Elizabeth David: A Cautionary Tale From the Kitchen

I have a secret thrift store.  And my friends want to know where it is. 

They see the clothes I find there.  The vintage kitchen items.  And the hard-to-find books.

I’ve had people beg me for the address. 

But I won’t tell them. 

Not even my closest friends.

Because it’s MY Secret Garden.  

“But I’m not even your size!  And I’m a man!”

Doesn’t matter.  You’ll eventually tell my doppelganger. 

“But I can keep a secret.  I SWEAR!!!”

People THINK they can keep a secret----but let me remind you that someone pointed out Anne Frank.

ANNE FRANK!

And my Secret Annex is not only an awesome thrift store----it’s magic!

One day I had a free afternoon and was on my way there when I thought to myself, “You know----you really don’t need anything.  Maybe you should take a walk in the park instead?  Or go to a museum?  What do you need that could possibly be there?”

And then I answered back to myself, “Well, I don’t NEED anything, but I wish I could find an Elizabeth David cookbook.”

Five minutes after walking in the door, I had a 1959 Penguin Edition of French Country Cooking in my hands.

For a dollar.

Maybe I just need to make more wishes!  My life is going to be AMAZING from now on!!!

So I kept wishing.

Unfortunately, not every rabbit hole leads to Wonderland.  Sometimes you just step in mud and rabbit poo.

But while my life isn’t always Utopia-----my secret thrift store has never let me down.  I can walk thru the doors of that magical wardrobe and wish for anything from a cool vintage t-shirt to a garlic keeper----and I will find it in Narnia.

For a dollar.

After discovering several of David’s cookbooks in my Boo Radley tree, I began to wonder about the life of the woman who wrote so brilliantly and was so passionately knowledgeable about food.

So this week, I book-wormed my way thru Writing at the Kitchen Table: The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David.

Elizabeth David was born into an upper-class family in Britain in 1913.  A bit too rebellious for the life of a debutante, she shocked her family by going off to Paris to study acting, quickly realized she was no good at it, and then ran off with her lover on a yacht to sail the Mediterranean. 

Unfortunately, they chose the outbreak of World War II as their departure date.  They spent the rest of the war trying to get away from it----shuttling between Greece, Egypt, India, and even spent time in an Italian prison accused of espionage.    

When she finally got back to England in 1946, she was shocked at the toll wartime food rations had taken on the already bland British cuisine.  To earn a bit of money, she began to write articles describing all the heavenly dishes she had eaten during her Mediterranean years while the folks back home were subsisting on tinned meats and powdered eggs.  Different from most cooking manuals of the day, she wrote about fresh ingredients, seasonality, how to cook with wine, and the emotional response to food and its preparation. 

Far from being resentful at her years of plenty, the still-rationed British public gobbled up her articles like food porn. 

She went on to publish several ground-breaking books that introduced then-exotic ingredients like zucchini, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese to the English-speaking world.  Her books on French, Mediterranean, and Italian cooking won her world-renown.  When she wrote a favorable review of the newly published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child was “simply overwhelmed” and immediately penned a gushing letter thanking her for the acknowledgement.  Her scholarly work on the history of English bread won her several honorary degrees and she was eventually made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a CBE of the Order of the British Empire.

Despite all the public accolades, David was intensely private.  She constantly turned down requests for interviews by saying, “Everything I want to say is in my books.”

Her biography by Artemis Cooper gives you a rough idea why.

Elizabeth David may have had a few good days, but she was mostly a bitter, unhappy woman.  She fought with friends and family constantly and held long-standing grudges against editors and business partners.  She appears to have spent most of her evenings all alone and flying into drunken rages---or with scores of sexual partners who cared as little about her as she did about them.

The great love of her life was a young officer of the 9^th Lancers.  But when General Montgomery began to drive Rommel out of North Africa, the officer’s jeep hit a landmine.  He was taken to a Cairo hospital where his legs were amputated.  Elizabeth visited him in the hospital and brought him some home-cooked food----but she knew she wasn’t the sort to play nursemaid and walked away.

He married a wonderful woman and lived happily ever after.

Elizabeth David continued to make herself miserable.

When she was only 49, she became maniacally obsessed with some illustrated plates her publisher had lost----and then she discovered that her boyfriend of ten years was in love a younger woman.

She completely lost it.  Screaming and hurling the contents of her home like a one-woman tornado, she finally collapsed into a heap.  She discovered soon after that she was physically unable to talk----she had given herself a cerebral hemorrhage.

She spent weeks in the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases recovering from what amounted to a stroke. 

While trying to keep her condition from editors, publishers, and the general public----she wrote an article from her hospital bed for The Spectator describing a fish market:

"In the dawn light of the Rialto markets...a sole isn't made of old white cricket flannels but of pale lilac silk, and....if you are looking you may see a pyramid of apricots radiating rose and gilt reflections from a catch of red mullet..."

Her image was all she had.

Her power of speech eventually came back; but it took quite a while longer for her to regain something else she’d lost---her sense of taste.

Only her doctors and a few close friends knew that the famous cookbook writer was putting her latest concoctions into four separate dishes and discreetly asking her dinner companions to taste them "to see which is properly salted".

From there it was more drinking and sleeping pills, more rages and family disputes, and then a whole messy business with her quaint little kitchen shop in London that caused her to fly into yet more rages, leave her own company, and spend years taking out lawyer-like ads denying her connection with them.

Frankly, by the time I got to this chapter, I was pretty sick of her myself.  I looked at the number of remaining pages left to read in the book and thought, “I wish she’d hurry up and die soon.  A hundred more pages!  Nooooo!!!!!”

But I kept reading.  Because I really wanted her to be happy.

And then it came out that her younger sister who lived in David’s upstairs apartment (in exchange for typing duties) was hospitalized for malnutrition.  Likely some form of anorexia, but David appeared more mortified that the famous cookery writer’s live-in sister was starving to death than getting her sibling any actual help.

Her life continued on---writing, drinking, trying to steal archival materials, more drinking, falls causing broken bones (likely from the drinking), suicides of relatives, more falls, more strokes, more bitter feuds.

She spent her final days in a constant dread that someone would write her biography.

And eventually she died---and someone did.

I’m SO happy I’m done reading it.  It’s been depressing me for days now. 

I still won’t tell you where my secret thrift store is.

And I’ll still keep wishing for good things in my life. 

But perhaps the key to happiness is how you handle life when you don’t get exactly what you want.