Alan Davidson (food writer)
Alan Eaton Davidson CMG (30 March 1924 – 2 December 2003) was a British diplomat and writer best known for his writing and editing on food and gastronomy.
After leaving
Life and career
Early years
Davidson was born in
Foreign Office
From Oxford, Davidson joined the
Davidson concluded his Foreign Office career as British ambassador to Laos, 1973–1975. A colleague later said of this posting:
Davidson took early retirement from the diplomatic service at the age of 51 in 1975.[2]
Food writer
While the Davidsons were living in Tunis, Jane asked her husband to look for a cookery book on fish because she did not recognise any of the local varieties and was unsure how they should be cooked.[1] Not being able to find one he wrote one himself: Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean "a handbook giving the names of 144 species in 5 languages, with a list of molluscs, crustaceans, and other marine creatures, and notes on cooking".[4] It was a 126-page tract produced on a stencil duplicator and published in 1963. The British cooking guru Elizabeth David gave it a good review in The Spectator and introduced Davidson to Jill Norman, her editor at Penguin Books; in 1972 Penguin published his Mediterranean Seafood, described by his biographer Paul Levy as "a revolutionary combination of scientific taxonomy along with the vernacular names of the fish, visual illustrations of them, and recipes for cooking them". Within four years the book had become "a classic", according to The Times: "a masterly combination of reference book and cook book with a beautifully illustrated and annotated catalogue of fish, plus a collection of remarkable recipes".[5] Further books on the same lines followed, much of the information in them supplied by Davidson's diplomatic contacts: Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos (1975), Seafood of South-East Asia (1976), and North Atlantic Seafood (1979), all of which went through several editions.[1]
In 1978 Davidson contracted with
In 1979 Davidson and his wife set up a publishing company, Prospect Books, to reprint rare cookery books.[2] They also started a magazine, Petits Propos Culinaires "the first serious periodical dealing with food history" (Levy).[1] In the same year Davidson was Alistair Horne Research Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford. He convened a symposium on food history, in partnership with Theodore Zeldin, which grew into an annual event known since 1981 as the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.[2]
The Oxford Companion took Davidson twenty years to complete. It ran to a million words on 892 pages.[1][6] There were contributions from more than fifty writers,[7] but most of the book was written by Davidson.[1] Elizabeth David, like the Davidsons, lived in Chelsea, and she made her extensive library available to him. Through her he met her favoured specialist booksellers in London and New York who helped him add to his knowledge.[8] When the Companion was published in 1999 The New York Times called it "The publishing event of the year, if not the decade", and The New Statesman said, "… the best food reference work ever to appear in the English language … read it and be dazzled."[9]
Davidson died on 2 December 2003 at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, of heart failure, aged 79; he was survived by his wife and their three daughters.[1][2]
Recognition
Davidson accepted the award of the
In March 2010
Publications
- Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean, 1963 OCLC 44835703
- Mediterranean Seafood, 1972 ISBN 0140461744
- Seafood of South-east Asia, 1976, revised edition 2003, ISBN 1-903018-23-4
- Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos, 1975, ISBN 0-907325-95-5
- North Atlantic Seafood, 1980, ISBN 978-1-58008-450-5
- Oxford Symposium on National and Regional Styles of Cookery, editor, 1981
- ISBN 0-907325-02-5
- Food in Motion: the migration of foodstuffs and cookery techniques: proceedings, editor, 1983
- On Fasting and Feasting: a personal collection of favourite writings on food and eating, 1988, ISBN 978-0-356-15637-8
- Seafood: a connoisseur's guide and cookbook, 1989, ISBN 0-85533-752-4
- A Kipper with my Tea: selected food essays, 1990, ISBN 978-0-333-47408-2
- The Cook's Room: a celebration of the heart of the home, 1991, ISBN 978-0-86824-456-3
- Fruit: a connoisseur's guide and cookbook, 1991, ISBN 0-85533-903-9
- Something Quite Big, 1993, ISBN 0-907325-51-3. (+ private copies printed in Bangkok, 1972)
- ISBN 0-19-280681-5
- Trifle, 2001, with Helen Saberi, ISBN 1-903018-19-6
- The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: twenty years of the best food writing from the journal "Petits Propos Culinaires" , editor,' with Helen Saberi, 2002, ISBN 1-58008-417-6
- The Penguin Companion to Food, 2000, ISBN 0-14-200163-5
References and sources
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Levy, Paul. "Davidson, Alan Eaton (1924–2003), diplomatist and food historian", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2007. Retrieved 16 June 2020 (subscription or UK public library membership required)
- ^ a b c d e "Alan Davidson", The Times, 4 December 2003, p. 40
- ^ Springate, M. D. M. "Lives Remembered: Alan Davidson", The Times, 9 January 2004, p. 48
- OCLC 44835703
- ^ Baker, Roger. "Food", The Times, 6 May 1976, p. 10
- ^ Davidson, p. 892
- ^ Davidson, "Contributors", unnumbered introductory page
- ^ Davidson, "Introduction", unnumbered introductory page
- ^ Quoted on the dust jacket of the Companion
- ^ "Television and radio", The Times, 17 March 2010, p. 56
Sources
- Davidson, Alan (1999). The Oxford Companion to Food. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19211579-0.