Omelette and a Glass of Wine - Paperback

by Elizabeth David (Author), John Thorne (Foreword by)

Contains delightful explorations of food and cooking, among which are the collection's namesake essay and many other gems; with black-and-white photographs and illustrations.

Front Jacket

Others can rightly claim credit for making French cooking--and other foreign cuisines--part of our popular culinary idiom. But it was Elizabeth David who convinced us that it was all right to care about cooking as a serious thing, because she herself did so with a discrimination as fine and as passionate as any we ourselves had just been learning to make over such things as The Waste Land or The Wings of the Dove. No one before or after Elizabeth David has quite this same sensual fineness of understanding. It springs, I think, from perfect culinary pitch. Even if you have never tried one of her recipes, you sense this in the clarity of her prose. . . . Delicately, nicely, with exact rightness, she works each food, each flavor, into simple dishes, leaving each of us not only wiser but with a gently shared sense of physical release. It is this that gives each page its vital tension, and her books their sense of purely private quest. --John Thorne, from his Foreword

Back Jacket

This revered collection of articles by the great food writer Elizabeth David originally appeared between 1952 and 1984 in such magazines and newspapers as the Spectator, Gourmet, Vogue, and the Sunday Times of London. David's writing offers delightful explorations of food and cooking, including the namesake essay and other such gems as "Syllabubs and Fruit Fools," "Sweet Vegetables, Soft Wine," "Pleasing Cheeses," and "Whisky in the Kitchen." Her many admirers will cherish this new edition, and those new to her writing will marvel at her wisdom and grace.

Author Biography

Elizabeth David was the author of nine books, including Mediterranean Food, French Provincial Cooking, and English Bread and Yeast Cookery, for which she won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award. Awarded a Chevalier de l'Ordre du Merite Agricole in France, she lived in England, France, Italy, Greece, Egypt, and India at different periods of her life. She died in 1992.