Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David

The Internet is great, in fact it's fabulous and magnificent, but it's not everything. Before computers there were books and, I don't know about you but I can't read books on a computer screen. I like the feel of books, I love seeing various typefaces and I tuck in deep under the covers to read in bed. Books and their pages of words are my friends and they never cease to transport me. {"In" my Amazon store I am constantly adding books I love and am reading currently.}

The other day my friend JW took me to one of her favorite places, the library. In my longish life I've had an on-again off-again relationship with The Library. I never discount their importance but my childhood experience of them in NYC was that treacherous men hid in their stacks.

At the library the other day a little book didn't let me pass her. An airy and colorful illustration by Giovanna Garzoni, Cherries, Strawberries, and Peas called out to me, and the title of the book, Summer Cooking, so simple, whispered me close.

Summer Cooking, by Elizabeth David, has a copyright date of 1955. This seems unbelievable to me. First because it feels so long ago, and second because David (1913-1992), as a British writer, the 1950's were not known for fresh, seasonal, delicious cookery, at least in the English speaking world!

Far from it, in fact; the 50's are known for overcooked and canned fruit and vegetables, at that time a fantastic discovery of the Industrial age after wartime and rationing. "Westerners," especially, moved away from growing their own food because they mostly lived in cities. And when WWII was over much of the unused chemicals for warfare became pesticides and fungicides for large scale, also industrialized, agriculture.

I'm not done reading Summer Cooking but I wanted to share with you part of the new edition, written by Molly O'Neill. This cookbook, this book of impeccable food writing, could have been written today... It does make you wonder who reads whom to "come to their" "philosophies" about their own food today!

    "Usually her recipes succeed, though never as an unimpeachable formulae. David believed that her readers had common sense and a grasp of cooking fundamentals. She gave an impressionistic sense of a dish, calling in a recipe for Iced Russian Soup, for instance, specifically for half a pound of young beet roots and then instructing that they be cooked 'in a little salted water for a few minutes.' David's recipes wouldn't make it by any food editor I know; today, recipes are expected to be an exact science (which they can't, really, ever be).

    "But cooking wasn't a science to David; it was an art. Recipes today are created to be followed literally and slavishly, the culinary equivalent to paint-by-numbers. The recipes that David wrote nearly half a century ago are broad strokes on a canvas-- she leaves the details to the cook, and for this reason, her recipes are neither dated nor dowdy, they are alive.

    Contemporary readers who have become accustomed to following (and dependent on blaming the recipe should a dish displease) may balk at David's recipes. They require the cook to engage, to reason, to improvise, to risk failure. Those willing to take responsibility for their cooking, however, may find a moment of intense liberation in using her blueprints as a starting point for their own improvisation. Eventually, they may even find their own voice in the kitchen."

--from Molly O'Neill's Foreward to the 1965 edition of Summer Cooking by Elizabeth David.

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More on the subject about recipes and if we really need them, here. I found the link at Becks & Posh.

Comments

[Christine]

The internet is a wonderful and available tool, you can shop and research so many different things. But a trip to a library for story time or just covering up under a blanket with a cup of tea and a good book still opens so many doors for me.

[jennywenny]

I'm not an expert, but I imagine that in england, certainly in the early 50's, they were still recovering from the war and growing their own vegetables in government allotments. My grandma had an allotment until very recently, and my parents still have one, so seasonality and such have always been a part of my families life. My grandma lived near London and I grew up in Birmingham, a town with 2 million people!

[Aaron]

Are you aware that Giovanna Garzoni makes a brief but important appearance in my thesis? Now you are I suppose...

[Aaron]

"It does make you wonder who reads whom to "come to their" "philosophies" about their own food today!"
For those who take this to be an attack on a certain Berkeley contingent, I would like to point out that David is included in the bibliographies of every CP cookbook I own, and I presume the ones I don't as well.

[kudzu]

The first comment I wrote to you was about a cookbook we both adored, then another. I have an original paperback of David's Summer Cooking (Penguin), all discolored and beaten up. There's nothing like pages to turn, ink to smell, the feeling of the book in one's hands.

I hope we never lose those -- it's becoming more and more difficult!

[Diane]

I love, love, LOVE Elizabeth David. I read her books just as entertainment, but in fact they are quite practical as cookery books as well. I have not heard of this one, but maybe it can be found at my library.

I think it was quite hard for her to move back from Egypt (?) to England at the end of the war, and be faced with the limited choice there in rationing days. However, being rather fearless she focused on what was available and good locally, what could be done with little.

[Stephanie]

A tattered copy of Summer Cooking has gone with me to many, many apts. It was my first introduction to Elizabeth David's work, at least a couple of decades back, and remains my favorite. Glad you found it!