The Cook's Room: A Celebration of the Heart of the Home
(A collection of essays and illustrations by an internatio...)
A collection of essays and illustrations by an international group of food writers evoke the atmosphere of home kitchens around the globe and describe the different cooking methods of local chefs.
(The Oxford Companion to Food is an encyclopedia about foo...)
The Oxford Companion to Food is an encyclopedia about food. It was edited by Alan Davidson and published by Oxford University Press in 1999. It was also issued in softcover under the name The Penguin Companion to Food. The second and third editions were edited by Tom Jaine and published by Oxford in 2006 and 2014.
(Trifles have been a perennial of English summer lunches, ...)
Trifles have been a perennial of English summer lunches, tennis parties, and schoolboy dreams of plenty. The authors trace their origins to the earliest recipe of 1596 and its gradual transformation from a merely cooked cream to the many-layered custardy extravagance we know today. far and wide, for example, returning home with trifles from Laos, America, Australasia, Mexico, Eritrea, South Africa, Afghanistan, Malta, and even Norway, where Veiled Maidens are all the rage at teatime. The resulting recipes, handy tips, and historical speculation amount to a ladleful of wit and amusement. Relaxing after the labors of the Oxford Companion to Food, the late Alan Davidson and his trusty lieutenant of the last years of its compilation, Helen Saberi, turned their spotlight on trifle.
Alan Davidson was a British diplomat, historian, and author. His passion for food and its history led him to write indispensable works on seafood and to edit the comprehensive Oxford Companion to Food.
Background
Alan Eaton Davidson was born on March 30, 1924, in Londonderry, United Kingdom. He was the son of a Scottish tax inspector, William John Davidson, and Constance Davidson. His family traveled around the United Kingdom because of his father's job, but they eventually settled in Leeds.
Education
Davidson attended Leeds Grammar School in Leeds. His studies in the classics at Queen's College, Oxford, were interrupted in 1943 by service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, which he left as a lieutenant in 1946 after seeing action in the Pacific, North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Alan earned a master's degree from Queen's College, Oxford, in 1948.
Alan Eaton Davidson joined the British Diplomatic Service in 1948. Working for the Foreign Office, Davidson was given assignments all over the world, including Washington, D.C., the Hague, Cairo, and Tunis. In 1967, he was made head of the Central Department of Foreign Office, and from 1968 to 1971 Davidson served in Brussels as head of the chancery of the British delegation to NATO.
After serving a year as head of the Defense Department of Foreign and Commonwealth Office, he spent his last few years in the Foreign Office as British ambassador to Laos. It was while stationed in Tunis that Davidson first became interested in the science of food. His wife was having difficulties making sense of all the different names that were given to the same species of fish, and so he decided to study the subject. The result was Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean, a pamphlet that became the basis for his first book, Mediterranean Seafood (1972). The book was a first of its kind, combining the science of taxonomy with the field of cooking in a guide that proved extremely helpful to cooks and chefs working with foods from around the world. The success of his debut led to other seafood books, including Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos (1975) and North Atlantic Seafood (1979).
Leaving government work behind in 1975, Davidson concentrated on research and writing about the history, language, and science of food, publishing such works as Science in the Kitchen (1982), A Kipper with My Tea (1990), Fruit: A Connoisseur's Guide and Cookbook (1991).
With his wife, in the late 1970s, he also founded the small-press culinary magazine Petits Propos Culinaires. Its hospitable pages found room for topics as diverse as food in the works of Chekhov and the fine points of making trifle, Davidson's favorite dessert, which also became the subject of a book, 'Trifle' (2001), written with Helen Saberi. A collection of essays from the quarterly was published in 2001 under the title The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy.
From 1982 to 2000, he was managing director of Prospect Books. By the 1980s, Davidson was widely recognized as a food authority, a position that was solidified by his work in founding the Oxford Symposium on Food in 1981 and by the publication of the authoritative reference work The Oxford Companion to Food (1999), which contains more than a million words, many of them written by Mr. Davidson himself in entries on topics as varied as pohickory, an American Indian beverage, and the iguana considered as food.
Also the author of a satirical thriller titled Something Quite Big (1993), Davidson was at work on a book about American screwball comedies of the 1930s at the time of his death.
A sense of whimsy, an elegant writing style, and a detective's nose for clues set Davidson well apart from the common run of food writers. His three major works on seafood combined tireless research with a rich appreciation of the history and ethnography of foods and food culture, qualities on display in his magisterial Oxford Companion to Food.
Connections
Alan married Jane Macatee. The couple had three daughters: Caroline, Jennifer, and Pamela.