have been in England at the time if this hotch-potchof factory-made pate and salad garnish with flashing moments of sincerity (peppered with moody service) is a place she liked revisiting over and over;
“Investigation of other local resources has produced the Beau Geste, an establishment situated on ther Kensington-Fulham-Chelsea borders. In France, you would not go into this restaurant, but in London SW3, you do. The pate is of M.Pigeon’s own confection. It is not discreditable. The red wine sauce with escalope is. It is a thick brown paste. A fork would stand upright in it. The escalopes could be veal. They could just as esily be the bedroom slippers I threw away last week. ” Through all this our author manages to see charm, civility and honesty. Her Francophilia does border on blind madness at points, but as a counterpoint to any prevailing anti-continentalism there might have been at the time, it must have been quite refreshing to her enlightened readers.
Just as Mrs Beeton was not the pinny-wearing straight-lacer that many of us have at some point imagined her to be, David was something of a loose-cannon herself. Her seemingly perpetual tours of Europe were with a married man under the funding of her irritated family - and all this before WWII. I read this book to see if I could understand something of the influence behind our modern attitudes to food. I feel now as if I have struck gold. Ever since my local butcher told me to “ignore your Jamie and Nigella- they all nicked it off of Elizabeth David” a couple of years ago, I have been intrigued. As soon as you start reading, you can see where contemporaries like Nigel Slater might have found inspiration. The similarity in terms of mixture is uncanny - one part recipe, three parts subjective description with a liberal dusting of strongly-held opinion about the purpose and value of food.
“It does seem to me that with so much talk about art vs fine ingredients somebody might mention that there is also the art, or the discipline, call it what you like, of leaving well alone”. This compares very closely to the opening sentence of one of Slater’s recent bestsellers. Simplicity is a golden thread which both these sumptuous food writers relish in and try to impart on their readers.
It now all seems so very innocent. Descriptions of French hotels, cafes, portly ladies cooking and the superiority of the boulangerie over the sliced white loaf which we favoured so heavily in this country for so long - just all seems so obvious today. You only have to take a turn around any supermarket to see the flourishing stock-lines of Taste the difference pain rustique to realise that we are much further away from le sliced white than we were twenty years ago. But when you begin to imagine what eating in Britain must have been like then, this book takes on a life beyond mere travel writing - it is historicaly important.
A large part of why she was so influential must lie in the backdrop of rationing at the time - that and the emergence of the middle classes for whom the kitchen was a visible part of the home. She came up with ways of glorifying the mechanics of cookery to our guests, rather than hide them away. Again, while this may seem obvious to us t0day (have a french farmhouse table in your kitchen for earthy, intimate soirees which hint at your honest aproach to food), she was suggesting we be more continental in post-war Britain. When the continent was war-ravaged and being viewed with suspicion.
In a short article called Waiting for lunch, written in 1984 but never published, she extolls the virtues of a bruschetta-style dish of warm bread rubbed with garlic and served with salt and tomatoes. David is sure this will never catch on over here. Her disappointment in the British public’s uptake of frozen and convenience foods is tangeable too as she remarks after this that if this dish were translated by the English, “there would be a curry version and a cheese variation and a super-gigantic one with bacon, lettuce, onion rings and radishes”. I’m not sure about the radishes (maybe in 1984), but you can certainly see her point.
The book also has its practical virtues, despite not existing as an instructonal book. The ‘Ommelette’ of the title was in fact one of the things that attracted me - as I hold the cooking of a good omelette to be core to enjoying cookery. If you can take your favourite pan and whip-one-up without more than a few minutes fuss and produce something wholesome and tasty, then maybe you can see the same joy in life that David saw in life.
This is a lovely book with real moments of character and seems to represent the tip of the iceberg where David is concerned. The next time I’m asked that question about who I’d invite to my perfect dinner party, there would be no contest. The only question would be whether she’d be happier at the table or in the kitchen.
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