Favourite food books: Linda Herrick

It was Elizabeth David who breathed the sunkissed warmth of the Mediterranean into Britain's cold, mean, post-war kitchens, where a fresh egg was like gold and olive oil unheard of. David's enthusiasm for fresh ingredients, her tart humour and elegant writing in magazines and papers such as the Spectator, Punch and the Sunday Times helped revolutionise English cooking, and her books are now classics which are often available in bookshops as reprints or via Amazon.

Summer Cooking, first published in 1955 — gosh, 50 years ago — is still a delight to read, even if some of the recipes now seem quaint. Kidney omelette or cold pigeon fillets with cherries? But you do love her when she ntroduces the chapter on salads and hors d'oeuvres: "How one learns to dread the season for salads in England ... what makes an English cook think that beetroot spreading its hideous purple dye over a sardine and a spoonful of tinned baked beans constitutes an hors d'oeuvres?"

One of the lovely things about the book — I have the 1977 edition — is its delicate drawings by Adrian Daintrey, and most of the recipes still apply as they are French, Spanish and Italian standards.

The final two chapters, on Improvised Cooking for Holidays and Weekends, and Picnics, are nostalgic hoots. On holiday, she writes, food should be simple and "ought to provide a change from all-the-year-round dishes". She reminisces about a picnic near Marseilles just before World War II and presents Mrs Beeton's "Bill of Fare for a Picnic for 40 Persons". "Water," advises Mrs B, "can usually be obtained so it is useless to take it."

How things have changed.

Speaking of Mrs Beeton, I'd like to get a copy of The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, by Kathryn Hughes, which came out in Britain this year but isn't available here yet.

It seems the doyenne of domesticity was a journalist who entered marriage with no cooking skills and wrote her Book of Household Management to try and introduce order into her less-than-ideal marriage. She had numerous miscarriages, her husband probably gave her syphilis and she died at the age of 28 — yet her book became a housewife's bible.

A dear favourite is Clementine in the Kitchen, by Samuel Chamberlain, published in the Modern Library Food series edited by Ruth Reichl. This is a 2001 reprint of the book first published in 1948 about the Burgundian gastronomic adventures of the American Beck family (the Chamberlains) in the years leading up to the war.

The services of their cook, the "smiling, pink-cheeked" Clementine proved a godsend, and when the drums of war became deafening, the Becks and Clementine took themselves back to New England where she had to adapt to the American way of life — and cooking.

Filled with engaging line drawings, anecdotes and Clementine's superb recipes, this book is a little treasure. There is even a recipe for snails in butter and garlic. First, take four dozen snails ... and there are plenty of them in my garden.