Career
The life-changing escapades started in Elizabeth’s life when she met Charles Gibson-Cowan with whom she left on a boat to Greece in 1938. Before that she was working as a junior assistant at the fashion house of Worth, England.
Elizabeth along with her lover crossed the English Channel on their boat in 1939 and took a stopover in Marseille and quickly moved to Antibes. There she met writer Norman Douglas who inspired and introduced her to Mediterranean food.
The couple left Antibes in 1940 but the moment they reached Sicily, they were arrested for they were suspected to be spies. They remained in custody for 19 days and all of their possessions were confiscated.
Elizabeth and her partner reached Athens in the same year and decided to settle there. He worked as an English teacher in Syros and she started to learn how to cook. They left for Egypt in 1941.
As Elizabeth was fluent in French and German, she was hired in the naval cipher office, Alexandria. There she savored the flavor of Egyptian food. In 1942, she ran the Ministry of Information’s reference library in Cairo.
She got married to Lieutenant-Colonel Tony David in 1944 and move to India with him. Elizabeth did not enjoy her life as a wife of an officer and also could not adjust to the Indian weather. She went back to England.
Elizabeth found it very difficult to adjust with the flavorless food of England. In 1947, her husband returned back and they started their marital life in Chelsea. It was here that she first started to write articles on cookery.
In 1949, her cookery articles appeared in ‘Harper’s Bazaar’. While writing these articles, Elizabeth knew her aim well to compile these articles into a book in future, which is why she did not sell the copyright to her articles.
After getting rejected from many publishers on the context that her book ‘A Book of Mediterranean Food’ was a collection of unconnected recipes, it was published by John Lehmann, who was essentially a publisher of poetry, in 1950.
Owing to the success of her book, Elizabeth published another book but this time debuted in the French cooking, ‘French Country Cooking’ in 1951. Unlike its predecessor, it drew less on her magazine articles. It had illustrations by John Minton.
She left for France immediately after the release of her second book and from there she went to Capri to meet Douglas. In 1954, she published ‘Italian Food’, a book based on her food and culture experiences in Italy.
In 1955, ‘Summer Cooking’ was released, and in this book she expressed her views on eating food in season. She wrote about dishes from Britain, Indian, Mauritius, Russia, Spain, France, etc. She was offered to write for ‘Vogue’.
Elizabeth travelled extensively in France and in 1960, she published the famous book, ‘French Provincial Cooking’, which referred to the dished from the interiors of France. She financed her French expeditions with the money she earned from ‘Vogue’.
She left ‘The Sunday Times’ and started writing for ‘The Spectator’ but her career suffered a big blow when she suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1963 and she lost her sense of taste and confidence in the incident.
In 1965, Elizabeth opened a kitchen equipment shop ‘Elizabeth David Ltd’ in Pimlico. She opened the shop with four business partners with the aim of selling the kind of kitchen equipments that were not readily available in England.
Elizabeth wrote ‘Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970)’, ‘English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977)’, and ‘An Omelette and a Glass of Wine (1984)’.She continued to write articles for magazines and wrote more about places, chefs, etc.