Readers of this revised edition of The Oxford Companion to Food may know little of the author of the vast majority of its entries, Alan Davidson. Alan died in 2003; not before making plans of his own for improvements and alterations to his book but, sadly, with little time to implement them.
Alan was born in 1924, the son of an inspector of taxes and proud of his Scottish forebears. He was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Queen’s College, Oxford, where he took a double first in classics. His time at university was interrupted by military service in the Royal Navy RNVR, first as an ordinary seaman, later a lieutenant, in the Pacific, the North Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. He somewhat shamefacedly recalled slicing a whale in two when officer of the watch aboard the aircraft carrier Formidable. ‘Left-hand down a bit,’ doesn’t work with large boats at full bore. Perhaps his fish books were a penance for this accident.
A man of his qualifications was a perfect match for the Foreign Office which he joined once down from Oxford in 1948. His career path took in Washington, The Hague, Cairo, Tunis, Brussels (where he was Head of Chancery of the British Delegation to NATO), and, finally, Laos, to which he was Ambassador 1973–5.
From the outset of adult life, Alan had written for pleasure and very occasional profit. His earliest squibs were humorous, some published in Punch magazine, and of course his diplomatic life allowed full rein to the composition of graceful, if formal, memoranda and reports. During his stay as Head of Chancery to the British Mission in Tunis in 1961, however, his wife Jane found herself understandably muddled by the various names proffered for one sort of fish or another in the local markets and he promised to compile a list. Even an Oxford man cannot summon such knowledge out of the ether and he was fortunate in the arrival of the Italian Professor Georgio Bini, the world’s greatest living authority on seafish in the Mediterranean, as part of an official delegation to discuss the irrepressible dynamiting of their catch by Sicilian fishermen in the Gulf of Tunis: a method more rapid than discerning. As the negotiations were long and largely political, Bini (no politician) was able to instruct Alan in elementary ichthyology. Out of these lessons, Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean was born. Published by Alan himself in 1963, it was shortly followed by Snakes and Scorpions Found in the Land of Tunisia. At that stage, his passion seemed to be for taxonomy, not fish dinners.
A colleague who had known the food writer Elizabeth David when she was working in wartime Cairo sent her a copy of the fish book which she reviewed in her column for the weekly magazine the Spectator. From this first contact flowed the process of its conversion from pamphlet to the full-blown work Mediterranean Seafood published by Penguin Books in 1972. This quite brilliant book combined the accurate physical description of fish and shellfish with notes of their various names in countries and localities all round the Mediterranean and recipes drawn from friends, family, diplomatic contacts, and well-reputed cookery books (often locally published and unknown to a British readership). The most important ingredients in this heady mix were a light touch, an impish humour, and a perfectly balanced, yet formal style of writing. It has remained in print ever since first appearing.
Alan’s first book was followed by two more in the same vein: Seafood of South East Asia in 1976 and North Atlantic Seafood in 1979. Meanwhile, his posting to Laos had permitted him to write Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos in 1975 and to begin work on Traditional Recipes of Laos, published in 1981.
The success of Mediterranean Seafood and a growing impatience with the formalities of diplomacy caused Alan to retire early from the Foreign Office in 1976 and turn to full-time writing with a particular interest in food. It was at this juncture that he approached the Oxford University Press with the scheme for this volume. Once contracts had been exchanged, the work would occupy him for the next twenty years. He recorded its completion in a gesture typical of his sense of fun: ‘Alan and Jane Davidson announce with great pleasure the safe delivery of The Oxford Companion to Food to the Oxford University Press at 1055 on Tuesday 21 July 1998.… Days overdue: 5674. Weight on delivery: 3 oz [it was, of course, a computer disc].’
Reasons for the long gestation of the book were many. It was more ambitious than most such works, for it not only took in the description of a multiplicity of foodstuffs, but tackled the history of food and eating habits in many countries as well as surveying cookery literature and discussing in some detail aspects of food and dietary science. All the while, Alan was pursuing other strands of his career. He was writing books and articles and, more importantly perhaps, he was publishing them under his own imprint of Prospect Books. He founded the company, in partnership with his wife, to allow the publication of a food studies journal Petits Propos Culinaires as well as to reprint important early English cookery books and issue new titles about unfamiliar foodways.
Serious work on food, food history, and cookery had little status and a small following in both the world of learning and the world at large in the 1970s. This is not to diminish the achievements of scholars, cooks, and writers of earlier decades, merely to acknowledge that they occupied an intellectual no man’s land. In terms of Great Britain, Alan’s enthusiasm for the subject proved galvanic. His own books, his initiatives at Prospect (for instance the series of historical bibliographies of English cookery and domestic literature), and especially his organizing (with the historian Theodore Zeldin) of the annual Symposia on Food and Food History at St Antony’s College, Oxford, from 1981, attracted many new recruits, encouraged those already at work, and afforded a platform for discussion and international co-operation. Some of the fruits of his labours are harvested in this present volume; see for instance the many references in the bibliography to papers given at St Antony’s and articles contributed to Petits Propos Culinaires.
When the Companion saw the light of day on both sides of the Atlantic, it was welcomed with unreserved enthusiasm. People recognized it as unique: a book of reference, indeed often of record, which managed to speak with a human voice, in tones so singular that none could replicate them. It drew together many disciplines: the organic sciences, history, ethnology, literary studies. It allowed equal status to all nations, all styles of cooking, all foods, and both genders of the human race. It neither devalued the simple task of washing-up, nor larded the esoterica of gastronomy with more respect than they merited. Alan wrote as he was: which is to say that the well-educated Briton of a certain era is on show in many of the entries he composed. But, simultaneously, they also expose a Briton of remarkable sensibility, infinite tact, and profound good will. Reasons, perhaps, why a casual glance at the Companion often turns into a marathon of browsing.
Towards the end of his life, Alan received many honours from his peers and admirers both here and abroad. Not least was the award in 2003 of the Erasmus Prize – Holland’s most prestigious intellectual recognition – for his role in encouraging the study of food history. The charm of the man, his radical attraction, was his innocent delight in the honour, combined with an inability to presume any claim upon it.
The judges in Amsterdam had perceived correctly that Alan’s contribution was wider than merely British concerns. He was equally at home among scientists and chefs at their periodic conferences exploring the furthest boundaries of culinary chemistry at Erice on Sicily, as seated round a table with French intellectuals of the deepest hue speculating on the dietary preferences of seventeenth-century Europe. His interest in food matters coincided with a burgeoning enthusiasm elsewhere and his deprecation of exclusivity and intellectual boundaries meant he was willing to engage with a tremendous variety of scholars. Amateurs, too, and the occasional light infantry of culinary investigation such as diplomats or soldiers in post, or neighbours and fellow residents of Chelsea, were liable to be recruited to the task in hand, whether providing information on current practice or searching out a local variation to a recipe or kitchen custom.
I, like so many others, found his rigorous curiosity (he was a stickler for exactitude) infectious. I first met Alan after sending him a pamphlet on fish cookery of my own composition in 1980. He was an obvious complementary candidate because we had tested his own books almost to destruction in our restaurant kitchen on the quayside at Dartmouth in Devon. Thereafter, his work and his approach have been my models, though sensing keenly that I may aspire to, but perhaps may never reach their rarefied heights.
TOM JAINE
December 2005