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• David, Elizabeth

Mediterranean Food has just been named to the KitchenAid Cookbook Hall of Fame

Here, together in one volume, are three culinary classics (Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking, and Summer Cooking) from England's most famous food writer, who has inspired and influenced a whole generation of cooks. Elizabeth David, as James Beard points out in his forward, was a leader, ahead of her time who shook her readers out of their culinary rut, challenging them to explore a different world of food. Today, some of the foods she introduced to the english-speaking world have become household words, like gazpacho and pesto, but Mrs. David was the first to discover these treasures, and her recipes are still the best.

Mrs David lived in France, Italy, Greece and Egypt, learning to master the local dishes, obtaining all her information firsthand. She had an unerring palate, an instinct for everything rational, wholesome, and genuine in cooking, and a gift for evoking the color, the lore, and magic not only of the sun-drenched Mediterranean but also of the lovely, honest dishes of her own country. Here are hundreds of marvelous recipes and ideas for preparing simple foods in exciting ways.

Mediterranean Food, French Country Cooking and Summer Food are permeated with Elizabeth David's wonderful authority, her sense of being there, her way of taking the reader into her confidence rather than spelling everything out, of sharing delightful tidbits about Gertrude Stein, Julius Caesar, or fellow travelers. As Mr. Beard also wrote, Elizabeth David had the rare gift of stimulating the imagination in both the mind and the mouth and making you want to head straight for the kitchen.

More than two million copies of Mrs David's books have been sold. She won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award for English Bread and Yeast Cookery, in 1977, was named Chevalier of the French Ordre du Merite Agricole in 1977, made an honorary doctor of the University of Essex in 1979, elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1982, Awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1986, and inducted into the James Beard Hall of Fame in 1995. Born December 26, 1913, she died in London, May 22, 1992.