French Provincial Cooking.
DAVID, Elizabeth.
French Provincial Cooking.
First Edition of Elizabeth David's French Provincial Cooking
London: Michael Joseph, 1960.
$375.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152136
First British edition of the author’s landmark work on European cooking. Octavo, original publisher’s green cloth, top stain red, title page vignette, illustrated throughout. Near fine in a good dust jacket with chipping and losses to the spine and rear panel. Illustrated by Juliet Renny.
French Provincial Cooking (1960) is widely regarded as the masterwork of Elizabeth David (1913-1992), the British cookery writer whose influence on twentieth-century British and American culinary culture was as profound and far-reaching as any single author's has been on the literature of food. Described by Joe Moran as her most influential book, the volume offered a stylish but straightforward cuisine fitted in with a new type of casual urban entertaining suitable for having a few friends round for a meal as opposed to an old-fashioned dinner party, a cultural shift in domestic life that David's writing both reflected and accelerated. Drawing on numerous articles she had written for Vogue and The Sunday Times throughout the 1950s, and rooted in her firsthand experience living in France and other Mediterranean countries, the book explores the authentic regional traditions of Alsace, Provence, Brittany, the Savoie, and other provinces with a combination of scholarly rigor, personal anecdote, and prose of exceptional literary quality that made it as rewarding to read as to cook from. Elizabeth David's books, along with Richard Olney's Simple French Food, were the inspirations behind Alice Waters's Chez Panisse and indirectly helped to spark America's interest in what it puts in its mouth, a legacy of influence that extended well beyond the British kitchen she had originally set out to transform.
