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'Italian Food'
Recipes by Elizabeth David
Foreword by Julia Child
Alfred A. Knopf -- 1958; Penguin edition -- 1999
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When Julia Child calls another cook "the doyenne of English food authorities" and her veal recipes "lovely," it's time to pay attention. Elizabeth David, not Child, is credited with breaking the English out of their stodgy meat-and-potatoes routines way back in the 1950s. Having sojourned in both France and Italy as a young woman, translating the recipes of local Italian and Frenchwomen from "by the handful" into so-called "proper" measurements, David was the first English cook to really bring Italian and French food to her native country.

Takeaway tips: David's prose is very unlike that of, say, M.F.K. Fisher, being quite straightforward, but is accurate and worth reading for its sheer Englishness: "Zuppa pavese" (a soup) is "a capital invention, admirable when one is tired, and also for solitary meals." She can't help but dropping details about her travels into the writing, but does so in such an accessible way that one doesn't come away from the book loathing her.