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'She'd have definitely hated any film about her, let alone this one'

This article is more than 18 years old
Besotted fan and screenwriter Amanda Coe on what inspired her to dramatise the life of cookery writer Elizabeth David

When Elizabeth David published her book of Mediterranean Food in 1950, it was closer to a work of fiction than a collection of recipes. Post-war rationing was still in full cry and nearly every ingredient she listed, from lemons to lamb, was at best difficult to come by, and at worst unobtainable. Today, as supermarkets groan with exotic produce, gastro porn has had to up the ante, tempting our jaded palates with explicit photographs, preferably including graphic lifestyle details of its celebrity cooks. In those more deprived times, all Elizabeth David had to do to produce the same effect was to write down the ingredients. As she herself noted, "... apricot[s], olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds ... Later, I came to realise that in the England of 1947, those were dirty words that I was putting down."

She was astute, as always, in making the connection between cookery writing and pornography. It's a link that becomes even more overt when translated to the screen. Films showing the act of cooking and eating arouse the appetite without sating it, and the images in such films - think of Babette's Feast, Eat, Drink, Man, Woman, or even those Marks and Spencer ads - customarily invoke a wider sensuality which gets all kinds of juices flowing.

In writing the screenplay for a film about Elizabeth David, this use of food was an obvious metaphorical route into the passionate emotional life of a formidably private woman who was the most important cookery writer Britain has produced.

Using the traumatic end of a love affair at the peak of her career in the early 60s as both its point of departure and climax, the film spins back to David's formative years in the Mediterranean just as the second world war was breaking out, and then to her early success as a writer, from Mediterranean Food, through Italian Food, up to the magisterial French Provincial Cooking. It is punctuated throughout by images set to Elizabeth David's own words of wisdom on food and cookery. They are as authoritative, precise and well chosen as her private life was frequently contradictory, chaotic and unplanned.

And there's the rub. I have no doubt that David would have hated any kind of film about her life, let alone a drama that has invented incidents and conversations which never took place. In her lifetime she granted few print interviews and only one, much regretted, TV interview. There was the occasional carefully posed publicity shot when the occasion demanded [she was both beautiful and chic], and beyond that she hid behind the blurb at the front of her books, offering only the rather high-handed information that "Mrs David has lived and kept house in France, Italy, Greece, Egypt and India". The fact that she was Mrs David in name only, having lived in a sexually various open marriage for some years before Mr David left for good, or that her "housekeeping" in Greece comprised cooking batches of piccalilli with which she bartered for basic goods on a remote island where she was shacked up with her ex-actor lover, were details she kept wilfully obscured.

In her horror of publicity, if in no other way, David was a product of her age, and in this respect, our age has got the better of her. I can only console myself with the thought that her extraordinary life was bound to be dramatised by someone, and that it might not have been someone as absolutely besotted with her as me.

It is not so much the recipes which first drew me to David, although they are as clear, practical and well researched as when they were first written. But pesto and hummus and boeuf bourgignon are all a culinary fact of life these days, largely thanks to her, and as likely to be bought in a tub as constructed from scratch. And although Jamie, Nigella and their cronies are all quick to cite Elizabeth David as a key influence, for a dinner-party effort it's frankly easier to turn to them.To the casual cook [which I am], the sheer volume and density of the recipes can seem daunting. Even so, they stand as sketches for a philosophy and tone which are gloriously achieved in the more expansive form of David's essays and journalism.

Some admirers claim to admire David foremost as a travel writer, others hail her as a stylist. It is true that she vividly evokes each place she visits through her gift for precisely rendered visual detail (she is particularly good at colours), and her sentences have the rhythm and confidence of a born writer. But for me, the magical ingredient is the personality revealed by the prose: the rigorous intelligence, the casual wit - often hinting at an enjoyably filthy streak. Witness her deadpan glee at a 60s confection called Princess Anne's Muff, the almost teenage fury directed against anything sham or pretentious or just plain bad. She was a good hater, but capable of equally passionate appreciation, and she could temper all her strength of feeling most exquisitely in words. Good taste, in its true sense of fineness of discrimination, was her gift.

Reading An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, the collection of essays and pieces published in her lifetime, is like getting to know someone whose force of personality seduces you to their cause. Long before the end, you hate garnishes as much as she did. You feel that pleasure is important, and pleasing yourself even more so. You have accumulated a store of eclectic details, not all related to cookery ("It was Herbert Beerbohm Tree's wedding day. His half-brother had been called in to act as best man in place of his real brother who had vanished to Spain"). You're a bit frightened of her, but you want her approval.

Which remains my feeling about daring to bring her to life in the film. I am confident that audiences will enjoy the quality of Catherine McCormack's remarkable performance as Elizabeth and James Kent's imaginative direction,and hopeful that this version of her story won't be seen as a reductive "chopping and fucking" account of her life. Elizabeth David was a complex woman whose influence on our culture was enormous. She deserves to be known, and read, and her recipes cooked to continue that tradition of authentic, guiltless, sensual pleasure first imported by her and once so alien to British life.

· Elizabeth David - My Life in Recipes, starring Catherine McCormack and Greg Wise, will be screened on January 17, 9pm, BBC2.

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