Elizabeth David

Fine first edition from Elizabeth David, the leading cookbook writer of her generation, a beautifully illustrated French Country Cooking, the second book following the success of A Book of Mediterranean Food.

• Elizabeth David (English, 1913–1992).
• Illustrations by John Minton (English).
• London: John Lehmann, Ltd., 1951.
• Octavo.
• Includes illustrated title and frontispiece.
• Bound in publisher's cloth, gilt lettering to spine on a brown ground, with the pictorial dust jacket by Minton.

When David returned to Britain after the Second World War, the country was still on food rationing (even into the 1950s) and she was appalled at the cooking she encountered. Of the meals in one hotel, she wrote that the food was "produced with a kind of bleak triumph, which amounted almost to a hatred of humanity and humanity's needs."

"The food was beyond bad: insupportable, in David's view, even allowing for the shortages; she was overcome with a sense of 'embattled rage that we should be asked—and should accept—the endurance of such cooking.' To comfort herself, she scribbled down lists of the things she most missed: apricots, olives, butter, rice, lemons, almonds... This, then, was how she first began to write. Her notes and recipes were an expression of her yearning, a way of assuaging something that was not homesickness exactly but which must have felt a lot like it" (The Guardian).