Elizabeth David

Elizabeth David (born Elizabeth Gwynne, 26 December 1913 – 22 May 1992) was a British cookery writer.

In the mid-20th century she strongly influenced the revitalisation of home cookery in her native country and beyond with articles and books about European cuisines and traditional British dishes.

Born to an upper-class family, David rebelled against social norms of the day.

Overwork, combined with his vigorous recreational pastimes, chiefly racing, riding, and womanising, brought about his death in 1924, aged 51.

The widowed Stella Gwynne was a dutiful mother, but her relations with her daughters were distant rather than affectionate.

Elizabeth and her sisters, Priscilla, Diana and Felicité were sent away to boarding schools.

Having been a pupil at Godstowe preparatory school in High Wycombe, Elizabeth was sent to St Clare's Private School for Ladies, Tunbridge Wells, which she left at the age of sixteen.

The girls grew up knowing nothing of cooking, which in upper-class households of the time was the exclusive province of the family's cook and her kitchen staff.

As a teenager David enjoyed painting, and her mother thought her talent worth developing.

In the 1930s she studied art in Paris, became an actress, and ran off with a married man with whom she sailed in a small boat to Italy, where their boat was confiscated.

In 1930 she was sent to Paris, where she studied painting privately and enrolled at the Sorbonne for a course in French civilisation which covered history, literature and architecture.

She found her Sorbonne studies arduous and in many ways uninspiring, but they left her with a love of French literature and a fluency in the language that remained with her throughout her life.

Stella Gwynne was not eager for her daughter's early return to England after qualifying for her Sorbonne diploma, and sent her from Paris to Munich in 1931 to study German.

After returning to England in 1932 David unenthusiastically went through the social rituals for upper-class young women of presentation at court as a débutante and the associated balls.

The respectable young Englishmen she met at the latter did not appeal to her.

David's biographer Lisa Chaney comments that with her "delicately smouldering looks and her shyness shielded by a steely coolness and barbed tongue" she would have been a daunting prospect for the young upper-class men she encountered.

David decided that she was not good enough as a painter and, to her mother's displeasure, became an actress.

She joined J. B. Fagan's company at the Oxford Playhouse in 1933.

They reached Greece, where they were nearly trapped by the German invasion in 1941, but escaped to Egypt, where they parted.

She then worked for the British government, running a library in Cairo.

While there she married, but she and her husband separated soon after and subsequently divorced.

In 1946 David returned to England, where food rationing imposed during the Second World War remained in force.

Dismayed by the contrast between the bad food served in Britain and the simple, excellent food to which she had become accustomed in France, Greece and Egypt, she began to write magazine articles about Mediterranean cooking.

They attracted favourable attention, and in 1950, at the age of 36, she published A Book of Mediterranean Food.

Her recipes called for ingredients such as aubergines, basil, figs, garlic, olive oil and saffron, which at the time were scarcely available in Britain.

Books on French, Italian and, later, English cuisine followed.

Between 1950 and 1984 she published eight books; after her death her literary executor completed a further four that she had planned and worked on.

David's influence on British cooking extended to professional as well as domestic cooks, and chefs and restaurateurs of later generations such as Terence Conran, Simon Hopkinson, Prue Leith, Jamie Oliver, Tom Parker Bowles and Rick Stein have acknowledged her importance to them.

In the US, cooks and writers including Julia Child, Richard Olney and Alice Waters have written of her influence.

David was born Elizabeth Gwynne, the second of four children, all daughters, of Rupert Sackville Gwynne and his wife, the Hon Stella Gwynne, daughter of the 1st Viscount Ridley.

Both parents' families had considerable fortunes, the Gwynnes from engineering and land speculation and the Ridleys from coal mining.

Through the two families, David was of English, Scottish and Welsh or Irish descent and, through an ancestor on her father's side, also Dutch and Sumatran.

She and her sisters grew up at Wootton Manor in Sussex, a seventeenth-century manor house with extensive, early twentieth-century additions by Detmar Blow.

Her father, despite having a weak heart, insisted on pursuing a demanding political career, becoming Conservative MP for Eastbourne, and a junior minister in Bonar Law's government.

By the 1960s David was a major influence on British cooking.

She was deeply hostile to anything second-rate, to over-elaborate cooking, and bogus substitutes for classic dishes and ingredients.

She lodged with a Parisian family, whose fanatical devotion to the pleasures of the table she portrayed to comic effect in her French Provincial Cooking (1960).

Nevertheless, she acknowledged in retrospect that the experience had been the most valuable part of her time in Paris: "I realized in what way the family had fulfilled their task of instilling French culture into at least one of their British charges. Forgotten were the Sorbonne professors. ... What had stuck was the taste for a kind of food quite ideally unlike anything I had known before."

In 1965 she opened a shop selling kitchen equipment, which continued to trade under her name after she left it in 1973.

David's reputation rests on her articles and her books, which have been continually reprinted.