Elizabeth David - Life and Career - 1960s

1960s

In 1960, David stopped writing for The Sunday Times, where she was unhappy about editorial interference with her copy, and joined the weekly publication The Spectator. Cooper writes, "Her professional career was at its height. She was hailed not only as Britain's foremost writer on food and cookery, but as the woman who had transformed the eating habits of middle-class England." Her books were now reaching a wide public, having been reprinted in paperback by the mass-market Penguin Books. Her private life was less felicitous. She was greatly distressed at the ending of her affair with Higgins, who fell in love with a younger woman, and for a period she drank too much brandy and resorted too often to sleeping pills. Probably as a result of these factors, and overwork, in 1963, when she was 49, David suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. She recovered, but her sense of taste was temporarily affected, and her confidence was badly shaken.

The shop is starkly simple. Pyramids of French coffee cups and English pot-bellied iron pans stand in the window. The interior, decorated in black and white … looks as clean and cool as a dairy. Iron shelves hold tin moulds and cutters of every description, glazed and unglazed earthenware pots, bowls and dishes in traditional colours, plain pots and pans in thick aluminium, cast-iron, vitreous enamel and fireproof porcelain, unadorned crockery in classic shapes and neat rows of cooks' knives, spoons and forks.

Together with four business partners, David opened a shop selling kitchen equipment. The partners were spurred on by the recent success of Terence Conran's Habitat shops, which sold among much else imported kitchen equipment for which there was evidently a market. Elizabeth David Ltd opened at 46 Bourne Street, Pimlico, in November 1965.

David was uncompromising in her choice of merchandise; despite its large range of kitchen implements, the shop famously did not stock garlic presses. David wrote an article called "Garlic Presses are Utterly Useless", refused to sell them, and advised customers who demanded them to go elsewhere. Not available elsewhere, by contrast, were booklets by David printed specially for the shop. Some of them were later incorporated into the collections of her essays and articles, An Omelette and a Glass of Wine and Is There a Nutmeg in the House?.

David continued to write articles for magazines. She still included many recipes but increasingly wrote about places – markets, auberges, farms – and people, including profiles of famous chefs and gourmets such as Marcel Boulestin and Edouard de Pomiane. In her later articles, she expressed strongly-held views on a wide range of subjects; she abominated the word "crispy", demanding to know what it conveyed that "crisp" did not; she confessed to an inability to refill anybody's wineglass until it was empty; she insisted on the traditional form "Welsh rabbit" rather than the modern invention "Welsh rarebit"; she poured scorn on the Guide Michelin's standards; she deplored "fussy garnish ... distract from the main flavours"; she inveighed against the ersatz: "anyone depraved enough to invent a dish consisting of a wedge of steam-heated bread spread with tomato paste and a piece of synthetic Cheddar can call it a pizza."