David’s books are suffused with references to picnics. She could be informal or according to her whims, something she adopted from her youth, which she wrote about in
Summer Cooking, “Picnic addicts [like herself] seem to be roughly divided between those who frankly make elaborate preparations and leave nothing to chance, and those others whose organization is no less complicated but who are more deceitful and pretend that everything will be obtained on the spot and cooked over a woodcutter’s fire conveniently at hand.”
At a childhood picnic, she remembered being led through a formal garden, across the lane, and over a fence into a wood, followed close behind by a butler, chauffeur, and footman carrying fine china, silver flatware, tablecloths, and prepared dishes of cold chicken, jellies and trifles. For the children, there was an open fire, already stocked by the gardener, at which the children grilled quantities of sausages and bacon. For a picnic in France just after the end of World War II, she shopped at local stores: olives, anchovies, salami sausages, pâtés, yards of bread, smoked fish, fruit, cheese, and “cheap red wine.”
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David’s books are suffused with references to picnics. She could be informal or according to her whims, something she adopted from her youth, which she wrote about in
Summer Cooking, “Picnic addicts [like herself] seem to be roughly divided between those who frankly make elaborate preparations and leave nothing to chance, and those others whose organization is no less complicated but who are more deceitful and pretend that everything will be obtained on the spot and cooked over a woodcutter’s fire conveniently at hand.”
At a childhood picnic, she remembered being led through a formal garden, across the lane, and over a fence into a wood, followed close behind by a butler, chauffeur, and footman carrying fine china, silver flatware, tablecloths, and prepared dishes of cold chicken, jellies and trifles. For the children, there was an open fire, already stocked by the gardener, at which the children grilled quantities of sausages and bacon. For a picnic in France just after the end of World War II, she shopped at local stores: olives, anchovies, salami sausages, pâtés, yards of bread, smoked fish, fruit, cheese, and “cheap red wine.”
See Elizabeth David. Summer Cooking. London: Penguin Books Ltd,1955 revised 1965