Timeline

Elizabeth Gwynne was born on Boxing Day 1913 to Stella (née Ridley) and Rupert Gwynne, a hard-riding barrister turned Tory MP. Stella was a well-connected Ridley. Their home was Wootton near Eastbourne, a manor house they extended through the work of Arts and Crafts architect Detmar Blow. An aesthetic environment was produced this way that influenced all their daughters’ tastes – Priscilla (b. 1909), Elizabeth, Diana (b.1915) and Felicité (b. 1917). Stella was not a very affectionate mother and Elizabeth couldn’t connect with her more demonstrative father’s passion for riding, preferring cats to dogs and horses. She read childhood classics like Alice in Wonderland and anything she could lay her hands on. She was known as Liza, a name sounding like ‘lizard’.

Children’s food was terrible at Wootton but the girls’ nanny brewed up treats on the nursery fire: fruit from the garden heated with sugar and wild field mushrooms and cream.

Rupert Gwynne died suddenly in 1924 when Elizabeth was 11. The four girls started a new life at different boarding schools and relations’ houses in the holidays while their mother pursued her own interests including travel and painting, eventually moving to Jamaica in 1933 and remarrying.. Aged 16 Elizabeth was sent to Paris and then Munich for her education. In Paris she discovered delicate, delicious food while boarding with an exceptionally greedy family.

On returning to England aged 18 Elizabeth had her acting phase. She was also presented at Court. While employed by the Oxford Repertory Company and the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park she worked hard producing plays, failed as an actress, relished the pails of Gunter’s ice cream shared by the actors, and met Charles Gibson Cowan. She spent her (generous) twenty-first birthday money on a fridge.

By 21 Elizabeth set out to teach herself to cook using a selection of recipe books of the time. She was flat sharing in London. To the disapproval of her family Charles Gibson Cowan, a married writer and actor, was a regular visitor. In 1936 the couple compiled a book together (The King is Dead: Verses on the Passing of Royalty). Elizabeth also handmade a decorative recipe book for a friend. She made trips to Malta, Egypt and France during this period to stay with family and friends. In 1938 Elizabeth and Gibson Cowan found the money to buy the Evelyn Hope, a wooden boat with two masts and an engine, with a plan to sail to Greece at the same time as war threatened Europe. They crossed the Channel to France and went up the Seine to Paris, then by canal and river to Dijon and Marseilles, where they encountered pizza (a ‘strange vegetable pie’) and air-raid sirens before moving on to Antibes. There Elizabeth met the writer Norman Douglas, who became her mentor. He taught her to value food, not to be shy about discussing and writing about it, and, crucially, to live life on her own terms.

In May 1939 Gibson Cowan and Elizabeth set sail again from Antibes to Corsica with visas for Italy and Greece. They were ordered by an Italian patrol boat to berth in Sicily, not having realised that Italy and Britain were now at war. Suspected of being spies Gibson Cowan and Elizabeth were interned and kept in squalid conditions with no fresh food before being sent on to neutral Yugoslavia. They had lost almost all possessions, including a large collection of recipes gathered by Elizabeth. Next was Athens and then a cottage on Syros where she revelled in the pleasures of simple food: bread, olive oil, olives, salt fish, hard white cheese, dried figs, tomato paste, rice, dried beans, sugar, coffee and wine. This was when she learned to cook the everyday food of the Mediterranean

The war forced them onwards to Crete in April 1941, before it too was invaded by the Germans. They were evacuated to Egypt where Elizabeth got a clerical day job in the naval cypher office in Alexandria while hosting parties at night. She moved on from Gibson Cowan.

By Spring 1943 Elizabeth was running the reference library for the British Ministry of Information in Cairo, a demanding job that developed her professional and research skills. She knew a great many foreign soldiers, spies, journalists, writers, bohemians, intellectuals, travellers and adventurers who made Cairo their home, as well as upper class Egyptians. Elizabeth had a flat with a cook and housekeeper, Suleiman, who became her guide to the food of the region. She hosted lunch parties on Sundays after visiting the bazaars for ingredients, Suleiman cooking up aromatic kebabs and vegetable dishes over a charcoal grill. They had this and two primus stoves, one converted to an oven with a tin box balanced on top. Good fresh food was cheap.

From 1944 to 1958 Elizabeth David was married.

In Cairo she met Lt Col Anthony David, an officer in the Indian Army, early in 1944. Tony David was an ex public schoolboy with a degree from Cambridge and roots in Wales. A short man, he was more comfortable with women than men and, like Elizabeth’s father, loved horses. He was a ‘kind, rather uninteresting young man… head over heels in love with Elizabeth Gwynne… her fearlessness, her wit, her sensual beauty’. She went into the marriage without a great amount of love for him or the institution, seemingly from a desire for security and respectability. There are no photographs of the wedding, her change of name being its most significant effect. She joined Tony in New Delhi at the beginning of 1946. This was an unhappy period during which she had very little to do apart from read, having been excluded from the kitchen of their flat by the servants. She found food in India either boringly British-institutional or too hot with chillis, although she did appreciate the rice dishes and breads.

Elizabeth became ill during the summer heat and after just a few months returned to London alone. Tony came nearly a year later but they largely led separate lives from this point.  (Jumping forward, 1958 she was finally able to divorce him against his will when he made a tactical error by referring to Elizabeth publicly as his ex-wife. He moved to Tangier to run a nightclub and died in 1967 aged 56).

With Tony still in India Elizabeth spent the rest of the year [1946] with her sisters. She moved in with Diana who was pregnant with her first child before taking her own flat in Kensington. In the aftermath of war London was cold, bleak and bomb-damaged. Many food items were rationed or in short supply: bread, rice, meat, eggs. Elizabeth rose to the challenge of finding and cooking edible meals while missing terribly the food she had left behind: ‘[it] had always had some sort of life, colour, guts, stimulus; there had always been bite, flavour and inviting smells’. Not cooking was all about scrubbing the mud off potatoes, sprouts and cabbages and boiling stodgy puddings. Winter 1946-7 set records for cold. Elizabeth escaped to a hotel in Ross-on-Wye with a man and started to write. She had been collecting recipes for a decade but now instead of recipes she evoked through words all that she couldn’t have, in ‘an agonised craving for the sun and a furious revolt against that terrible, cheerless, heartless food’.

Tony had come back to England in the spring of 1947. He, Elizabeth and a friend drove to France in an old Rolls-Royce. On returning to London they bought 24 Halsey Street, a terraced house in Chelsea that Elizabeth lived in for the rest of her life. Tony was extravagant. Their debts rose until in 1949 he proposed selling up and going to live abroad together. Rejecting this idea, Elizabeth set to work as a cookery journalist, her articles appearing in Harper’s Bazaar from spring 1949. She wrote in her own unique voice and resented interference from subeditors. At the same time she was compiling a book of Mediterranean recipes.

This became A Book of Mediterranean Food, published in June 1950 and described by Elizabeth as ‘a love letter to the Mediterranean’. While an immediate critical success it had been repeatedly turned down by publishers until finally the publisher John Lehmann and his reader Julia Strachey recognised its brilliance. Lehmann chose John Minton as its illustrator.

There followed an intense time of writing, Elizabeth producing articles for the Sunday Times, Harper’s and the travel magazine Go as well as a new book, French Country Cooking, completed early in 1951. She had been able to compile this from the same stash of recipes as Mediterranean Food, collected over the previous ten years. Letting out Halsey Street and leaving Tony behind, she then moved to France, renting a house in Ménerbes in the Luberon in March 1951. This was a beautiful, simple place with no shortage of bread, olives and wine. She was joined there by a succession of friends. Over the summer fresh cooking ingredients came into abundance: eggs (so cheap they were almost given away), ‘tomatoes, broad beans, haricot verts, peas, fennel, artichokes or courgettes for a few francs. Asparagus and strawberries were so cheap we could afford them almost every day’. They also feasted on local truffles. It was such a happy time that Elizabeth thought of Ménerbes as a second home, returning repeatedly to the same house.

French Country Cooking was published in September 1951. Its unpretentious recipes were nevertheless not unchallenging for English cooks. Elizabeth had discovered that her readers often lacked equipment so the book includes a chapter called Batterie de Cuisine. In it she sets out her emotional relationship with kitchen tools, ‘things which graft themselves on to your life; an ancient thin fork for the testing of meat, a broken knife for scraping mussels… an earthenware bean-pot of such charm that nothing cooked in it could possibly go wrong’.

Elizabeth’s next project was Italian food, a subject both neglected and misunderstood in England shortly after a war in which Italy was an enemy. Her publisher Lehmann advanced her £100 for research and travel and she set off in March 1952. She travelled to Rome by train with a trunkful of books and met up with friends who took her to Capri. There she placed a pot of basil on the grave of Norman Douglas. He was her great inspiration, with his message to say what she thought and damn everyone else. He had died by suicide earlier in 1952.

Elizabeth then set out on a tour of Italy’s most famous restaurants, first in the north – Siena, Florence, Venice, Verona, Milan, Genoa, Parma and back to Rome. Among a great many impressions, she found the Florentines overdid rosemary and discovered that ‘rice can be cooked contrary to the rules, slowly, in a small amount of liquid, and emerge in a perfect state of creaminess with a very slightly resistant core in each grain’: risotto. Early one morning in Venice she met by chance the Sicilian artist Renato Guttuso. She designated him on the spot to illustrate Italian Food, which he did end up doing, improbably for £60.

Elizabeth continued to travel around Italy, arriving back in London in late October 1952. Wines were a focus as well as food and she was able to introduce English readers to a previously unknown world of Italian wine. The whole experience was exhilarating to her, the new book a huge project. But she was at the height of her powers and in a ‘fever to communicate that grew every day more urgent’. She began testing all the new recipes, not an easy task because of the challenges of sourcing olive oil, parmesan, Italian rice, special cuts of meat and even cream.

Italian Food was published in November 1954. Its hardback first edition sold out in three weeks.

Elizabeth’s next book Summer Cooking was published in 1955. She left Harper’s for Vogue in 1956 in a move that gave her more editorial freedom, having been poached by Vogue editor Audrey Withers. Her articles, now in the centre of the magazine, were illustrated by photographer Anthony Denney in a fruitful collaboration. Withers also offered Elizabeth a research allowance, enabling her to travel to France. She did this frugally, taking a friend as a driver and food-shopping like a local. At hotels she talked extensively to the patron to learn how the food was prepared and cooked. She made multiple trips, often with Doreen Thompson in her Morris Traveller, recorded sketchily in diaries but mainly through the workings of her formidable memory.

In the late 1950s Elizabeth wrote about the food scene in Britain too for the Sunday Times for a while as well as Vogue. She toured Walls’s sausage factory and hated it, tried Uncle Ben’s rice and liked it, and as a Nescafé drinker largely ignored the fashion for coffee bars.

French Provincial Cooking was published in 1960. Nearly 600 pages long, it was the culmination of ten years of research, thought and synthesis. To glowing reviews, it cemented her reputation for scholarship, knowledge and fine writing.

1961 and ‘62 were busy years of journalism, writing for the Daily Telegraph, Spectator and Wine and Food. 1963 began with a disagreement between Elizabeth and her publisher Penguin about their plan to replace drawings in her books with photographs. While she won the argument, it emerged that Guttuso’s illustrations for Italian Food had gone missing from previous publishers and could therefore not be reused. Anger about this collided with an intense shock in her personal life, the end of a long and difficult relationship with society stockbroker Peter Higgins. The result was a stroke that landed Elizabeth in hospital at the relatively young age of 49. She made a slow and partial recovery during 1963 but was depressed and couldn’t work, unable to bear the smell of onions.

The photographer Anthony Denney and her brother-in-law Christopher Grey encouraged her to set up a shop. Elizabeth David Ltd opened its doors on 1 November 1965 at 46 Bourne Street, SW1, the previous months a flurry of activity choosing stock, mainly in France, and forming a partnership to run the shop.

Elizabeth and Anthony Denney created famous window displays of towering pyramids of dishes, tinware and wire baskets. The walls inside were pale grey-blue with white shelves displaying casseroles, bean-pots, jars and platters with more stock stacked on the floor. She first brought Le Creuset to the British public, along with Pillivuyt porcelain, stoneware pouring bowls, earthenware gratin dishes, fish kettles, bags of gros sel, and, in pride of place, real unfiltered olive oil from the Tuscan estate of the Zyw family – described by Elizabeth as ‘one of the supreme pleasures of my life’.

In contrast to the privacy of writing, she was now in direct contact with her public, providing help and advice. The shop was popular, though ultimately not very profitable. Elizabeth fell out with her partners and severed her connection with it in 1973.

In mid 1969 Elizabeth was still working at the shop but ready to write another book. Prompted by her friend the painter and sculptor Arthur Lett-Haines from the artists’ community Benton End where she spent time cooking, she turned her attention to English food. While reading about Anglo-Indian food and preparing a book on Christmas, she focussed on the English love for hot spicy food. She started researching and testing spices, condiments, syllabubs and potted meats, all traditional English fare. Spices, Salts and Aromatics in the English Kitchen was published in 1970. It can be seen more of a history book than a collection of recipes, although it does contain some.

On 31 March, Elizabeth’s sister Diana died by suicide at her country cottage near Petersfield. Elizabeth had lost her favourite sister and her only real focus of family life. Her mother returned from Jamaica and died in 1973, the same year she left the shop.

Elizabeth absorbed herself in bread. Some of the sadness and anger in her life became directed at factory-made bread. She exposed the Chorleywood process whereby the rising of nutrient- depleted flour is mechanically accelerated by agitation to save time and resources, producing a low-quality loaf. Elizabeth set out to research all aspects of bread making. She travelled to France and around England and Wales and studied obscure works in the London Library. The result was English Bread and Yeast Cookery, published in November 1976, another blend of history, scholarship and recipes. The potato and rice bread recipes are particularly rewarding for the home cook. Readers today might be surprised at how little the book has to say about sourdough, Elizabeth commenting that she’d received a good example by air from San Francisco but she found making sourdough at home ‘rather unrewarding’. The bread book initiated a wave of cultural change in Britain with the Sunday Times launching its Campaign for Real Bread in 1979.

Elizabeth made an awkward appearance on the BBC’s Food Programme with Derek Cooper in 1982, giving monosyllabic answers, but her voice was now in the BBC archive.

She began work on two books concurrently: ‘Ice and Ices’ and a collection of her journalism with the working title ‘Early Works’, later published as An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1984). She collaborated closely on these with editor Jill Norman.

In 1983 Elizabeth commissioned her nephew Johnny Grey to design a new kitchen in the basement of her Chelsea house. There was no microwave, no dishwasher or waste disposal unit, but this kitchen had more natural light than the one upstairs and a soft seating area. With furniture made from English ash and London plane, it became Elizabeth’s ‘winter kitchen’.

Elizabeth was made a Companion of the British Empire in the 1986 New Year’s Honours; she received it hatless from Prince Charles.

Her sister Felicité who lived upstairs in Halsey Street died of a stroke in March 1986. Elizabeth’s grief took the form of depression and she was also treated for TB in hospital. After a period of no red wine she recovered enough to take a trip to California to recuperate. The trip was a great success, with Elizabeth feted in the States. She loved San Francisco, visited Yosemite, met Alice Waters and discovered the Zuni Café, returning many times up until 1990.

Meanwhile she worked on the ice book, which contains detailed research, evocative imaginings of the taste of the earliest ices, and personal history. It ended up being finished by Jill Norman and published in 1994 as Harvest of the Cold Months.

In 1988 Elizabeth agreed to become the subject of a television programme on Channel 4. Filming took place in July 1989 at the Walnut Tree in Abergavenny, Elizabeth proving a difficult subject for interviewer Jancis Robinson. The programme, A Matter of Taste, was aired on Boxing Day, her birthday.

By 1991 Elizabeth spent most of her time in bed. She watched television, noting something of herself in the dramatization of Oliva Manning’s Balkan and Levant novels, Fortunes of War. On the subject of food writers, she praised Jane Grigson the most highly but also rated Delia Smith for her thoroughness and solid principles. She died of a stroke at home on 22 May 1992. At the funeral held at Folkington near Wootton, a loaf of bread and a bunch of herbs were left among the wreaths.