Inspiring People and Their Food: Jane Grigson

Cookbooks don’t travel well. So those who are not English may never have heard of Jane Grigson. That’s a pity. She was one of the great cookbook authors of the mid twentieth century. Like most people who have ended up the in the food world, that was not her original intention. She took a degree in English from Cambridge University in 1949 at a time when only the best and the brightest girls could get access to that hallowed but misogynist institution. She had a series of jobs in art galleries and publisher’s offices, and then turned to translating. In 1966 she won a prize for her translation of the great nineteenth-century Italian work Of Crime and Punishment by Beccaria. Beccaria’s work still challenges criminologists, lawyers and philosophers, as I know because my husband pores over it.

Then in 1968, she embarked on a series of wonderful cookbooks (listed in the next post). Her French Charcuterie and Pork Cookery was the third cookbook I bought, after Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food and Claudia Roden’s A Book of Middle Eastern Food, all of them in the brilliant Penguin series edited by Jill Norman.

All this is by way of introduction to a lovely celebration that will take place in New York at the Astor Center on March 18th, on what would have been her 80th birthday. It’s organized by Amy Besa, a true dynamo, and author of Memories of Philippine Kitchens. It will weave together a tribute to Jane Grigson’s life with contributions from later cookbook authors who have won the prize that memorializes her, the Jane Grigson Prize for Distinguished Food Scholarship of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Amy was one of those winners.

So was I and I would have love to have participated but I will be far away in Buenos Aires. But Doug Duda, another dynamo and director of the center, videotaped some brief comments when I was there. He asked when I first knew of her work, what I learned from it, and how it is influencing my current work.

In short, what I said, as I mentioned above, that I was lucky enough to come upon her just as I was getting interested in food. That she, particularly in her wonderful Fruit Book, showed that writing about food was worthy of serious intellectual attention and careful scholarship, while at the same time being both lyrical and a repository of inspiring recipes. So much so, that I thought there was little left to do. Only when I arrived in Hawaii did I find a subject that seemed so untouched that it was worth venturing where others more talented had already made their mark. And that as regards my current work on the history of food on a global scale, I would like to use it to reinforce her message about food and cooking which, perhaps slightly misquoted, is “We already have plenty of masterpieces. What we need is a better standard of ordinariness.”

(Thanks to my friend John Whiting for repeatedly pointing out that comment of hers).

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