Long acknowledged as the inspiration for such modern masters as Julia Child and Claudia Roden, A Book of Mediterranean Food is Elizabeth David's passionate mixture of recipes, culinary lore, and frank talk.

The book is based on a collection of recipes made by Elizabeth David when she lived in France, Italy, the Greek Islands and Egypt, doing her own cooking and obtaining information at first hand. The pages contain recipes, and practical ones, evoking all the colour and fun of the Mediterranean, dishes as soupe au pistou, pebronata from Corsica, or the skordalia of the Greeks; some are sumptuous, many are simple, most are sublime.

The ingredients for these dishes are all readily available today: indeed, many of them are made with our most familiar vegetables, fish and herbs, but treated in unfamiliar ways.

All good cookery books should be enjoyable to read as well as to cook from, and David has included interesting sidelights to the eating habits of other countries, as well as extracts from some famous authors, descriptions of memorable meals and disquisitions on the art of cookery and eating.

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Recommended by

Nina Caplan

Wine and food writer

Her manner is invariably peremptory, her recipes occasionally impossible – David, more than almost any other cookery book writer, assumes you can cook. (She also assumes common sense, which is flattering but not always helpful.) And yet – persist, and the food is great, with a whiff of the lazy south of another era, where the bottle of Macon, Beaujolais or Châteauneuf du Pape upended easefully into the Coq au Vin would have been better than most of us can now afford to drink, and the time spent around the table for a single meal would have sufficed to write another book. Even if you don’t want to cook her food, David’s digressions are worth reading – I will remember Senator Couteaux taking a week to catch his hare for Lièvre à la Royale, then substituting the recipe for his usual political column, when all the recipes are forgotten.

Michele Cranston

Food stylist and magazine food editor

Reading this book is all about travelling back to a time when the world and its food was constrained by villages and customs, seasons and states. You can hear in the re-telling the excitement with which an English woman discovered the extraordinary flavours of provincial Italy and France and as a reader you can imagine how thrilling it would have been to have had, for the first time, the extraordinary blending of pine-nuts, fresh basil, garlic and Parmesan cheese. I also love the conversational tone of the recipes which reflect an era when a certain degree of knowledge was assumed.

Aliza Green

Chef and author

David is a wonderful writer whose romantic vision of sun-kissed Mediterranean food and casual, literary writing style I continue to admire. One of the very first cookbooks I ever read, since my mom purchased a copy when it was first published in 1950.

A Book of Mediterranean Food

Recommended by

Nina Caplan

Michele Cranston

Aliza Green

Annabel Abbs

Karen Anderson

Anthony Warner

Valeria Necchio

Adrian Chiles

Lauraine Jacobs

Graham Kerr

Craig Sams

Ben Tish

Joyce Molyneux

Joan Nathan

Henrietta Graham

Alexander Lobrano

Prue Leith

MM Pack

Ruth Reichl

Henrietta Green

David Rowley

Ed Mottershaw

David Dale

Anna Del Conte

Jake Tilson

Aglaia Kremezi

Martin Boetz

Lucinda Ebersole

Bridget Henisch

Barbara Haber

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