Summer Cooking

by Elizabeth David

Published April 1987
For Elizabeth David, summer fare meant fresh, seasonal food—recipes that could be prepared quickly and savoured slowly, from Gnocchi alla Genovese (‘simply an excuse for eating pesto’) to La Poule au Pot to Gooseberry Fool. Her 1955 classic work, now reissued in a handsome, attractively priced hardback edition, includes an overview of herbs as well as chapters on impromptu cooking for holidays and picnics. Divided into chapters on Soups, Salads, Eggs, Fish, Meat, Poultry and Game, Vegetables, and Sweets, it contains recipes from all over the world. Summer Cooking is a witty, precise companion for feasting in the warmer months — every bit as unexpected and enchanting to read today as it was 50 years ago. But the purest thrill of Summer Cooking, as in all of her books, is the pleasure her food delivers and the graceful way her prose captures the reader’s delight.

Harvest of the Cold Months

by Elizabeth David

Published 27 October 1994
'A splendid tale of human ingenuity in the service of taste, sedulously researched and told with great flair.' Loyd Grossman Sunday Times

Author of such cookery classics as Italian Food and French Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David (1913-1992) found that the literature of cookery, as well as the practical side, was of absorbing interest, and she studied it throughout her life. Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen was published in 1970, followed by English Bread and Yeast Cookery, for which she won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year award, in 1977. At the time of her death in 1992 she was working on this equally epic study of the use of ice, the ice-trade and the early days of refrigeration, which was published posthumously in 1994 as Harvest of the Cold Months.

'An awe-inspiring feat of detective scholarship, the literally marvellous story of how human beings came to ingest lumps of flavoured frozen matter for pleasure ... There is much, much more - about the making and breaking of reputations, the founding of Parisian cafe culture, the great and rivalrous confectioners of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, about Russian ice-cream (surprisingly superior) and Persian sherbets ... sumptuous.' Independent on Sunday

'This survey of the use of ice in cookery takes us on a fascinating journey from 1581, where in Florence they put snow in the wine glasses, to that modern phenomenon, the growth of the ice-cream business. A scholarly social history, which makes a fitting finale to the work of the greatest of our writers on foods and its contexts.' Harpers & Queen