Free Something to Declare: Essays on France and French Culture by Julian Barnes

of us who now feel cheated out of the remainder of the Truffaut canon. Godard, ever-radical, went to direct a European commercial for Nike.

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The Land Without
Brussels Sprouts

    A simple recipe
    In 1959, Evelyn Waugh revised Brideshead Revisited for a collected edition. Fourteen years on from first publication, he admitted that the novel had a number of “grosser passages” which required modification. These had been provoked by the conditions of wartime composition:
It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster—the period of soya beans and Basic English—and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful.
    Nor did this “bleak period” end in 1945. Austerity and rationing continued under the peacetime Labour Government, which Waugh biliously characterized as “the Cripps-Attlee terror” but many thought a rare reforming administration. “I suppose you will not come back to this country,” he wrote to the Paris-based Nancy Mitford in July 1946. “You are very wise. The food gets drearier and drearier.” An elderly friend of mine recently confirmed this observation. “We ate better during the war than after it,” he recalled. Rationing was prolonged until 1954, while exchange-control regulations restricted foreign travel except for those with money in their shoes.
    Yet Brideshead's initial success was partly due to its very gluttony of prose and content; while the overhang of austerity helped further exoticize the work of voluptuaries such as Lawrence Durrell and Cyril Connolly. Elizabeth David, a young upper-middle-class Englishwoman, had spent the war in Egypt working for the Admiralty and the Ministry of Information, and had known Durrell in his Alexandrian period. Back in Britain during the harsh winter of 1946–7, she found herself in a Ross-on-Wye hotel where the food was “produced with a kind of bleak triumph which amounted almost to a hatred of humanity and humanity's needs.” In response, she started jotting down what was as much a series of aromatic memories as useful advice for embattled British housewives. One such memory was a recipe for stuffing and roasting a whole sheep. At the time, the meat ration consisted of a pound per person per week. It was partly the surreal implausibility of the dish which persuaded the publisher's reader to recommend the work.
    A Book of Mediterranean Food came out in 1950. Forty-two years later, when she died, Elizabeth David—by now “E.D.” even to those who had never met her—was routinely farewelled as the doyenne of food writers; the most important influence on the British kitchen since Mrs. Beeton; the woman who brought the aromatic south to our dank and foggy islands. The legend went like this: poor benighted Brits, mired in snoek and Spam, believing olive oil was something you bought at the chemist's to dewax ears, were hauled into culinary awareness by E. David, whereupon they all started growing their own basil and baking their own bread. In some respects, this legend is accurate. A painter friend, now in his sixties, recalls his mother saying, “Eating for me is like cleaning my teeth”; he now cooks to a standard that E.D. would herself approve. Her writing could be immediately inspiring: my wife recalls reading an E.D. article about breadmaking and setting off at once to scour west London for live yeast. She made her acolytic bread for several months until a gas bill suggested the down-side to home baking for the single person.
    At the same time, the story is, of course, more complicated. Just as there was little stuffing of whole sheep in 1950s Britain, so a lot of E.D.'s lauded ingredients were unobtainable to the point of myth. Early readers of Elizabeth David were inevitably indulging in a little light gastroporn. If male adolescents of the time consumed