Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
viewers,
3
journeys about the performance of
distinction.
made little concession to her public's insular sen-
sibilities, to the ears, eyes and nostrils. David posi-
tions her readers within the continuity of the
generations of privileged English tourists who had
made The Grand Tour. As she wrote for her post-
war readers not yet protected from the realities
and importunities of Mediterranean markets by
the 'environmental bubble'
6
of the package tour,
The Legacy of Elizabeth David
In 1950, Elizabeth David published
A Book of
Mediterranean Food
. It was written for readers
who wanted 'to bring a fl avour of those blessed
lands of sun and sea and olive trees' into the
colourless austerity of post-war Britain (
MF
,
Introduction
4
). Her subsequent books,
French
Country Cooking
(1951),
Italian Food
(1954),
Summer Cooking
(1955) and
French Provincial
Cooking
(1960), and her journalistic work, con-
solidated her reputation. She touched the dawn-
ing aspirational
zeitgeist
of increasing travel and
cultural mobility, and, in the words of her 'offi -
cial' biographer Artemis Cooper (1999, p. xii),
5
described food 'in such a way as to make people
dream of it and want to cook it'. Her recipes are
full of fl avour and detail; but it is the detail of
place, not the detail of the cookery class. In the
fi rst of the discursive pieces which form an intro-
duction to
French Provincial Cooking
, David
writes of her favourite Mediterranean region,
the butchers' stalls are festooned with every
imaginable portion of the inside of every edible
animal (anyone who has lived for long in Greece
will be familiar with the sound of air gruesomely
whistling through sheep's lungs frying in oil).
(
MF
, pp. 9-10)
Visual evocation is an important aspect of
David's work, and she was, of course, writing at
a time when colour photographs were rare in
cookery books. In the case of
French Country
Cooking
, she insisted of John Minton's illustra-
tions that they convey information, not just
atmosphere (Chaney, 1998, p. 275). Yet what is
of equal interest to the boldly stroked-in ingredi-
ents, the
batterie de cuisine
and the occasional
'sultry French peasants and […] jovial bour-
geois family at lunch' (Cooper, 1999, p. 156), is
the neo-romantic view through an open win-
dow to a pastoral or urban scene. One might as
easily be looking at a travel poster, save for the
absence of colour, as a cookery book. Yet these
illustrations offer a reminder of what the French
call
goût de terroir
, that
nexus
of place and pro-
duce held to defi ne fl avour as a unique and
place-specifi c taste (Trubek, 2005).
Weary of her own life in England, where,
after youthful studies in Paris and Munich, she
had worked as an actress and as an assistant in
the fashion house of Worth, David and her lover
Charles Gibson Cowan had set sail for Marseilles
en route
for Greece in July 1939 in the yacht
which they had bought largely with money
provided by her Uncle Jasper. The outbreak of
war made them refugees, and after fl eeing
Provence is a country to which I am always
returning, next week, next year, any day now,
as soon as I can get on to a train. Here in London
it is an effort of will to believe in the existence
of such a place at all. But now and again the
vision of golden tiles on a round southern roof,
or of some warm, stony, herb-scented hillside
will rise out of my kitchen pots with the smell of
a piece of orange peel scenting a beef stew.
(
FP
, p. 23)
The emphasis on colour and smell as signifi ers
of place, of memories catalysed by a scent or an
image, is a constant in her writing. So too is her
representation of the Mediterranean as the Eng-
lish traveller's proper destination, a place of
heightened senses and sensuality; yet one which
3
See Barthes (1957) and Bourdieu (1989) on the links between food and the expression of taste.
4
David's texts cited in this chapter are abbreviated as follows:
MF
:
A Book of Mediterranean Food
(1950);
IF
:
Italian Food
(1954);
FP
:
French Provincial Cooking
(1960). See the references for details of the subsequent
editions cited here.
5
The description 'authorised', Cooper suggests, meant merely that she was given full access to David's papers,
not that she was subject to any censorship (Cooper, p. xv).
6
See Cohen (1972) on the tourist's need for the familiar when in unfamiliar places.
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