Summer Cooking

Elizabeth David (1913-1992) was brought up in an outwardly idyllic seventeenth-century Sussex farmhouse, Wootton Manor, and her interest in cooking may well have been a response to the less-than-stellar meals on offer there. During World War II she lived in France, Italy, Greece, and Egypt (where she worked for the Ministry of Information), and spent much of her time researching and cooking local fare. On her return to London in 1946, David began to write cooking articles, and in 1949 the publisher John Lehmann offered her a hundred-pound advance for A Book of Mediterranean Food. When it came out the following year, it proved a revelation to Anglo-Saxon appetites. Summer Cooking (1955, also published by NYRB Classics) consolidated her position as the foremost food writer of her day. David continued to be a student of her art throughout her life. Always an innovative force, she even persuaded Le Creuset to extend its range of cookware colors by pointing at a pack of Gauloises. "That's the blue I want," she said. Elizabeth David was awarded a CBE, made a Chevalier de l'Ordre de Mérite Agricole, and--the honor that pleased her most--elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Molly O'Neill writes profiles and feature stories for The New Yorker. She was the longtime food columnist for the New York Times Magazine. She is the host of the PBS series Great Food and has published three award-winning cookbooks, The New York Cookbook (1992), A Well-Seasoned Appetite (1995), and The Pleasure of Your Company (1997).