Did Elizabeth David Test Recipes? Eat Your Words, Rachel
Some time ago, writing about Elizabeth David and Julia Child, I cheerfully said of the former
“I would bet a good bit that she had never cooked most of those recipes, let alone tested them. Not that this worries me because recipe testing in most cases (not all) is vastly overrated. But someday a scholar is going to locate the origins of all those recipes in French cookbooks.”
Now in this video, Jill Norman, Elizabeth David’s editor and author in her own right, describes how Elizabeth David prepared certain dishes at successive lunches, trying them out on her friends. When she had achieved a version she liked, whatever the opinion of her friends, that was the one that went in the manuscript. And the friends all received a typed copy of the final version, a lovely gesture.
via Video: Jill Norman talks about Elizabeth David – Telegraph.
Eat your words, Rachel.
Well, yes, I’ll eat my words.
But I also maintain that David’s attitude to trying out dishes differed in an important way from contemporary recipe testing.
Take French Provincial Cooking as an example. Many of the recipes are direct, acknowledged quotations from French cookbooks, with no indication of further modification. Others are acknowledged summaries of French authors, Madame Sainte-Ange, for example.
Further, the recipes rely on the judgment of the cook rather than measurements down to the last ounce. Here’s one picked at random for an Alsatian onion and cream tart (p. 284).
For the filling: 1-1/2 lb. onion, the yolks of 3 eggs, a good 1/4 pint of thick cream, seasonings including nutmeg and plenty of milled pepper, butter and oil for cooking the onions.
That wouldn’t pass muster now.
In short, David never assumes uniformity, whether of diner’s tastes, availability of ingredients, nature of ingredients, or availability of utensils, cookware, or of cooking equipment. She writes her recipes to suggest the limits within which a cook can explore, not as a template to be reproduced.
I remember when I was a judge for a major cookbook prize. Boxes of books would arrive at my house situated at 7000 feet up on the central plateau of Mexico. Fulfilling my obligation to test at least two recipes from each finalist was a matter of intuiting from the recipe what the author was aiming at and trying to recreate it under very difficult circumstances.
I once tried to explain this to colleagues in the organization. “You shouldn’t have been a judge,” they said angrily.
Sorry, no, I think I should. Even within the boundaries of the United States, altitudes vary, water varies, flour varies, availability of produce varies. Templates and strict copying are not what is required but mutual trust between author and reader.
At least that’s how I look at it.
I also feel her approach and recipes are more authentic. And her lack of respect for precise measurement just delighted this American raised on the sifting, spooning, and leveling mechanics of contempory recipe writing standards. I have read your postings on Julia & Elizabeth and enjoyed your insights. Just for the record, I could never get into Julia Child. She came across to me as dogmatic and unnecessaryily procedural. But I am definitely not in step with my fellow countrymen on that issue.
I am totally with you! I also feel like the reliance on recipes fetishizes the idea that there’s a specific way to do things, and disempowers law-abiding people who don’t feel free or empowered to create with food in original ways… I am trying to re-teach myself (and sometimes my readers) in a different way…
Looking forward to reading more of your blog. I’m not sure I’d want to dispense with recipes but I want them to allow room for the cook’s judgement.
I think it’s the idea of “repertoire” I’m trying to explore… Anyway thanks for YOUR writing!
Hi, Rachel! I’m a bit confused. First, tho, so what’s wrong with the above instructions for the Alsatian onion and cream tart? Is it that it’s too specific? Not specific enough? Or…what? Also, so are you saying that Ms. David took an historic recipe, re-did it/re-wrote it/re-arranged the instructions/whatever, and then presented it as that original historic recipe? Or…something else?
See, I told you I was confused! LOL
cheers,
carolina
historiccookery.com
Well, Carolina, I could have been clearer.
1) Nothing’s wrong with the Alsatian onion and cream recipe (though of course I’m not quoting all of it, only the part on ingredients). It seems to me to be at about the right level of specificity. You can choose how much cream you add, you use your judgement about the amount of oil or butter for cooking the onions. You implicitly have the option to vary the quantity of the onions a bit, at least I think so, so as not to be left with a bit of onion.
2) My suspicion is that when ED took a recipe direct or re-written from a French cookbook (and she acknowledges these), she in all likelihood didn’t do independent testing. And thus that there is some substance to my claim she didn’t test some recipes at all.
Does this help?
She sometimes wrote she never tried a recipe, I can recall instances in Summer Food and Spices, Salt and Aromatics In The English Kitchen. And I doubt she tested or even tried once all of them. Clearly, she did so for some, which is fine, but a person of her knowledge didn’t have to try out everything. When you know as much about food and basic cooking techniques as she did, you don’t have to, you can “project” the result.
Gary, I will have to go back to Summer Food and Spices, Salt and Aromatics. I thought I knew them almost by heart but obviously I don’t because I don’t remember any such statements. But I’m glad you agree with me that she did not test in anything like the sense that is expected now.
I do agree with you that E.D. probably did not sedulously test every recipe. It is just not within the general scheme of her books which are of a literary nature and assume a certain facility in the kitchen. In leafing through Spices, Sale and Aromatics in the English Kitchen, Summer Cookery, and Italian Food, I confess I cannot find examples where she states in so many words she did not try a recipe. I am fairly certain she did say this of occasion, but it must be in one of her other books. Still, in the numerous cases where she quotes with attribution as you said a recipe from an earlier book, I have to think she did not put all of these to the test simply because it wasn’t necessary. Some opt these were quite old and involved unusual ingredients, e.g. tripe or a pig’s head… Some involved combinations of Mediterranean fish unlikely to be available in England, or certain vegetables ditto, and so forth. Clearly she did work out many recipes, and the Norman interview is excellent in general, but I’d think some were not tested again, e.g. the one for Cyprus sausages in the first book mentioned.
I agree with everything you say, Gary. With one exception. Neither tripe nor pig’s heads were unusual ingredients in England when she was working. In fact I lived off pig’s head as a graduate student. I would buy half a head for half a crown, make brawn, and it did me for lunch for a week or two with the horrible, heavy brown bread I then made. But it’s an interesting example of how what is unusual has changed.
My question is this: did any of our classic authors ever test their recipes? Did Mary Randolph? Did Eliza Leslie? Did Isabella Beeton? Did any of the women who contributed to charity/fund-raising cookbooks? I think people just wrote down what worked for them (hopefully they did not omit a crucial ingredient as some are wont to do, or so the folklore goes). If it didn’t work for you, too bad, but the guidelines were there. Keyword: guidelines. Guidelines = recipes. Personally, I love E. David’s books because she gives me the leeway to make a recipe my own. Or at least delude me into thinking so!
No, I don’t think they did. Nor do I think it was necessary. Nor do I think it was possible.
But that’s exactly my point: the so-called classic authors, and David is one of them, didn’t test recipes and it wasn’t necessary for them to do so, because cookbook users at the time could feel confident that the author’s “author-ity” would allow readers, with their a priori knowledge, to succeed in using the recipes. I guess I don’t understand why Elizabeth David is being dissected here, as she was simply falling into the common pattern of previous British cookbook authors indulging in a lot of borrowings and certainly little, if any, recipe testing. Even at the time that E. David wrote her books, people had half a clue about how to operate in the kitchen. Suddenly (?), it seemed that no one knew a wooden spoon from a spatula and that’s when recipe testing and all the photos became necessary in cookbooks, because the only cooking anyone saw was somebody opening a can or tearing apart a plastic bag with pre-prepared food waiting to be nuked in a microwave. I just went through 100s of cookbooks in my own collection, and this is true – until sometime in the 1990s, you could still get away with publishing a cookbook without photos, or very few. Now, it seems, every dish must smile for the camera, as cookbook readers cannot seemingly visualize the end results of the recipe, even though recipes are now written with every detail spelled out.
Well, this is right up your street, Cindy. Elizabeth David is simply being dissected because I’d written about her earlier, comparing and contrasting her attitudes to cooking with those of Julia Child.
This whole discussion has made me wonder if the change in cookbooks can be put down simply to a decline in cooking skills. I need to think about this a bit further.
I think that the indication of precise quantities of ingredients is a hallmark of modern cuisine cookbooks or recipes given on the web.
Old books are clearly aimed at people who are already skilled in kitchen’s practices and who can judge by themselves “the right amount” basing on experience or taste.
Funnily enough this is something I tend to apply to the recipes I write, I realize that sometimes I am a bit vague in terms of how many minutes you should stir a sauce or cook a piece of meat, tasting and testing still has great importance in the way I proceed rather than merely looking at a clock.
Probably many see this as a point of “weakness” compared to others who dare to weigh the flour by the gram on a 2Kg loaf (it’s amazing how many recipes there are out there with 251g of this and 349g of that, I wonder what would happen with 250g or 350g instead).
I believe also that you will hardly find a pasta recipe where someone tells you how much salt to put in the water, it’s something we learn by experience and will be simply taken for granted, so that doesn’t necessarily mean that we didn’t test the recipe ;-)
Of course if we are talking of a procedure where a certain chemical reaction has to take place, it makes sense to carefully weigh the components, but in general I don’t think that for ordinary ingredients a couple of grams can make any distinguishable difference.
Flavio, I am entirely with you. And I too am amused by some of the quantities that crop up in cookbooks. But I do bet there are American cookbooks which tell you how much salt to put in the water.
Julia Child discussed these exact issues in her Foreword to Elizabeth Davids “Italian Food,” (Penguin, 1998 ed). Among other quotes: “She had to test and retest the recipes herself…” (p. xxviii) and between quotes of the recipes: “I like that easy style, but alas no american cookbook editor would let you get away with that!” and “Well that is pretty vague, but I haven’t a doubt any of us could make fine sauce out of those ingredients.” (p. xxix)
Fascinating Mae. I have the 1963 revised English edition, which, needless to say, does not have a forward by Julia Child. And I think JC is perhaps over-interpreting when she says “She had to test and retest the recipes herself . . ” Because unless she had spoken to ED, what ED say !I had been naggingly aware . . . that a tremendous task still awaited me when I should return to England.” And then goes on to discuss two problems: establishing measures and finding ingredients. No mention of testing. Which she may have done but I think it was more a matter of translating her notes into workable recipes.
a topic that touches my heart – greek cooking has very little to do with exact measurements, it’s mainly fistfuls, bunches and glugs, so when i see exact measurements in greek recipes on various blogs, i cringe; i think to myself: they can’t possibly have made this recipe to the letter, they must have deviated somewhere along the line at some point
Maria, couldn’t agree more, especially for savory recipes. Sweets may be a bit different because many do require precise times and temperatures. But home cooking means having certain templates in your head and adjusting them to what is available, the tastes of the family and so on. As you so often nicely show on your blog.
ED’s Spices, Salt and Aromatics contains a whole chapter on Measurements and Temperatures, in which she discusses her developing attitude to precision in measurement and its limitations.
Yes. Good point. I’d forgotten that. Not quite testing, though.