Book of a Lifetime: The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson

Battered and dog-eared, my copy of this hefty tome has suffered more wear than any other reference work on my shelves. My near-daily exploration of its 892 pages is usually prompted by the need for information on a certain topic but I am always distracted by neighbouring temptations.

Look up the entry, for example, on Egypt (a culinary paradise if you like beans and pickled turnip). You may also find yourself musing on elevenses (“it is necessary to heed the warning given by the expiring Henry King that elevenses should not be allowed to attain the status of meals”) and emmenthal, whose makers insist, “Anyone can make the holes, but only the Swiss can make the cheese.”

Far more entertaining, addictive and idiosyncratic than any reference book has a right to be, The Oxford Companion to Food involved “7,250 days of gestation”, according to Alan Davidson. With the exception of entries by a few dozen specialists, he wrote the entire work. Davidson was a career diplomat whose food sideline began when he produced a guide to local fish during a posting in Tunis. Subsequently expanded, it became his classic, Mediterranean Seafood. While ambassador in Laos, he wrote Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos, an unlikely project in a landlocked country.

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The same quirky spirit imbues Davidson’s magnum opus. Though he tackles staple foods with great thoroughness, it sometimes feels that his real interest lies with gastronomic oddities. He collected some of the more outre entries, including geophagy (eating earth), sea cucumber and son-of-a-bitch stew (“a cowboy dish of unusual character”) – in The (much) Abridged Oxford Companion to Food. The more solemn sort of foodie deprecates Davidson’s playfulness, characterised by his entry for an Australian fruit also known as ooray: “As one would expect from its generic name, it is excellent.”

A more justifiable criticism applies to the handful of errors that crept into his massive work. The entry on pork pie declares that Melton Mowbray pies have “an attractive pink colour, while pies from other districts were brownish or greyish”. In fact, the reverse is true. Still, a few blemishes are a small price to pay for a work that is so engaging on such an epic scale.

Davidson followed his masterpiece with a book co-written with Helen Saberi, Trifle a consideration of the great English dessert. Sadly, he died before completing a work on another topic of profound interest to him. “I’m planning a book of essays about actresses in the screwball comedies of the Thirties,” Davidson told me. A hint of what we missed can be seen in the entry on Colbert sauce in the companion: “One can hardy suppress a yawn on learning that the name was that of a French statesman, whose chef gave his name to a sauce [rather than] Claudette Colbert.”