Elizabeth David Made Me Gay

A cuisine of sensory arousal was the taste of my liberation.

As a young woman raised in Sussex the future Elizabeth David, author of some of the finest books on food of the 20th century, fiercely resisted the class she was delivered into and many of the things that came with it: her Tory MP father and titled mother; nannies who forced her to eat nasty stewed rhubarb to regulate her bowels; Swiss boarding school. In London she became an actor of no distinction. She ran away with a broke stagehand, Charles Gibson Cowan, a communist. With Elizabeth’s money they bought a decrepit boat, the Evelyn Hope. They crossed the Channel in 1939 to troll the rivers and canals of France, fucking and eating beautiful food in the countryside all the way to Marseille: bargemen’s mussels steamed on boats, rabbit cooked in stiff local wine, tomato salads shiny with oil, each with the heavy taste of deliverance.

When word arrived in September 1939 that France and Britain were at war with Germany they fled east, dodging Axis boats at night in open water. Eventually they docked on a small Greek island hoping to hide, but Cowan was determined to return to France with the Evelyn Hope. Elizabeth stayed behind. As the Nazis closed in she made it to Alexandria on a small merchant boat. Once in Cairo, she landed a job for the duration of the war with the British Ministry of Culture. 

In London again after the armistice she made a marriage of convenience with Tony David, a bland, affable businessman. The Davids settled in India, where Tony had interests. Elizabeth hated it. One the eve of Indian independence they returned to England. 

They bought a large row house on Halsey Street in Knightsbridge, London. Both had quiet affairs, Elizabeth with men and women both. Tony spent less and less time on Halsey Street, until he and Elizabeth together decided he should drift away for good. Elizabeth painted Halsey Street’s cavernous kitchen pink and installed a large old pine table around which she cooked, received visitors for lunches that would span several hours and many bottles, and wrote books and articles for three decades.

In an essay from the 1960s, David recalled the moment in 1948 she sat down to write A Book of Mediterranean Food, when wartime food rationing was still on, and the British public didn’t seem to mind their industrial cuisine of cheap, starchy substitutes: sausages stretched with pea powder, gravy stirred up from flour and the stink water left over from boiling cabbage. “Hardly knowing what I was doing,” she recalled, “I who had scarcely ever put pen to paper…started to work out an agonized craving for the sun and a furious revolt against [England’s] terrible, cheerless, heartless food by writing down descriptions of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking. Even to write words like apricot, olives and butter, rice and lemons, oil and almonds, produced assuagement.”

She turned rage into writing: all of the forbidden things that the cold, repressive, mendacious northern world around her would not allow to be expressed, ingredients and flavors almost completely unavailable in Britain after the war. David wrote about them as if it were a lie that they couldn’t exist in the cold north; she wrote as if there were no practical barriers to achieving honesty, to life as a condition of perpetual arousal for primal pleasures.

“Provence is a country to which I am always returning,” David wrote in French Provincial Cooking, “next week, next year, any day now, as soon as I can get on a train. Here in London, it is an effort of will to believe in the existence of such a place at all. But now and again the vision of golden tiles on a round southern roof, or of some warm, stony, herb-scented hillside will rise out of my kitchen pots with the smell of a piece of orange peel scenting a beef stew.”

I knew this vision David describes, and her rage—recognized it as the heat and color of my own secret and implacable desires.

At nineteen, in my second year at UC Berkeley, I applied for a study abroad program in the UK, hoping to spend my junior year in London. I was assigned instead to the University of Stirling, a public college on the grounds of Airthrey Castle in the Scottish Midlands. It felt like the coldest and most northerly place in the world, austere, beautiful, and dull: drizzly woods near a town of bleak stone, car parks, and a bland castle; a high street of trolley-toting nans.