Contains delightful explorations of food and cooking, among which are the collection's namesake essay and many other gems; with black-and-white photographs and illustrations.

Others can rightly claim credit for making French cooking—and other foreign cuisines—part of our popular culinary idiom. But it was Elizabeth David who convinced us that it was all right to care about cooking as a serious thing, because she herself did so with a discrimination as fine and as passionate as any we ourselves had just been learning to make over such things as The Waste Land or The Wings of the Dove. No one before or after Elizabeth David has quite this same sensual fineness of understanding. It springs, I think, from perfect culinary pitch. Even if you have never tried one of her recipes, you sense this in the clarity of her prose. . . . Delicately, nicely, with exact rightness, she works each food, each flavor, into simple dishes, leaving each of us not only wiser but with a gently shared sense of physical release. It is this that gives each page its vital tension, and her books their sense of purely private quest. —John Thorne, from his Foreword