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

can she?
    All this is a normal, indeed ritual, part of cooking, it seems to me. I duly argued myself to various conclusions. (Recipes that blandly lay down probable timings for preparation and cooking should also, if they are being honest, add extra minutes for paralysing fits of indecision.) The tomatoes were chopped, and the oil sizzling, when my understanding thumped belatedly against the first word of the recipe: “Melt.” How could I have missed it until now? Melt? Melt a tomato? Even a chopped one? The implausi-bility of the verb froze me. Perhaps if you're south of Naples, and beneath the intense noonday sun your fingers have just that moment eased from the plant something that is less a tomato than a warm scarlet deliquescence waiting to happen; then, perhaps, the thing might melt under your spatula. But would these muscular cubettes I was now easing into the oil ever do such a thing? I found myself, as the Anxious Pedant frequently does, caught between two incompatibilities. On the one hand, I believed, or wanted to believe, that with a few encouraging prods the tomatoes would, by a culinary process hitherto unknown to me but promised by my trustworthy tutress, suddenly melt; at the same time, I was pursued by the sane fear that cooking the surly chunks any longer in the oil and thus adding to the over-all ten-minute time limit would make them lose their freshness and vitiate the whole point of the recipe. For several fretful minutes I waited for the miracle “melt.” Then, with a cookish oath, I seized the potato masher and mashed the shit out of them, hurriedly washed up the guilty instrument, and continued to the next stage of the recipe. The soup did, in the end, taste wonderful—even if not quite as wonderful as if E.D. had made it.
    Could it be that Elizabeth David was too good a writer to be a food writer? Or is this just special pleading by one who needs constant textual hand-holding? Probably. E.D. cites a recipe of the French gastrotechnologist Edouard de Pomiane as “the best kind of cookery writing,” by which she means something that is “courageous, courteous, adult.” Further, “It is creative in the true sense of that ill-used word, creative because it invites the reader to use his own critical and inventive faculties, sends him out to make discoveries, form his own opinions, observe things for himself, instead of slavishly accepting what the books tell him.” E.D. herself could not be better described than as “courageous, courteous, adult.” Perhaps her ellipses are in fact sly encouragements to adulthood. Perhaps my frenzied use of the potato masher was, in its small and shameful way, creative?
    Elizabeth David stood for: excellence of ingredients, simplicity of preparation, respect for tradition and for region. She stood against: fuss, overdecoration, pretentiousness; “heaps of vegetables” and “food tormented into irrelevant shapes”: the castellated radish, the limply supportive lettuce leaf, the worm-cast of potato salad. She was wary of three-star restaurants and ambivalent about nouvelle cuisine. She sang of the Mediterranean but was also learned about British food. Her approach is always unsnobbish, even if snobberies attach to some of her followers. She could be scholarly about the history of sardine canning, and equally precise about “the sound of air gruesomely whistling through sheeps' lungs frying in oil.” She described the state of the British bread industry with a fury worthy of Evelyn Waugh, but, instead of Wavianly bemoaning the equivalent of the Cripps-Attlee terror and retreating into the brandy balloon, she told people how to go about making proper bread themselves, and so helped kick-start the British bread revival.
    E.D. was a liberator; perhaps it is not absurd to compare her effect on a certain sector of tired, hungry, impoverished Fifties Britain with Kinsey's effect on America. Perhaps she knew even more than he: that pine nuts, basil, and garlic are