How Elizabeth David changed the way we eat

This month 100 years ago, the British food writer, Elizabeth David, was born.

You might not care about food writers anymore, now that all the chefs are on the telly, swearing, shouting, licking, primping, like bulls in china shops and soap-opera coquettes. The food gets lost among all the personalities, the gloss, the retouching, the camera angles, the dizzying private lives.

But where would we be without Elizabeth David? Still eating boiled nursery food, that’s where. She’s long dead — her last meal, in 1992, was a bottle of chablis and a plate of caviar — but many of us remember what it was like before her radical cook books influenced the dinner plates of ordinary people in Britain and Ireland.