Italian Food by Elizabeth David

Illustration by Renato Guttuso from Italian Food
Work is the enemy of blogging. I started by cookbook idea and haven’t touched my keyboard on the subject for weeks. Worse, two key books were left out of my original posts.
First is Elizabeth David. For the uninitiated she was the Julia Child (or Margaret Fulton) of the UK (the second will follow tomorrow)
While we Brits (I live in Australia now), were tucking into to meat and two veg she was trawling Europe wheedling out what now seems to be everyday exotic Italian and French food.
Wikipedia credits her with bringing olive oil and zucchini to the UK. And there I was thinking that it was Terence Conran who single-handedly discovered the continent.

Interestingly her first cookbook was The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel given to her by her mother. The book conquered up images (and meals from) the Arabian Nights.
David said: “I wonder if I would have ever learned to cook at all if I had been given a routine Mrs Beeton to learn from, instead of the romantic Mrs Leyel with her rather wild, imagination-catching recipes.”
Another early acquisition (from Selfridges) was Recipes of All Nations by Countess Morphy and Good Food by Ambrose Heath, published in 1932.
It was one of my great regrets that after her death in 1992 I didn’t go to the auctioning off of her kitchen in Chelsea. At the time I was serving up her exotic fair through nightlong dinner parties in South London.
It was only later after reading Artemis Cooper’s biography of David that I realized that I probably wouldn’t have liked knowing her. She was one of those difficult people.
Back to the point of this. Elizabeth David’s Italian Food with Illustrations by Renato Guttuso, given to my Mother on her birthday some 37 years ago by her mother. And much later passed to me. At the time Evelyn Waugh named it in the Sunday Times as one of the two books, which had given him the most pleasure that year.
I should have preserved this book. Instead it sits on the shelf with its torn and stained cover. Its pages are turning brown with age and are splashed with various Italian sauces and wines.
And that’s the thing about this book. It’s a working tool. It doesn’t give recipes precise to the gram. It has stories and within those stories recipes. It was the influence that started me grabbing an onion, a couple of handfuls of Arborio rice, a pinch of saffron and tipping into my risotto several slugs of white wine and an indeterminate amount of good, homemade chicken stock.
It’s where I first took two egg yolks, two teaspoons of sugar and with a few glugs of Marsala whipped up a memorable Zabaione “much recommended by Italian doctors as a restorative”. After one of my marathon dinners I probably needed it
Stainfactor 10