AN OMELETTE AND A GLASS OF WINE

by Elizabeth David ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1985

About 60 articles by the author of seven cookbooks--from A Book of Mediterranean Food, 1950, to English Bread and Yeast Cookery, first U.S. edition 1980--that must rank as among the best of the 20th century. Most of these pieces were contributed to The Spectator, though there are other venues ranging from Punch to British Vogue. Aside from the somewhat different case of M.F.K. Fisher, David is the only contemporary writer on cookery to have escaped from the ghetto of recipedom into the world of letters. She is a writer of plain graceful prose who happens to know and love plain graceful food (of the sort intimated in the title). The pleasures these pieces record are those of a noticing mind taking in the colors and textures and smells of things, rejoicing in the byways of food history and gastronomic literature, marveling at the ubiquity of bad food and the social ironies that can overtake good. Included are travel pieces and articles on restaurants, full of forthright appreciation and bereft of silly superlatives; ""very fine flavor,"" ""delicate,"" ""full and fragrant"" mean something in here carefully weighted sentences. There are generous-spirited introductions to other books on food, from Norman Douglas' posthumously published Venus in the Kitchen to Lady Llanover's Good Cookery of 1867. There are explorations of individual dishes and ingredients: whisky used like cognac or Calvados in cooking, lemons, fresh homemade curd cheeses, sardines. Throughout, there is a candor and intelligence rarely permitted to trouble the pages of American food publications: ""Choice pears masked with chocolate sauce and cream, beautiful fresh peaches smothered in raspberry pur‚e and set around with vanilla ice seem to me offences to nature, let alone to art or basic principles."" Reading this clear-headed stuff is like breathing fresh air.

Pub Date: July 1, 1985

ISBN: 1599218607

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1985

Categories: NONFICTION