Elizabeth David leed een alles behalve saai bestaan. De Britse invloedrijkste kookschrijfster hield van eten en mannen. Ze was minstens zo spannend als haar 'exotische recepten' voor het naoorlogse Groot-Brittanië. Zelfs nu, 13 jaar na haar dood, is het grootste gedeelte van haar privé leven nog steeds in nevelen gehuld. In haar geboorteland zijn er verschillende artikelen en documentaires aan haar turbulente leven gewijd.  Hieronder een selectie.

ABC TV Documentaries: In The Footsteps of Elizabeth David      Telegraph: You can smell the sea or touch the olive branch          BBC radio 4 Woman's hour          Elizabeth David: And you thought Nigella was sexy...        Wall to wall      Waitrose Food Illustrated  BBC Breakfast       BBC2:  A life in recipes

ABC TV Documentaries: In The Footsteps of Elizabeth David

Broadcast: 4/1/2001 In The Footsteps of Elizabeth David Chris Patten in search of the influential, largely itinerant, food writer who had a remarkable effect on British cooking. Savour his journey through Europe and Elizabeth David’s life as he feasts on the dishes Britain now accepts as its normal diet

With a combination of intimate accounts from family and friends, unprecedented access to the Elizabeth David archive and breathtaking scenery Patten savours his journey through Europe, feasting on the dishes Britain now accepts as its normal diet and exploring the legacy of the unique woman who changed the way the British cook

                                                              Bron: ABC Documentairies

Episode One
In the first of a two-part documentary on the life of Elizabeth David, Chris Patten, recently appointed European Commissioner, traces the famous food writer’s early years, from her conservative upbringing in rural England and a reckless odyssey through war torn Europe with an unsuitable lover to a loveless marriage to a British Colonel in Cairo.

David’s experiences in Europe inspired a passion for the Mediterranean that never left her - a passion that was to inspire many pioneering cookery books. In each country the lovers visited, Elizabeth sampled the local fare and collected recipes but soon the realities of war caught up with them and their Greek idyll, the island of Syros, was bombed. They fled to Cairo. Whilst there, David married a man who represented the conventional life that was everything she despised. After a disastrous eight months with her new husband on a posting to India she returned to Britain and began to write ’Mediterranean Food’, a huge success in drab post-war Britain - every word evoking the warmth and sun of the Mediterranean.


Episode Two
Chris Patten concludes his profile of the itinerant and traumatic life of the food writer who had a remarkable effect on British cooking.

Chris returns to Italy, where Elizabeth spent eight months in 1952 researching her most challenging book. He retraces her journey through Venice, Tuscany and Capri, from whence she returned to London with armfuls of recipes that she proceeded to test out on unsuspecting friends; drying spaghetti on the back of chairs and looking for aubergines in a city where even mushrooms were a rarity.

Her next book, French Provincial Cooking, takes Chris to France, Elizabeth’s most beloved country. The book was a huge success but, as usual, Elizabeth’s emotional life was in turmoil. Her marriage had failed, and an illness dealt her a terrible blow - incredibly, she lost her sense of taste. But, despite the catalogue of trauma in her personal life, her passion for bringing the food of the Mediterranean to Britain never waned and she remains one of the leading influences in Western cooking.

Director: Mark Halliley
Produced by: Rose Prince & Mark Halliley
Executive Producer: Roy Ackerman
Presenter: Chris, Patten
ABC documentaries

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Telegraph

you can smell the sea or touch the olive branch

As legendary cookery writer Elizabeth David gets the ’docu-drama’ treatment, Tom Norrington-Davies asks how inspirational she really was

Glancing at January’s television schedules, it looks as if the unholy marriage between the words ’’drama’’ and ’’documentary’’ is set to go from strength to strength in 2006.
We have already winced over ITV’s portrayal of the early lives of Charles and Camilla. Will we now have to cringe at the interpretation of the love life of culinary royalty? Elizabeth David: a life in recipes promises to tell "the compelling story of the most important food writer of the last century... the woman behind the persona... the love affair which drove her to success as a writer" and so on.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with her work, Elizabeth David was a cookery writer and the author of several trail-blazing books. Her career spanned 30 turbulent years of British food history. Influenced by her travels through France and the Mediterranean, she is widely held to be responsible for weaning a jaded national palate off the austerity imposed by rationing after World War II.
Foodies have been singing her praises ever since: Nigel Slater, Gordon Ramsay and Rick Stein are fans. Most recently, David is acknowledged in Jamie Oliver’s current bestseller, Jamie’s Italy.
This is something she would no doubt find bemusing. Oliver and David’s profiles are like chalk and cheese: Jamie’s voice is brash and unscholarly, whereas David’s prose is as celebrated as her recipes. Jamie’s life is an open book: his wife and children are almost as recognisable as he is, thanks in no small part to their inclusion in programmes made by his own production company.
Few people even know what Elizabeth David looked like. Her friend and editor Jill Norman remembers how they could slip in and out of fashionable restaurants together unnoticed (much to the author’s delight). David appeared on television only once during her career. It was for an interview in the Eighties. She seemed shy and ill at ease. Fiercely private, she once remarked: "Everything I want to say is in my books."
This near reclusiveness led to what food historian Nicola Humble describes as a "cult of personality" surrounding David. During and after her lifetime, wild speculation surrounded her personal life. She was rumoured to believe in open relationships and to have conducted love affairs with men and women. Is it this and little else that has led to the making of A Life in Recipes? Considering that cookery programmes and books by the likes of Jamie Oliver now reach millions, more people than she could ever have hoped to, is David’s culinary legacy at all relevant to today’s audience?

One person who would answer a resounding "yes" to this question is her current publisher, Camilla Stoddart. For David’s recipes are still very much in print. Her latest book, Elizabeth David’s Christmas, was begun in the Seventies then forgotten about, due to other projects, until it was completed by Jill Norman in 2003, a decade after David’s death. This book alone sold 20,000 copies last year. "Working with E D (as she signed herself) is strange," says Stoddart, "because I do feel I know her. I’d give anything to have a glass of wine with her. Preferably on top of a hill, in France, with a picnic." Restaurateur and baker Sally Clarke, who did know David, can understand why. "Something about the way she wrote makes you think you are with her. You can smell the sea or touch the olive branch. Her sense of wonder is palpable and this must have been hugely exciting for the first people who discovered her work at such a dismal time."

                                                                                                                                      Bron: Telegraph online

The facts about David’s post-war impact are almost as muddled with folklore as her private life. Claims that everyone endured a miserable diet of Spam and dried egg until she turned the nation on to courgettes and spaghetti are slightly erroneous. In fact, books such as Mediterranean Food and French Country Cooking, both published in the early Fifties, reached only a very small section of the population, albeit one that was undergoing a dramatic upheaval. Educated, moderately wealthy women suddenly found themselves in their kitchens without servants. In the preface to a collection of David’s work, her friend and fellow writer Jane Grigson wrote that "Elizabeth didn’t so much restore confidence in cooking as invent it".
At the same time, changes were taking place on the high street. In bigger towns and cities, refugees and ex-POWs who had stayed on after the war opened delicatessens and grocery stores. So the idea of David rescuing olive oil from the chemists is a romantic but not historically accurate one. She did, however, direct her readers to ingredients that were increasingly available. This mix of fact and fiction surrounding the influence of David has vexed some of today’s food writers. One notable sceptic is Matthew Fort. Why, he wonders, has she been canonised? The didactic nature of her work was, he says, an unwitting form of social exclusion. Her recipes were not easy to follow, her tone could be imperious and the ingredients were hard to find. Too much cookery writing since then, he argues, has delighted in taking the same line. As unpalatable as it seems, says Fort, we should measure the reach of David’s work against far more popular writers such as Delia Smith or Jamie Oliver before we call her the greatest cookery writer of the 20th century.
Even Jill Norman wonders if anyone would give David the time of day, were she a new writer, with her refusal to appear in public and her strong opinions. So, I decided to ask some of today’s youngest stars if they had any time for "E D." Sam Stern is the talented 15-year-old who produced Cooking up a Storm: a teenage survival manual. It has been a huge hit. Written in true Jamie-speak (with an endorsement from Mr Oliver on the cover), it features recipes for every occasion from "mates round" to "revision".

While Stern himself hasn’t yet read David’s work, his mother, Susan, tells me, "he is strongly influenced by her, through me. I learnt to cook at school and my teacher was a huge fan. When I left home for drama school in London I turned to Elizabeth David’s books for inspiration." Stern will tell you his two greatest heroes are Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and Rick Stein. These two are interesting examples. They may not have rationing to contend with any more, but both write and present their material knowing that a large part of the population is hugely disenfranchised. Increasingly, there are pockets of Britain referred to as food deserts, where it is impossible to buy fresh produce. Both writers tirelessly promote the importance of supporting local producers, and of cooking simply and seasonally. In this way, they continue a tradition pioneered by the likes of David.Local produce and seasonality are at the heart of the cooking at the Anchor and Hope, one of London’s busiest gastro pubs. Chef Harry Lester, yet to see 30, has been reading David avidly since his late teens. What he loves most about her work, he says, "is that every word is about the food. None of her wit or style interferes with the substance. You don’t get so much of that today.

Bron: Telegraph : Catherine McCormack as Elizabeth David

The publishers are too busy trying to create personalities so they can shove them in front of a television camera and sell more books." I have to agree with Lester. Besides, I don’t think we are alone. In the age of the super celebrity chef, it was heartening to witness the re-emergence in 2005 of one of David’s best-known disciples. After Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories hit the top spot in a magazine poll of "the most useful cookbooks ever" last summer, the work was reprinted and hit the bestseller lists. The book was five years in the making and fans (myself and Lester included) will tell you that Hopkinson’s eminently readable writing is the kind you could just as well curl up in bed with as cook from. Perhaps people have been starved of this kind of cook book, the kind that deals with the sheer pleasure of food, for too long.
• ’Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes’ will be shown on BBC 2 on January 17 at 9 pm.


BBC radio 4 Woman's hour

Life and loves of the revolutionary food writer

Elizabeth David was something of a revolutionary in post-war Britain, writing about Mediterranean dishes involving olive oil and avocados at a time when British people were still grappling with ration books. But as well as being years ahead of her time in the kitchen, David was also a very sexually liberated woman, who took both male and female lovers and led an open marriage.

"Elizabeth David - A Life in Recipes" is on BBC TWO, 17 January 2006.

Beluister deze uitzending van 17 januari 2006

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The Independent

Elizabeth David: And you thought Nigella was sexy...

She brought olive oil and garlic to Britain, but the very private life of Elizabeth David was even spicier than the recipes in her books. As a biopic comes to the small screen, Caroline Stacey reports
Published: 14 January 2006
In less time than it takes to boil an egg, the woman who was to become Britain’s greatest 20th-century cookery writer, and as famous for her froideur as her fricassees, is snogging her rough-diamond lover. As war loomed in Europe the one-time debutante and actress Elizabeth Gwynne was sailing away to France with East End Jewish charmer Charles Gibson Cowan, a fellow actor, writer and pacifist. And married man.

This is where BBC2’s forthcoming Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes begins the story of the beautiful, unconventional Tory MP’s daughter who changed what the British middle classes ate. When A Book of Mediterranean Food, her hymn of longing to the cooking around the southern shores, was published in 1950 there was still rationing. Most readers could only dream of trying out the crisply instructive recipes. Olive oil was sold at the chemist’s shop, garlic did the devil’s work; but she includes in her book a method for stuffing a whole sheep. She ushered not only olive oil and garlic, but also aubergines, courgettes and basil on to the stripped-pine tables of 1960s kitchens. She was probably responsible for the tables, too.

A Life in Recipes turns her life into a drama (though not half as excitingly as her biographies), interwoven with readings from her work and soft-focus cooking shots. The scriptwriter has also contributed to Shameless. At the opposite end of the social spectrum to the Gallagher family, David’s early life was, for its time, almost as wild.

Long before the swinging Sixties began, back in post-war England, the by then Mrs David was misbehaving, despite having taken on her husband’s name and the respectable mien of a married woman. Behind her evocative accounts of the sensual pleasures of the Mediterranean was a history of torrid affairs before, during, and after the war.

Hers was an extraordinary life, through which she discovered the pleasures of cooking in contrast to the cheerless British approach to it, travelled as far as India (although never much rated the food) and returned to Britain to flout convention behind an imposing patrician manner.

Until Lisa Chaney’s unofficial biography lifted the lid on the steamy goings-on in her youth, little was known about her private life. Even now, 13 years after David’s death, the keepers of the flame protect her reputation, and tell the prurient what is and is not relevant. Imagine how much they and she would loathe the BBC drama, making so explicit that which she never revealed.

Her friends were kept apart, her lovers kept secret. It’s rumoured she had affairs with women as well as men but neither the unofficial nor (not that you’d expect it) the official biography names names. Life in Recipes is so irreverent it’s hilarious. There’s a mischievous thrill to be had seeing actors simulate the bedroom romps of a woman who was the embodiment of hauteur and guarded her privacy fiercely. "She was very unforgiving, very temperamental, very severe in her standards," her "friend" Sybille Bedford has said.

                                                                                                       Bron: BBC.co.uk

A gutless performance by the breadstick-thin and brittle Catherine McCormack doesn’t really get this across. The journey with the charismatic but uncouth Gibson Cowan is a ripping yarn, though, and one which eventually gave her all the background she needed to become the scourge of bad British cooking. Aged 25, she was already extremely independent (even before running off with Cowan, David had an affair with a married theatre director). At 17, she’d lived with a French family in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. She had visited ex-pat relatives in Malta between working as a vendeuse at the couture house Worth and as an actress before she set off for France in 1939.

From Provence, the lovers sailed to Italy where their little boat was impounded. From there they reached Greece and the island of Syros where they hid out in a primitively equipped cottage. David was living on handouts from relatives, despite the fact that they disapproved of her antics.

When Greece was invaded by the Nazis, the couple fled to Crete and thence to Egypt where David finally got involved in the war effort and free of her lover. She settled in Cairo with a Sudanese cook called Suleiman, and developed both a flair for mixing ethnic and couture clothes, and a wide circle of friends living life on the edge. Even by the standards of the time - think Mary Wesley novels but set in the Middle East - she played hard. But then her mentor was Norman Douglas, a gamey old libertine who had decamped to Europe after allegedly molesting an under-age boy. When he met David in Antibes, Douglas was 72. He passed on to his protégée his knowledge, contacts and his opinions on fish soup for her third book, Italian Food. He passed on his damn-the-consequences morality, too.

After seven years abroad, London in the bitterly cold winter of 1946-47 was a wretched place. David was driven to put down her memories of the sights and sounds of Mediterranean markets, the heady scent of herbs, garlic and the "the sound of air gruesomely whistling through sheep’s lungs frying in oil". Her Indian Army officer husband, Tony David, unromantically acquired in Cairo, had been unregretfully left behind in India, and unceremoniously sidelined once he eventually made it to Britain. By then, staying in a hotel in Ross-on- Wye with unspeakable food, she’d started on the book that began her career. What she never admitted but - with much squeaking of bedsprings - the dramatisation lays bare is that she was not staying alone in the hotel but with another lover she’d first met in Cairo.

Elizabeth David insisted that everything there is to know about her is in her books. Both biographies and Life in Recipes make it grippingly apparent this is not the case. Even now, not everyone agrees how much more there is to know. The TV drama bigs up an affair that the unauthorised biography mentions in passing. Greg Wise smoulders as Peter Higgins, the "PH" to whom she dedicated French Provincial Cooking in 1960.

When that was published, she had reinvented cookery writing and the national diet in just 15 years. Drawing on dishes she had eaten and learnt from cooks in France, Italy, Greece and north Africa, her books are evocative pieces of travel writing, creating an instant connection with the places she had visited, and indispensable for reference. Although her delivery can be horribly imperious, her taste in food still seems impeccable. Her taste in men never was.

Life in Recipes leaves off after the end of the love affair with Higgins. He’d married another woman. Shortly after that, David suffered a stroke at the age of 49 and lost not only the ability to taste salt but also her libido. But she carried on working. She spent the next 25-odd years working, often in bed, on magazine articles, and switched the focus of her scholarship to English cookery - the spices, the seasoning and the breads. Her effect on British kitchens didn’t stop there. Until then kitchens had been purely functional and often out of sight.

Bron: BBC.co.uk

Her singular existence of cooking, writing, entertaining, drinking and smoking revolved around her farmhouse kitchen table, surrounded by open dressers stacked with terracotta and earthenware pots, cast iron pans, peasant pottery bowls of eggs and artfully arranged Mediterranean fruit and vegetables. Avant garde for 1950s Chelsea, this was how the kitchens of the future would look.

When David opened a cook shop with friends, (with whom she later, inevitably, fell out) selling the artisan cooking euqipment she loved and everyone else later copied, its launch in 1965 was headline news. She was responsible for Le Creuset introducing its cast-iron pans in blue - inspired by the colour of her Gauloise packet.

At the same time, working with the food photographer Anthony Denney, she changed the way recipes were presented in magazines. No studio shots of mashed potato masquerading as ice-cream as was the practice then; the photographs are simply of what she had cooked. Her prose style is echoed by contemporary writers such as Nigel Slater.

The hold she had over the gastrocenti remained after she died. At an auction at Sotheby’s, the kitchen table on which she had done much of her writing sold for £1,100, a colander for £320. I bet the buyers and all those who fetishise her will be up in arms about the TV dramatisation. There’s plenty to object to. Those tortellini look rather thick. Would she have bared her midriff, aged 39, as a single woman in 1950s Capri? Surely she’d have complained about the stubby wine glasses in a smart restaurant in the 1960s? Above all, wouldn’t she have been furious that her private affairs were being acted out and broadcast?

Her life was remarkable and her legacy astonishing. Her recipes stand the test of time and her brilliant writing was the outcome of racketing around the Mediterranean, travelling, drinking and eating alone in Italy, and holing herself up in Ross-on-Wye with another man while her husband was in India. By all accounts she was disagreeable, but that shouldn’t put anyone off her books. And now that we know how extraordinarily racy her life was there’s even more reason not to forget her.

’Elizabeth David: A Life in Recipes’ is on BBC2 on Tuesday at 9pm

The Independent online

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Wall to wall

A life in recipes

Mail on Sunday - "Utterly compelling"
Sunday Telegraph - "Sparkling dramatisation"
Time Out - "Catherine McCormack is a brilliant mix of toughness and vulnerbility".
Independent on Sunday - "an elegant and brittle turn from Catherine McCormack in the lead role."
Sunday Times - "Sharply written and elegantly directed film."
The Independent - "Catherine McCormack is outstanding"
Evening Standard - "A riveting slice of social history." "Catherine McCormack gives a beautifully composed performance"

Elizabeth David is the most important cookery writer of the past century - she revolutionised the way we, as a nation, think about food. When Mrs David published her first book in 1950, post-war rationing was still in place and olive oil was only found in chemists in bottles marked “for external use only”. British housewives were making do with Spam, dried egg and over-boiled cabbage. David changed all that. Her books, with their beautiful descriptions of mouth-watering Mediterranean cuisine, introduced the country to the previously unheard of delights of olives, apricots, avocados and basil.

David’s public image was of an elegant, respectable and somewhat austere figure. In reality Elizabeth was a deeply unconventional person with a profound passion for food, life and men. This film tells the compelling story of the woman behind the Mrs David persona. At the heart of the drama is the one true love affair of David’s life – the affair which she claimed drove her to success as a food writer – and the moment where it all came crashing down. Her misery at losing this great love was so extreme that she suffered a brain haemorrhage, which tragically and ironically robbed her of a full sense of taste.

                                                                                                                       Bron: Wall To Wall

Shot on location in the UK and Malta, the film stars Catherine McCormack (Spy Game, The Tailor of Panama, Dancing at Lughnasa, The Honest Courtesan, Land Girls, Braveheart) as Elizabeth David. Greg Wise (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, According to Bex, Sense and Sensibility) plays her long-term lover, Peter Higgins.

The film was written by Amanda Coe

Wall to wall

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Waitrose Food Illustrated

The First Lady of Food

• Georgisch Tafelen
• Pellegrino Artusi De wetenschap in de keuken
• Koken in Kleur
• Marleen Willebrands in de media
• Alan Davidson in de media
• Het spek van slager Blom
• Noord-Atlantisch Viskookboek
• Groente Kookboek
• Hutspot met klapstuk
• Mosselkookboek
• Snoep Goed, Natuurlijk zoete toetjes & traktaties
• Lombokkookboek
• De Verstandige Kok
• Het Hans Christian Andersen Sprookjes kookboek: Geluksperen, roverballetjes en paradijskoekjes
• Drie Klassieken
• Mozarts Menu
• Mediterraan Viskookboek