Omelette and a Glass Of Wine

by Elizabeth David

Overview

An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, offers 62 articles originally written by Elizabeth David between 1955 and 1984 for numerous publications including The Spectator, Gourmet magazine, Vogue, and The Sunday Times.

This revered classic volume contains delightful explorations of food and cooking, among which are the collection's namesake essay and other such gems as Syllabubs and Fruit Fools, Sweet Vegetables, Soft Wine, Pleasing Cheeses, and Whisky in the Kitchen. Her subjects range from the story of how her own cookery writing began to accounts of some restaurants in provincial France, of white truffles in Piedmont, wild risottos on the islands of the Venetian lagoon and odd happenings during rain-drenched seaside holidays in the British Isles. Here we can share her appreciation of books, people who influenced her, places she loved and the delicious meals she enjoyed.

Some of the best essays are those about others who wrote about food such as Norman Douglas and Mrs Beeton. She writes so vividly that we can see, taste and even smell the dishes she describes. Many of these pieces, such as ‘I'll Be with You in the Squeezing of a Lemon,’ from 1969 - about cooking with lemons - barely show their age. But even if they did, you wouldn't care, because of the rich store of information that David shares and the literary grace with which she imparts it. Some articles include recipes, but for the most part this is a volume nicely sized to curl up with or to take on a trip. Articles, book reviews and travel pieces, they will be new to many of her readers and a delight to all for their highly personal flavor.

Jane Grigson praised it for including all the dishes most closely associated with her, Spiced Beef, Salted Welsh Duck and Syllabub. Her many admirers will cherish this new hardback edition for its 320 high quality pages casually interspersed with charming black and white illustrations and some photographs. It is a book sure to appeal to the 'Elizabeth David' book collector and readers coming to know Ms. David for the first time will marvel at her wisdom and grace.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781906502355
Publisher:	Grub Street
Publication date:	07/19/2009
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.10(d)

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

John Wesley's Eye

In a brief and neatly-worded letter to the Guardian some three weeks ago Mr George Mikes expressed the view that we shall need no independent deterrent so long as we have English provincial cooking. I am not arguing with Mr Mikes. I simply wonder if he, as an old inhabitant of these islands and, I take it, a man of resource, was really making his way about our provinces unprovided with the wherewithal to sustain life without resort to hotel meals. Myself, it wouldn't occur to me to do such a thing. Once, I was involved in such a venture, and very odd consequences it had.

It was the winter of 1946–47. In the late summer of 1946 I had returned to England after some years spent in the Middle East and a brief period in the Farther one.

After years of enjoying comparative plenty, rationing was a challenge. Everyone else had hoards of things like powdered soups and packets of dehydrated egg to which they were conditioned. I started off untrammelled; an empty cupboard was an advantage. With whatever I could get I cooked like one possessed. The frustrations were great. All the same one managed some entertainment. Nobody ever came to a meal without bringing contributions. Unexpected ones sometimes. A wild goose. Snails from Paris. Mock liver pâté from Fortnums. British Government-bought Algerian wine. One of my sisters turned up from Vienna with a hare which she claimed had been caught by hand outside the State Opera House.

Game was plentiful everywhere that year. Even if one didn't actually catch pheasants in Kensington High Street one could buy them very cheaply in the shops. Wild duck, although distinctly fishy some of them, were not more than a shilling apiece. My landlady, living in the flat below mine, was saintly. Not once did she complain about the cooking smells, the garlic, the onions, those eternal bacon bones simmering in the stock ... About the heating she was, with the best will in the world, powerless. Literally. And gas-less. By mid-January of that year the fire in my sitting room was reduced to a candle-splutter. Impossible to heat the water. My wardrobe, after so long in warm climates, was entirely inadequate. Clothes coupons went nowhere. At this moment somebody put into my head the idea of going to stay, at reduced all-in rates, in a hotel at Ross-on-Wye. You may well ask ... I didn't. I just went.

I knew little in those days of English hotels. It was many years since I had been exposed to them. This one was adequately warm, and that was miracle enough. There was a fine coal fire in the public sitting room, a maid to bring hot-water-bottles and breakfast in bed. I had friends near by.

In Ross-on-Wye, I was told, there are more public houses to the square yard than in any other town in these islands. There seemed to be some truth in the claim. Many of them were cider pubs. Up and down that steep hill I went, sampling every kind and degree of Hereford cider, most of it rough, some very rough indeed.

On one of these outings I came on an interesting-looking antique shop. A very large shop, with immense windows. These were filled from floor to ceiling with a fantastic jumble of every conceivable kind of antique. Lamps, china, glass, chairs, bedsteads, curtains, Sheffield candlesticks, desks, pictures, books, bookshelves, bronzes, Georgian silver coffee pots, horse brasses, corner cupboards, whole services of dinner plates, soup tureens, sauce boats, statuary. The lady inside the shop was as unusual as her windows. I shall call her Miss D. If you asked to look at something she pulled it out from amid the morass, regardless. A chandelier would come rippling to the ground. A Biedermeier sofa standing on end would topple, upsetting a pile of Wedgwood.

'May I look at that Leeds dish?' Miss D. extracted it from underneath a ship's decanter and an early Peter Jones painted waste paper basket.

'There's a pair to it somewhere. Do you want it?'

'If you can find it.'

'Oh, here it is. Broken with that lot that just came down. Can't be helped.'

I took the bereaved Leeds dish and put it in my basket before Miss D. had a chance to knock it flying. The friend I was with rescued from under the lady's foot, and gave to me, a frail white jug with black transfers of John Wesley's head and a building called the Centenary Hall, dated 1839. As Miss D. took my cheque her elbow jogged the tap of a copper tea-urn perched on top of a model four-masted barque in a heavy box frame. It knocked over a solid silver clock representing General Gordon sitting on a horse, which fell against a scrap screen, a japanned tray and a tortoiseshell and silver-inlaid musical box. The guts of the little musical box cracked out on to the floor. Miss D. was unshaken. 'Take care how you go out,' she said.

Visiting Miss D.'s shop became a compulsive occupation. Before I should myself acquire an abominable taste for cool, passionless destruction, I decided to be gone from Ross-on-Wye. Not so easy. By this time the West Country was devastated by floods. Ross was in the Wye rather than on it. The BBC news announcements had a Shakespearean ring. 'Hereford's under water, Ludlow and Mon-mouth cut off. Gloucester flooded.' I was intending to go toward Bristol rather than back to London, so I stuck it out. It was an effort. By this time I was finding it very difficult indeed to swallow the food provided in the hotel. It was worse than unpardonable, even for those days of desperation; and, oddly, considering the kindly efforts made in other respects, produced with a kind of bleak triumph which amounted almost to a hatred of humanity and humanity's needs. There was flour and water soup seasoned solely with pepper; bread and gristle rissoles; dehydrated onions and carrots; corned beef toad-in-the-hole. I need not go on. We all know that kind of cooking. It still exists. 'War-time food made with 1963 ingredients' as it was genially put to me by a friend lately returned from a scarring experience in an Eastbourne residential establishment.

It was not feasible, in 1947, to go out and buy food as nowadays I would. When you stayed more than a night or two in a hotel you gave them your ration book, retaining only coupons for things like chocolate and sweets. Those didn't get you far. And of course all that rough cider was inconveniently appetite-rousing.

Hardly knowing what I was doing, I who had scarcely ever put pen to paper except to write memos to the heads of departments in the Ministry which employed me during the war, I sat down and, watched over by John Wesley, started to work out an agonized craving for the sun and a furious revolt against that terrible, cheerless, heartless food by writing down descriptions of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking. Even to write words like apricot, olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds, produced assuagement. Later I came to realize that in the England of 1947, those were dirty words that I was putting down.

To people who have sometimes asked how it was that in 1949, when such words were still very dubious, I came to be writing them so freely, this is at least partly the answer. Any publisher lessperceptive than mine (he was John Lehmann) would have asked me to take them all out when in that year he accepted the cookery book of which those original notes had become a part.

The Spectator, 1 February 1963

CHAPTER 2

Fast and Fresh

It isn't only the expense, the monotony and the false tastes of the food inside most tins and jars and packages which turn me every day more against them. The amount of space they take up, the clutter they make and the performance of opening the things also seem to me quite unnecessarily exasperating. However, even cookery journalists who spend most of their lives with a saucepan in one hand and a pen in the other can't dispense entirely with the kind of stores from which a meal can every now and again be improvised. What I personally require of such things is that there shall be no question whatever of their letting me down or giving me any unwelcome surprise. Out with any product which plays tricks or deteriorates easily. And out also with all the things of which one might say they'll do for an emergency. If something isn't good enough for every day, then it isn't good enough to offer friends, even if they have turned up demanding a meal without notice.

Twenty years ago, during the war years, which I spent in the Eastern Mediterranean, I became accustomed to planning meals from a fairly restricted range of provisions. Now I find myself returning more and more to the same sort of rather ancient and basic foods. They suit my taste and they are the kind of stores which will always produce a coherent and more or less complete meal, which is just what haphazardly bought tins and packages won't do. What happens when you have to open four tins, two jars and three packets in order to make one hasty cook-up is that you get a thoroughly unsatisfactory meal; and the contents of half-used tins and jars have got to be dealt with next day – or left to moulder in the fridge. Or else, like the surburban housewife in N. F. Simpson's One Way Pendulum, you've got to pay somebody to come in and eat the stuff up.

The only stores I had to bother about when I lived for a time in a small seashore village on an Ægean island were bread, olive oil, olives, salt fish, hard white cheese, dried figs, tomato paste, rice, dried beans, sugar, coffee and wine.

With fresh fish – mostly small fry or inkfish, but occasionally a treat such as red mullet or a langouste to be obtained from one of the fisher boys, with vegetables and fruit from the garden of the tavern-owner, eggs at about twopence a dozen, and meat – usually kid, lamb or pork – available only for feast days, the diet was certainly limited, but at least presented none of the meal-planning problems which, as I have learned from readers' letters, daily plague the better-off English housewife.

Subsequently, in war-time Egypt, I found, in spite of the comparative plenty and variety and the fact that in Greece I had often grumbled about the food, that the basic commodities of the Eastern Mediterranean shores were the ones which had begun to seem essential. Alexandrians, not surprisingly, knew how to prepare these commodities in a more civilized way than did the Greek islanders. The old-established merchant families of the city – Greek, Syrian, Jewish, English – appeared to have evolved a most delicious and unique blend of Levantine and European cookery and were at the same time most marvellously hospitable. I have seldom seen such wonderfully glamorous looking, and tasting, food as the Levantine cooks of Alexandria could produce for a party. And yet when you got down to analysing it, you would find that much the same ingredients had been used in dish after dish – only they were so differently treated, so skilfully blended and seasoned and spiced that each one had its own perfectly individual character and flavour.

In Cairo the dividing line between European and Eastern food was much sharper. It was uphill work trying to make English-trained Sudanese cooks produce interesting food. Most of them held a firm belief that the proper meal to set before English people consisted of roast or fried chicken, boiled vegetables and a pudding known to one and all as grème garamel.

My own cook, Suleiman, was a Sudanese who had previously worked only for Italian and Jewish families. He was erratic and forgetful, but singularly sweet-natured, devoted to his cooking pots and above all knew absolutely nothing of good, clean, English schoolroom food.

I used occasionally to try to teach him some French or English dish for which I had a nostalgic craving, but time for cooking was very limited, my kitchen facilities even more so, and on the whole I left him to his own devices.

So it came about that for three or four more years I lived mainly on rather rough but highly flavoured, colourful shining vegetable dishes, lentil or fresh tomato soups, delicious spiced pilaffs, lamb kebabs grilled over charcoal, salads with cool mint-flavoured yoghurt dressings, the Egyptian fellahin dish of black beans with olive oil and lemon and hard-boiled eggs – these things were not only attractive but also cheap and this was important because although Egypt was a land of fantastic plenty compared with war-time Europe, a lot of the better-class food was far beyond the means of young persons living on British Civil Service pay without foreign allowances, and tinned stores were out of the question because there was no room for them in the cave which my landlord was pleased to describe as a furnished flat.

What I found out when I returned to England to another five or six years of the awful dreary foods of rationing was that while my own standard of living in Egypt had perhaps not been very high, my food had always had some sort of life, colour, guts, stimulus; there had always been bite, flavour and inviting smells. Those elements were totally absent from English meals.

As imports came slowly back, I found once more, and still find, that it is the basic foods of the Mediterranean world which produce them in the highest degree. And it is curious how much more true variety can be extracted from a few of these basic commodities than from a whole supermarketful of products, none of which really taste of anything in particular.

So long as I have a supply of elementary fresh things like eggs, onions, parsley, lemons, oranges and bread and tomatoes – and I keep tinned tomatoes too – I find that my store cupboard will always provide the main part of an improvised meal. If this has to be made quickly it may be just a salad of anchovy fillets and black olives, hard-Boiled eggs and olive oil, with bread and a bottle of wine. If it is a question of not being able to leave the house to go shopping, or of being too otherwise occupied to stand over the cooking pots, then there are white beans or brown lentils for slow cooking, and usually a piece of cured sausage or bacon to add to them, with onions and oil and possibly tomato. Apricots or other dried fruit can be baked in the oven at the same time, or I may have oranges for a fruit salad, and if it comes to the worst there'll at least be bread and butter and honey and jam. Or if I am given, say, forty-five minutes to get an unplanned meal ready – well, I have Italian and Patna rice and Parmesan, spices, herbs, currants, almonds, walnuts, to make a risotto or a pilaff. And perhaps tunny, with eggs to make mayonnaise, for an easy first dish. The countless number of permutations to be devised is part of the entertainment.

The Spectator, 9 December 1960

CHAPTER 3

The True Emulsion

With the mayonnaise season in full blast, once more the familiar complaints about bottled mayonnaise and salad creams are heard in the land. Perhaps there is less cause for grumbling, thanks to the advent of the electric mixer combined with the whackings of the Postgate guide, than there used to be. The defence, when complaints are made, can no longer be that kitchen labour is lacking; it is simply the old one about the majority of customers preferring the synthetic product to the real thing. I am sure that this is very often perfectly true. Why?

Partly, the trouble lies in the characteristic English custom – which in some degree we share with the Swiss – of appropriating the names of established French and other foreign dishes, even of our own traditional ones, and attaching to them recipes of our own devising, often with the most carefree disregard of the ingredients and methods of cooking which made these dishes famous. The caterers, the manufacturers and the recipe-hashers employed by public relations firms to help sell factory products may reply that as long as a dish is found acceptable and sells it surely doesn't matter what it is called. Maybe these operators don't realize that what they are doing is fraudulent; legally it isn't. There is no international patent or copyright law to protect the names or the recipes of recognized traditional and classic dishes. While nobody in this country can now, say, label any wine champagne that is not champagne or pass off margarine as butter without risk of prosecution, anybody depraved enough to invent a dish consisting of a wedge of steam-heated bread spread with tomato paste and a piece of synthetic Cheddar can call it a pizza; for that matter they could sell a pizza as a Welsh Rabbit and a Welsh Rabbit as a Swiss fondue or a quiche lorraine; they can publish recipes for a soup called vichyssoise containing everything and anything but what its creator actually put into it – leeks and potatoes. At the time the deceptions seem just sad or silly, but the consequences can be far-reaching.

In the case of mayonnaise the damage may have been done by the commercial firms and their bottled products which were already on sale by the mid-1880s, but the cookery advisers and experts certainly helped the public to accept the name 'mayonnaise' as applied to a cooked custard-type sauce made of flour, milk, eggs, and a very high proportion of vinegar. Plenty of relevant recipes are to be found in cookery books and other publications of the period. Two examples will suffice. In the November, 1895, issue of the Epicure magazine, under the heading 'New Recipes', Miss Ida Cameron, principal of the Earls Court Cookery School, contributed a recipe for what she called cornflour mayonnaise. The lady explained that in this cooked mixture the cornflour 'does for thickening the sauce instead of salad oil'. Presumably this is what she was teaching her pupils. Herman Senn, a professional of very high standing, at one time chef to the Reform Club, author of countless cookery books, honorary secretary to the Universal Food and Cookery Association, editor of that body's magazine and promoter of a number of commercial products including one called Hygienic Caviar, was employed by Ward, Lock and Co. to edit the gigantic 1906 edition of Mrs Beeton. This edition contains two mayonnaise recipes. (Mrs Beeton's own original formula which had been left untouched for over forty years was dropped, one might think none too soon. It specified four tablespoons of vinegar to six of oil.) One of Senn's recipes was the authentic one, but called for a pint of olive oil to two eggs, an unnecessarily large allowance, tricky to work; and in view of the national English fear and dislike of olive oil, to which every cookery writer of the period refers and which was certainly a factor in the public's easy acceptance of the custard-type dressing in place of true mayonnaise, rather tactless. The second recipe Senn called 'cooked mayonnaise'. With his training he should surely have known that mayonnaise, whatever the origin of the word, had long been accepted in France, Spain and Italy as denoting an emulsion sauce of uncooked egg yolks and olive oil, and that the term 'cooked' used in conjunction with mayonnaise was contradictory.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "An Omelette and a Glass of Wine"
by .
Copyright © 2009 Elizabeth David.
Excerpted by permission of Grub Street.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction,
John Wesley's Eye,
Fast and Fresh,
The True Emulsion,
Lucky Dip,
Summer Holidays,
Big Bad Bramleys,
Crackling,
Your Perfected Hostess,
Secrets,
Ladies' Halves,
Letting Well Alone,
An Omelette and a Glass of Wine,
Chez Barattero,
Dishes for Collectors,
Eating out in Provincial France 1965-1977,
Confort anglais, French fare,
Roustidou,
Golden Delicious,
A la marinière,
Fruits de mer,
Waiting for Lunch,
Para Navidad,
Pizza,
Sweet Vegetables, Soft Wines,
Bruscandoli,
Mafalda, Giovanna, Giulia,
Have It Your Way,
South Wind through the Kitchen,
The Englishman's Food,
Home Baked Bread,
West Points,
If You Care to Eat Shark,
Moorish Recipes,
Fine Bouche,
How Bare is Your Cupboard?,
Chez Gee-Gee,
Franglais,
Exigez le véritable Cheddar français,
Having Crossed the Channel,
Pomiane, Master of the Unsacrosanct,
Table Talk,
Whisky in the Kitchen,
A Gourmet in Edwardian London,
I'll Be with You in the Squeezing of a Lemon,
Pleasing Cheeses,
Sweet Aristo,
English Potted Meats and Fish Pastes,
Syllabubs and Fruit Fools,
Operation Mulberry,
Foods of Legend,
The Markets of France: Cavaillon,
Yvetot,
Montepellier,
Martigues,
Valence,
Oules of Sardines,
Trufflesville Regis,
The Magpie System,
Traditional Christmas Dishes,
Welsh Doubles,
Too Many Cooks,
Isabella Beeton and her Book,
Index,