Elizabeth David - Is there a nutmeg in the house?

PENGUIN BOOKS

IS THERE A NUTMEG IN THE HOUSE?

Elizabeth David published eight books during her lifetime, from the evocative Book of Mediterranean Food, published in ration-bound 1950, to the masterly English Bread and Yeast Cookery of 1977 both books being immensely influential in very different ways. In 1984 she published An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, which was the direct forerunner of this book: in it she allowed herself to look back on three decades of popular and successful journalism. Her last eleven years were taken up with the ever-expanding and never-finished project which, after her death in 1992, emerged as the scholarly social history of ice and ices, Harvest of the Cold Months.

The subject of two very different biographies and a major television programme, Elizabeth David continues to fascinate both her long-time devotees and also a younger generation discovering a grand dame of the past who speaks a language and conveys a message they feel completely at home with. Her writings testify to an inevitable gift of making her many passions, be they loves or hates, come alive.

Jill Norman, who created the Penguin cookery list and went on to publish and eventually write equally distinguished work, was Elizabeth Davids editor and friend for over a quarter of a century, and is now the Literary Trustee of the Estate. She saw Harvest of the Cold Months through to posthumous publication, then persuaded many of Elizabeths friends and enthusiasts to contribute notes on their favourite pieces for the anthology South Wind Through the Kitchen, and has here completed this last of the projects left unfinished on Elizabeths death.

Jill Norman is an author in her own right, her most recent book being The New Penguin Cookery Book.

compiled by Jill Norman

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

www.penguin.com

First published by Michael Joseph 2000

Published in Penguin Books 2001

Copyright this collection The Estate of Elizabeth David, 2000

A number of the articles and recipes in this book have been previously published and their sources appear at the end of each article. The year of copyright will be the year of first publication.

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-194972-7

In the early eighties, Elizabeth and I spent many very agreeable hours selecting the articles which appeared in her first anthology, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, published in 1984. The kitchen in her house in Halsey Street may have been crammed with utensils of all sorts, but bookcases and shelves took up every wall in the other rooms and corridors overflowing with her substantial library of cookery, history, travel and reference books, and numerous files and folders of assorted papers. Out came the dusty files of articles written for the Spectator, Vogue, House & Garden, Wine & Food or for a wine merchants catalogue. Most of this material was new to me: I had not seen the articles when they were first published and knew only from references in Elizabeths books that some chapters were based on early journalism.

Our routine was to take a number of files each, select the pieces each found most stimulating, most expressive of the pleasures of good food, and likely still to appeal to readers, and then compare notes. It was one of the most enjoyable editorial tasks I have ever undertaken. The articles were a pleasure to read, and Elizabeths reminiscences about the research and writing of many of them often kept us talking until late at night.

In the end we had too much material, and decided to put some pieces aside for a later volume. This, at last, is that volume: during the last years of her life, most of Elizabeths energy went into gathering material for Harvest of the Cold Months which was finished after her death and published in 1994. By that time mountains of miscellaneous papers had been transferred from Halsey Street to our house, and only much patient sorting by my husband, Paul Breman, made it possible to assess their contents and select further material for this new collection. The articles Elizabeth and I put to one side sixteen years ago are here, but others were published later: scholarly and historical essays appeared in Petits Propos Culinaires and Mark Boxer persuaded Elizabeth to do a monthly column for the Tatler in the mid-eighties. Here she was free to write on anything that engaged her at the time: the potato as aphrodisiac, useless kitchen equipment like garlic presses, the travesties wrought by British chefs and caterers in the name of pizza or quiche, the story behind the Oxo cube. Often the basis of a piece would be a review of a recently published book.

Elizabeth always read widely in early cookery books in English, French and Italian and enjoyed trying out their recipes. Many of those which she adapted from well-known English writers have appeared in her English books, but here we have her versions of Relishes of the Renaissance from one of her favourite works, the Opera dellArte del Cucinare of 1570 by Bartolomeo Scappi, cook to Pope Pius V; notes on the ices recorded by Emy in LArt de Bien Faire les Glaces dOffice in 1768; some simple vegetable dishes from Bartolomeo Stefanis LArte de Ben Cucinare (1662); and more articles about other writers William Verral, master of the White Hart Inn at Lewes; John Nott, author of a dictionary of receipts of the late Stuart period; the enigmatic Countess of Kent to whom is attributed A True Gentlewomans Delight; and the ebullient chef Alexis Soyer, nineteenth-century self-publicist who would have made some of todays television cooks look like mere amateurs.

In 1965 Elizabeth opened her kitchen shop and during the next few years published privately some booklets of recipes which were sold through the shop. Syllabubs and Fruit Fools and English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes were published in An Omelette and a Glass of Wine; parts of others are reprinted here.

During the twenty-five years I worked with Elizabeth she was constantly experimenting and trying out new dishes, sometimes for a book, sometimes because a food she or one of her friends particularly liked was in season, or because there was a dish she wanted to explore more thoroughly. When she was satisfied with the recipe and it was typed in its final form, it was her custom to give copies, usually signed and dated, to friends. Many subsequently appeared in her later books, but others which did not are included here. The folders from her house yielded many unpublished recipes, and occasionally accompanying articles. During the preparation of