Oct 17

An Elizabeth David recipe - some thoughts

"It is her recipes that I am grateful to have found as they are not traditional and they are not precise" The Simply Luxurious Life

Having decided to return to the guru or new recipe each week aim, and because this week is a guru week I decided to start at the beginning again with Elizabeth David, and because suddenly it's summer it seems - for a few days at least - I decided to pick out her Summer Cooking for my search for something delicious.

It's one of her slimmer books and also one that doesn't concentrate on just France, or, as in Italian Food - Italian. Indeed on the page on which my chosen recipe sits - Daube à la Corsoise - there are also recipes from Sicily and from India, with another having no source. Valerie Stivers on The Paris Review website says of it:

"Summer Cooking is considered David’s most casual, personal, and playful work. It was written after the intense, years long labor of Italian Food and contains many of her perennial themes: fresh, seasonal ingredients, bright flavor, and simplicity" Valerie Stivers/The Paris Review

'Playful' is an odd word to use when talking about Elizabeth David - at least with reference to her cookbooks, as they are mostly diatribes against all that she abhorred about post war British food, and rhapsodies of nostalgia for Europe. Which are wonderful although as with everything, you could also criticise - as does Tim Hayward in The Guardian.

"I find it hard to read her work without enjoyment but it also defines a kind of "holidays-in-Provence" middle-class elitism."

At which I cringed and rebelled a bit, whilst also admitting to myself that therein lies an element of truth. Well she is very, very dismissive about all the bad things about the food of the time - both at home, in the shops and even the very poshest of restaurants.

Playful she may well have been in her personal life, although even there she was said to be 'difficult'. She certainly 'played' her way around the Mediterranean in her earlier years, during and just after the war, however, in the company of many of the period's literary élite.

'Casual' is another odd word to use in the context of Summer Cooking. There are many who have written amusingly of the vagueness of her instructions in her early books.

"what are you to do if you don’t know what she means when she says “cook in a moderate oven until it’s done”? What, I used to ask myself, is a moderate oven? And for goodness’ sake, I’ve got four people coming round for supper – just how long will it be before it’s “done”? In this recipe she says airily “add all kinds of herbs and seasoning” and then tells you to add a tomato and pepper sauce towards the end, for which she gives the ingredients but not the method." Mrs. Portly's Kitchen

Many of her earlier recipes are like this, but in Summer Cooking she is rather more exact. There is mostly an actual list of ingredients with fairly clear instructions that include timing, but not always oven temperatures. My recipe for example says 'slow' for the oven.

Looking at the cover of my edition of her book, and the title - Summer Cooking, I wonder a little why it was chosen - not by her I'm sure, for the food on the cover is not cooked - some figs and some cheese. Summery yes, but not cooked. That said, the essence of Elizabeth David's message in her introduction is seasonality:

"dishes which bring some savour of the garden, the fields, the sea, into the kitchen and the dining room. ... Summer cooking, implies, therefore, a sense of immediacy, a capacity to capture the essence of a fleeting moment."

There is a long diatribe against frozen and canned food, as opposed to what is cheap and in season - for example when writing of peas she says:

"Is it because the 'pick of the crop' has gone to the factory instead of to the market and we are therefore unable to buy them, or is it because people no longer know how to shell them and cook them and have forgotten what they taste like?"

Which some would say is a little ironic as indeed the whole concept of freezing food is to 'Capture the essence of a fleeting moment."

But I have strayed somewhat from my original intent which was to ponder on whether her recipes, and specifically my chosen recipe, are collected from other sources, and merely reproduced as she found them, or whether they are modified, even invented by herself.

I chose her Daube à la Corsoise because the ingredients - beef, tomatoes, mushrooms and olives were all available, indeed, in the case of the mushrooms, needing to be used. It was also pretty simple and most likely delicious - I mean who doesn't appreciate a daube? And here's a random thought. We often think of the daube as a summer dish, don't we? But it's a stew - a hearty one, which is really a winter thing isn't it? It must be that association with Provence I guess, which to the English at least means summer.

So I started looking for other versions - and if I was lucky even for somebody who had made it. But somewhat interestingly I drew an almost complete blank. Even from the good people of Corsica and mainland France. The closest I came to it was this Corsican beef stew served with pasta from a website called A Life Lived - so veering towards nearby Italy. - and actually it didn't have the olives and the mushrooms were dried - so no, not the same. That said, I did see that several so-called Corsican stews were indeed served with pasta.

All of which reinforced my question about whether her recipes were 'genuine' or not. In a sense they are of course genuine - they exist after all and many of them have actual references to their origin and/or their source. This one does not. Indeed it really has no comment about either Corsica, or the dish, or an associated cook - it's just the name. The most personal things that she says are - at the end of the recipe -

"There is no need to add any liquid to this stew; the tomatoes make sufficient. Take care not to add too much salt to start with."

I have now decided, through a process of internet exploration that it is maybe a combination of two different dishes, and a crystallisation of Corsica stews. Spirit rather than fact - which is perhaps her true talent.

When instead of Daube à la Corse I went English and searched for Corsican beef stew I came up with this - Pebronata, which is indeed a Corsican dish. This is actually a slightly modified version of Elizabeth David's own recipe from A Book of Mediterranean Food, which she calls, in brackets, 'a Corsican ragout'. The major difference here is that the main feature is red peppers, of which there are none in her Daube à la Corsoise.

A little further along I thought I had hit pay dirt with Corsican veal with olives - a sautéed version of which is shown at the top of the page, and which even the Hairy Bikers had a version of. The very tempting looking version at the top of the page is from a website called Corse Boutique. I also found veal and olive stews listed on a few best dishes of Corsica lists:

"A popular slow cooked stew, full of flavour with tender veal, olives, tomatoes, onions and herbs from the maquis as well as a generous dash of white or rosé wine" Corsican Places

and so I checked out a few recipes and saw there were similarities - well mostly the olives - although they were always green and Elizabeth David's were black. The tomatoes were often in the form of tomato paste and there were not usually any mushrooms. And Elizabeth as I said above, does not add any wine.

Conclusion - I think she made it up and gave it that name because she felt that it encapsulated what Corsican food was:

"Elizabeth David lived and cooked in France, Italy, Egypt and India, learning the local dishes and experimenting in her own kitchen." Darina Allen

Although it does seem that to be truly Corsican it should have had some chestnuts in the mix and maybe a piece of orange peel. Perhaps quite rightly she decided that chestnuts didn't fit. Well:

"Much of David's genius was in knowing when to stop." Valerie Stivers/The Paris Review

To conclude, with a couple of not completely relevant quotes. The first two are from Tim Hayward, in a Guardian article, in which he wrote about reading through all the notes that Elizabeth made on her manuscripts:

"Trawling through her notes is like reading an undiscovered stash of pornography by Charlotte Bronte or a long-buried draft of early chick-lit from Ernest Hemingway." Tim Hayward/The Guardian

He gave a lot of examples of her sometimes caustic comments, but I particularly liked this one:

"There are comments that should be engraved on every modern food writer's heart [said Tim Hayward]: "Why say crispy when crisp is more expressive?"

And this which is just rather touching:

"When she died in 1992, among the mounds of her favorite flowers — blue irises and violets—somebody placed a loaf of good bread and a bunch of herbs tied up in brown paper." Word Wenches