September 17, 2000

Beyond Bangers

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Elizabeth David faced a daunting task: awakening the English palate to sensual pleasure.

By LAURA SHAPIRO

WRITING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David. By Artemis Cooper. Illustrated. 364 pp. New York: The Ecco Press/ HarperCollins Publishers. $27.50.

here wasn't much in the shops when Elizabeth David returned to London in 1946. She had spent most of the war in Cairo and Alexandria, where tomatoes, rice, lemons and olive oil, not to mention the wine and the sunshine, never ran out. Now, back home, the climate was just as bleak in the kitchen as it was outdoors. Odd lots of rationed meat were being dutifully roasted no matter how tough they were; cabbages were boiled to exhaustion; everything else, from soup to dessert, seemed to come from tins and powders. Hungry, cold and furious at her compatriots for their apparently devout conviction that frugal cooking had to mean tasteless cooking, David picked up her pen and began to describe the simple, sun-drenched meals she had eaten around the Mediterranean.

This moment -- when David awakens England not only to a cuisine of wine and olives but to a new way of thinking about food -- has become a legend in British gastronomic history, a kind of culinary 1066 that every food lover knows by heart. ''A Book of Mediterranean Food,'' published in 1950, was greeted with joy by reviewers and readers. Even if the recipes were, just then, more evocative than practical, here was a conjuring act that summoned a world beyond powdered eggs and made it plausible. With the best-selling books and articles that followed, David acquired a peerless reputation for scholarship, taste and sheer culinary wisdom. By the time she died in 1992, she was sporting an aura that placed her somewhere between Julia Child and the Dalai Lama. Not surprisingly, a biography soon appeared -- the admiring and comprehensive ''Elizabeth David,'' by Lisa Chaney, published in 1998. What is surprising is to see another one, Artemis Cooper's ''Writing at the Kitchen Table,'' just two years later.

Cooper, a historian whose previous books include ''Cairo in the War, 1939-1945,'' says David's publisher invited her ''out of the blue'' to write an authorized biography, promising full access to David's papers and no interference. It's not clear from the results that the official archive gave Cooper much of an edge over Chaney. For the most part, the two books cover similar ground using similar sources, and Chaney's account is considerably more thorough. Cooper has produced a graceful and judicious sketch, but it lacks the depth, detail and color that would turn it into a major portrait.

Her book does make it easy to see why researchers will be elbowing one another out of the way for years to get to David's papers. Elizabeth Gwynne was born in 1913 into one of those tight-lipped, wealthy families appallingly familiar to anyone who has ever taken a course in the English novel. Her father was a staunch right-winger in Parliament who kept a wife in Sussex and mistresses in London; her mother attended to gardening and civic duties, politely freezing out her four daughters. There was much horseback riding, much fuss over which branch of the family would inherit the ancestral home. Elizabeth escaped, just as World War II was breaking out, by embarking on a sailing adventure with Charles Gibson Cowan, a rakish vagabond who was her first great love.Their relationship frayed during sojourns in France and Greece, disintegrating entirely after they were routed to Egypt by the war; but all this time she was accumulating friends and lovers who would be important to her for the rest of her life.

There was 72-year-old Norman Douglas, for instance, a crankily independent writer and traveler who treated her as a sort of disciple, teaching her to apply high, unyielding standards to food and everything else. Then there was an officer named Peter Laing -- their romance started lightly but surprised them by turning powerful. She ended it when he was injured by a land mine and had to have both legs amputated. (Or, as Cooper tactfully puts it, ''She knew that she was not the sort of woman who could nurse him through what was obviously going to be a long convalescence, and he did not press her.'') Finally she met Tony David, an Indian Army officer, and agreed to marry him. Neither smart nor glamorous, he really didn't appeal to her very much, but he adored her: ''She had never had so much love before, and for the moment, her misgivings melted in its warmth.'' In 1946, she followed her new husband to India, hated the place and fled to London. She never took their marriage seriously again, though it lasted nominally for more than a decade.

Describing these years abroad, Cooper pays more attention to David's heart than to her palate, so if there was a culinary moment of truth that turned a casual British cook into a passionate Mediterranean one, we don't see it here. Nor do we get a clear sense of how David came to be such a brilliant writer -- on cookery, of all things, hardly the subject that was attracting the best minds of her generation. In fact, throughout the book Cooper makes no real effort to tell David's story as a culinary story. Food is everywhere, but it functions more as scenery than as plot; and Cooper rarely brings any significant weight of research or imagination to bear on it.

Most important, David's role in the variegated world of postwar British cuisine is never analyzed in depth. David is often celebrated as the most influential food writer of her time, but what precisely was the nature of her influence? Was it confined to writers and chefs, or did she actually reach the woman in the kitchen? Those heady, beautifully written recipes can be followed by any cook with good instincts, but they're nowhere near precise enough for the rest of us. (The reviewer who felt that ''French Provincial Cooking'' should be ''presented to every young wife on her wedding day'' was either joking or sadistic.)

Perhaps the choice of a historian as official scribe was meant to situate David at a dignified height far above the foodie fray. Yet it's possible to close this book with a very ahistorical notion: that David constituted a one-woman culinary revolution in Britain. Revolutions don't happen that way. Whatever it was that diverted the British from cold baked beans on toast to asparagus risotto most certainly involved a great deal besides Elizabeth David. Eight years after her death and two biographies later, we know a lot about her life but relatively little about why she mattered. Maybe it's time to step away and let her legacy simmer quietly at the back of the stove until the ingredients lose their raw taste and the flavors emerge in full.

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Laura Shapiro is at work on a book about women and cooking in the 1950's.

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