The EU can take credit for much, but pizza's ousting of fish'n'chips as the takeaway of choice has nothing to do with Brussels and Strasbourg. The change in our eating habits over the past quarter century has been phenomenal. And in history of that cultural sea change, one name stands out among all others. Elizabeth David.
It is hard for anyone under 40 to imagine a time when even the humblest corner shop didn't have a bottle of olive oil somewhere on its shelves. Yet when I was a girl, olive oil was for putting in your ears and you got it from the chemist. Garlic was for fending off vampires and tinned tomatoes were for serving on toast with a poached egg. Frozen sweetcorn kernels were about as exotic a vegetable as you could find. At least at other people's houses. Mine was different. While my friends' mothers cooked joints and pies, mine cooked ratatouille and quiches. Her inspiration was a vast tome called Recipes of all Nations, compiled and edited by Countess Morphy. In spite of Countess Morphy's enigmatic name, what she wrote about was everyday food: a traditional way of cooking potatoes from Austria, a milk pudding from Portugal. There was Conejo Asado con Aioli, I remember, the rabbit shot by my father, the garlic grown in the garden, and Dodine de Canard ("stewed duck"). The book is beside me as I write and this must have been a particular favourite as the page is liberally marked with brown spatters. My mother was not alone. The tantalisingly-named Countess Morphy inspired Elizabeth David (then a young English debutante) to stop ordering cooked food from Selfridges where she had an account, and take to the kitchen herself. Ten years later she published A Book Of Mediterranean Food and culinary life in Britain would never be the same again.
Far from being a dilettante's take on peasant food, Mediterranean Food was grounded in the realities of doing it yourself. Because in 1939, when a European war seemed no more than an empty threat, the 24-year-old Elizabeth Gwynne set sail for Greece. She didn't return until 1946. Nothing in Elizabeth Gwynne's aristocratic past could have predicted her position at the end of her life as the ultimate cookery guru. A natural rebel, the third of five daughters, Elizabeth was only 10 when her dashing MP father died: her mother had no interest in either food or her family.
Elizabeth left her boarding school when she was 16 and went to Paris to study painting, soon afterwards enrolling at the Sorbonne for a course in French civilisation. Living with a French family as a paying guest was her first experience of food as anything other than fuel. Twice a week she would accompany Madame on her dawn visits to Les Halles and occasionally she would sneak down to watch the family cook at work in the kitchen. She was there for 18 months. Next came Munich where an unsuitable romance, rather than food, was the memorable feature of her stay. Unsuitable men and good food became Elizabeth David's twin passions. The debs delights on offer when she "came out" in 1932 were of no interest. She didn't want a husband, she wanted a job, and not a job her family could organise through their connections. She joined the Oxford Repertory Company, sweeping the stage and making tea. Next came the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, where she met the extremely unsuitable Charles Gibson Cowan. Devastatingly attractive, well-read and highly intelligent, he was also married. However, in Miss Gwynne's would-be-Bohemian book, that was no obstacle.
By 1939 they'd both had enough of England. In the preceding three years, Elizabeth had visited her newly married sister in Malta, been to Cairo to stay with family friends and holidayed on the French Riviera, when she scandalised her hosts by taking a boat to Corsica where, money being short, she stayed with a local family. In French Provincial Cooking, published in 1960, she wrote: "There were great dishes of ham and tomatoes, eggs and olives, plenty of salads and oil, huge hunks of bread and great bowls of bursting ripe figs. In all the years since then I have never forgotten the very special savour of that food." Charles was a keen sailor and thanks to an overdraft negotiated with her Uncle Jasper, who happened to be on the board of Coutts Bank, Elizabeth was able to buy a two-masted yawl. The couple crossed France via the Seine and the Rhone and six weeks after leaving England, they were in Marseille. A major port was a dangerous place to stay with France on the brink of war, but the boat needed minor repairs, so they sailed along the coast to Antibes. As the war closed in, they decided to move on. Between the toe of Italy and Sicily, the war caught up with them. They were interned in Italy for three weeks. Their boat was confiscated, as were Charles's manuscripts and all the recipes Elizabeth had collected over the past couple of years. (She had given a bound, hand-written collection to a sister as a wedding present.) Released, they made their way down through Greece, ending up on the island of Syros where Charles had found a job teaching English through a friend.
Keeping one step ahead of the Germans, the couple moved first to Crete and then to Cairo where, once Charles had gone - and with a job as a cypher clerk - Elizabeth embarked on a series of affairs. In the meantime, she married a gentle army officer called Tony David. To no one's surprise, it didn't last. A spell together in India hadn't helped, and when Elizabeth was invalided out back to England, she immediately took up with one of her Cairo lovers. It was he who suggested they spend some time together at a hotel in Hay-on-Wye and it was here - motivated by the horrors of hotel food - that she began to recapture the flavours and smells of her unlikely war years in Mediterranean Food which, 50 years after she wrote it has the trick of making you want to rush to the kitchen and set to.
To those whose culinary imagination had all but died during the war, Elizabeth David's ability to conjure a mood and way of life through a description of a simple meal was a joy. Within days Mediterranean Food had sold out and was immediately reprinted. Next came French Country Cook- ing, then Italian Cooking, French Provincial Cooking and Summer Cooking, each progressively more confident as David discovered that she could not only cook, but could write. A whole generation learnt to cook from them, from students like me, to bistro owners, to readers of Vogue, where her column paved the way for the eclectic musings of food/travel writers of today. Once rationing was over in 1954, grocers and greengrocers had learnt to keep up: olive oil, salami; garlic, courgettes, aubergine, peppers. And it wasn't just the ingredients.
From Elizabeth David we discovered the pleasures of entertaining in the kitchen, the guests helping themselves to plonk and olives while the cook chopped and chatted; the practicality of oven-to-table earthenware dishes, of cast-iron enamelled casseroles, of ramekins, of decent knives. Terence Conran began to stock such things in his new houseware emporium, Habitat. Then Elizabeth David herself followed suit with an Aladdin's cave of a shop in Chelsea. Elizabeth David died in 1992. The last years of her life had not been happy. Her long-time lover Peter Higgins had deserted her; she was ousted from the shop that bore her name; her health, never good, got worse. One sister committed suicide, another died of malnutrition. She took part in a television documentary, but hated it. Yet her legacy goes beyond her name. From pizza to pasta, not to mention sun-dried tomatoes and rocket (she discovered it on Syros), people to whom the name of Elizabeth David means nothing have a whole way of life to thank her for.
Writing At The Kitchen Table: Elizabeth David, The Authorised Biography, by Artemis Cooper is published by Michael Joseph, price £20 in the UK