Photo: Amazon.com

'Summer Cooking'
Elizabeth David
Foreword by Molly O'Neill
New York Review of Books -- 1995, reprinted in 2002
Buy it on Amazon

Sometimes you want a cookbook author to give it to you straight.

None of this "You can whip this up in 10 minutes!" when you are certain, as you possess merely mortal chopping skills, it will take you 20 with that pile of onions.

The well-traveled cookbook author Elizabeth David, who many think brought "real food" to the English in the 1950s, is of this no-nonsense school. She saw it among her duties to bring picnic food and something called "seasonal shopping" to her countrymen and women, as they were stuck in an out-of-season loop. On one page she gripes about the mortification of seeing ratatouille on a February menu comprised of tomatoes and (ugh) cabbage.

On another she writes of the English approach to the "dread" salad season that is summertime: "What makes a cook think that the beetroot spreading its hideous purple dye over a sardine and a spoonful of tinned baked beans constitutes an hors d'oeuvre?"

Tell us how you really feel, Elizabeth.

What we tested and whether the book's worth buying, after the jump.

Takeaway tips: David's recipes include cooking temperatures ... sometimes ... and exact proportions ... when she feels like it. Her inexact instructions are compensated for by her witty asides and general sense of (tempered, very English) joie de vivre. She'll throw a "delicious" into the end of a recipe. No exclamation point, thank you very much.

Quality of pictures: Nonexistent. This is a petite, written tome of culinary history.

We tested: Pesto; Tarragon Soup

David's pesto is absolutely our standby, with a fantastic mix of bright, fresh elements and proper instructions for adding olive oil slowly to the basil mixture. Tarragon soup was a delight; it hadn't occurred to us to use the somewhat anise-y herb in this fashion before, simply steeped with a clear chicken broth and topped with a flurry of parmesan. We might throw a knob of parmesan rind into the broth next time for more of an umami element, however.

Worth the investment: Sure, particularly for trained cooks and lovers of culinaria. It's funny (and perhaps worth the investment all on its own) to watch David veer wildly off-topic at the book's close as she claims "picnic addicts" are of "two schools": "those who frankly make elaborate preparations and leave nothing to chance, and those others whose organization is no less complicated but who are more deceitful and pretend that everything will be obtained on the spot [but is] conveniently to hand."

Her travels also inform a strange epilogue of crosscultural picnics, including one in India in which she was surrounded by a pack of "dreadful" wild dogs determined to interfere with her enjoyment of a bottle of "Rhinegold Australian hock."

This is a time capsule in many ways, and one we're glad to have kicking around.