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

more certain providers of pleasure than unreliable human flesh. She became famous, revered and fetishized within her own culture, to the point where one instinctively searches for the but. Asking around among foodies, I turned up a few small buts, or semi-buts: that all food writing is evolutionary, not revolutionary; that other, forgotten figures were aware of the South at the same time; that her influence is narrower than supporters claim, or hope; that the over-all effect of her work has been to persuade Britain away from its authentic culinary roots, resulting in the geographical anomaly of the Birmingham housewife proudly serving up a Provençal dinner. “To put it crudely,” an ex-restaurant critic suggested to me, “where are the recipes for Brussels sprouts?” Where, indeed; and that is part of the point. In French Provincial Cooking Elizabeth David quoted Ford Madox Ford, fellow-Mediterraneanist and enthusiastic home cook, on one of the prime virtues of Provence: “There there is no more any evil, for there the apple will not flourish and the Brussels sprout will not grow at all.” *
    These buts and semi-buts would have been irrelevant to those who assembled in February of 1994 for the sale of E.D.'s kitchen remnants. I went along one viewing afternoon, intending to return for the sale, but was unnerved by the atmosphere, a smellable mix of melancholy, hysteria, and acquisitiveness. The melancholy came not so much from the hovering fact of Mrs. David's death two years previously as from the pathetic nature of most items: chipped jugs, two-legged colanders, battered sieves, stained cookbooks, bashed-up wooden spoons. Apart from a Welsh dresser and the large table at which E.D. had both cooked and written (bought by Prue Leith for eleven hundred pounds), it was—objectively— junk. As one of her nephews tactlessly admitted, “The best has been creamed off. It's gone to family and friends. These are the dregs.” But these resonant dregs had been touched by the radioactive hand of Mrs. David, and the auction raised £49,000, three times the Phillips estimate. Francis Wheen, the biographer of Karl Marx, spent £220 of his capital on three cheesegraters, two paperbacks, and a nutmeg grater—the last item still containing a talis-manically half-used nutmeg.
    In 1976, when Elizabeth David collected her O.B.E., the Queen asked her what she did. “Write cookery books, Ma'am.” To which the Queen responded, “How useful.” It isn't known if the monarch then rushed—or sent—out for potted basil, extra-virgin olive oil, live yeast, and the right sort of bread crock. But for once she spoke for her nation. E.D. was, and after her death continues to be, very useful. It isn't always the correct accolade for a prose writer, but on this occasion it is.
* She didn't. Two of the things she always refused to stock at the Elizabeth David shop were the wall-mounted knife-sharpener and the garlic press.

* Sprouts were an idée fixe for Ford: “Any alienist will tell you that the first thing he does with a homicidal maniac after he gets him into an asylum is to deliver, with immense purges, his stomach from bull-beef and Brussels Sprouts.”

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Tour de France 1907

    The Pont du Gard: “a little stupid,” according to Henry James
    The first Michelin Guide to France —limp-bound, pocket-sized, and, of course, red—came out in 1900. “The appearance of this work,” its foreword pomped, “coincides with that of the new century, and the one will last as long as the other. The art of motoring has just been born; it will develop with each year, and the tyre will develop with it, since the tyre is the essential organ without which the car cannot travel.” The years between 1900 and 1914 were a blessed age for motorists (and, no doubt, for tyre-developers): a time at which—for those who could afford it—technology seemed to have advanced the possibilities of pleasure with no apparent drawback. “In those days,” Ford