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

girlie magazines while waiting for the real thing, British domestic cooks had a few panting years to endure before the garlic and basil became available and olive oil was liberated from the chemist's. Between 1950 and 1960, Mrs. David published five classic guides to Mediterranean, Italian, French Country, French Provincial, and Summer cooking; yet her influence didn't really begin to take hold until the Sixties and Seventies. And while her books sold more than a million copies over the years, her sales penetration wasn't necessarily all that broad. People who know about Elizabeth David tend to own four or five of her books, so we might be talking of two hundred thousand households, perhaps fewer. She was much acknowledged in the breach, and her secondary influence was probably greater than her primary one. For instance, she constantly urged the necessity and virtue of using the correct equipment and proper serving dishes, opening her own shop in Chelsea to this purpose: but it was the entrepreneur and style commissar Terence Conran who popularized her ideas.
    Another reason for this secondary influence was her absolute refusal to be a public figure. She received many honours, both in Britain and France, but her form of communication was the written word. She belonged much more to the prewar world of Norman Douglas (writer and gastronome, early friend and influence) than to the postwar television world of the personality chef and the décor huckster. Her first and only public interview occurred on television in 1989, when she was seventy-five. It was a coup for the production company, rather like netting J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon; but the result was awkward and at times pitiable. Evelyn Waugh was also spiritually pre-television, but his occasional appearances were compelling, not least for the evident contempt with which he regarded this infantile medium. E.D. had some of the same cornered-badger prickliness, but asserted herself by eva sion, leaving long silences, giving two-word answers, and evincing far less interest in the process, the medium, and the question than in the stuffed courgette in front of her on the plate.
    She could be formidable and dismissive in person, permanently banishing those who offended or failed her; and she is often formidable in the text. She writes like a writer—that's to say, as one addressing an equal—rather than as an indulgent instructress jollying along any passing five-thumbed débutant. She is not com-plicit with other people's ignorance. Reading her, you have a strong sense of a person whose cardinal principles were truth and pleasure. This does not make for an easy relationship with those who take truthfulness to be a sign of hauteur and pleasure, a sibling of self-indulgence.
    One of the ironies of E.D.'s career was that by the time she was acknowledged as a defining cultural influence she had stopped writing the kind of books which had made her one. Her work had become more scholarly and less frequent; over the last three decades of her life she produced just three grave volumes on bread, spices, and ice. A broader irony was that she encouraged more and more Britons to seek out good food in France (as being the nearest part of the Mediterranean basin) at a time when its national cuisine was passing through one of its worst crises in centuries.
    I first noticed that something was up—or potentially up—in about 1980. I was having dinner near the station at Brive-la-Gaillarde. The restaurant, used by commercial travellers and those about to put their car on the overnight motorail to Boulogne, was small and unpretentious; there might have been a timid domestic murderer at the next table, but only Richard Cobb would have spotted him. You can guess the culinary plot: red check tablecloth, plateau de crudités, steak with thin-cut jaundiced frites, local cheese, then a choice of fruit or crème caramel. A bottle of red opened and left on the table. The kind of friendly, reliable