Summer food

photo credit: IMGP8839rd via photopin (license)

I’m reading a cookbook that celebrates “the suitability of certain foods to certain times of the year, and the pleasure of eating the vegetables, fruits, poultry, meat or fish which is in season, therefore at its best, most plentiful, and cheapest.”

These sentiments could come from almost any cookbook written today. Every chef or cooking writer worth their salt describes their food as fresh, local and seasonal.

But the words above were not written this year. Elizabeth David wrote them 60 years ago in the introduction to her book, Summer Cooking.

Although the cover of my 1965 Penguin edition looks dull and brownish overall, it shows a white, footed bowl of purple figs nestled in their leaves. In front, a cut fig and pieces of fresh, white cheese sit on a blue-rimmed plate. When I bought my copy in the late seventies, ripe figs and fresh cheese both seemed impossibly exotic.

Considered by many to be England’s most influential cookery writer of the twentieth century, Elizabeth David’s passion for seasonality had nothing to do with fashion. It derived from her appreciation of traditional French and Mediterranean food cultures.

She fell in love with French food when she was 17 and lived with a family in Paris while she studied at the Sorbonne. Her love of Mediterranean food began in the late 1930s when she and a lover sailed a wooden yacht around the south of France, Italy and Greece. When war broke out, they lived in a cottage at the edge of the Aegean on the Greek island of Syros, where Elizabeth made meals from bread, olives, fish, white cheese, figs, tomato paste, dried beans, and lemons – until the German invasion forced them to leave.

In Summer Cooking, she acknowledges the convenience of the tinned and frozen foods becoming widely available in the mid fifties. But she reminds her readers these foods are no substitute for fresh. To her, eating the same foods year round is dull, and in summer it’s best to serve “dishes which bring some savour of the garden, the fields, the sea”.

I don’t think anyone today says it better.

So now I’m off to the market to buy some asparagus to serve with Elizabeth’s sauce maltaise, a form of hollandaise flavoured with blood orange, from page 148.  

It needs to be made now, before the season for blood oranges is over for another year.

If you would like to make it yourself, here is a similar recipe from Poh Ling Yeow.

SW – Post 4