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‘Italian Food’

When Julia Child calls another cook “the doyenne of English food authorities” and her veal recipes “lovely,” it’s time to pay attention. Elizabeth David, not Child, is credited with breaking the English out of their stodgy meat-and-potatoes routines way back in the 1950s. Having sojourned in both France and Italy as a young woman, translating the recipes of local Italian and Frenchwomen from “by the handful” into so-called “proper” measurements, David was the first English cook to really bring Italian and French food to her native country.

Takeaway tips: David’s prose is very unlike that of, say, M.F.K. Fisher, being quite straightforward, but is accurate and worth reading for its sheer Englishness: “Zuppa pavese” (a soup) is “a capital invention, admirable when one is tired, and also for solitary meals.” She can’t help but dropping details about her travels into the writing, but does so in such an accessible way that one doesn’t come away from the book loathing her.
Quality of pictures: Nonexistent. David’s book came out at a time when recipes were recipes and photographs were photographs. This is a book for those who want to meet her and live in her Anglicism-saturated world for awhile.

We tested: Pesto
David — perhaps unwittingly — adapted her Italian friends’ method of saying, “a handful of this, a handful of that,” and it shows in this pesto recipe: “one large bunch of fresh basil, garlic, a generous ounce each of pine nuts and grated Sardo or Parmesan cheese, 1-2 ounces of olive oil.” Give this book to a young person straight out of college; the ease (and deliciousness) of this recipe will make his life bearable even if he is earning only pennies.

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