Food & drink special: When Michael met Elizabeth

There's only room for one at the top. And that place is occupied by Elizabeth David. Her reputation stands on a comparatively small amount of work. Her first devastating Mediterranean Cooking, which burst like a firework on the postwar era of rationing (it didn't even mention margarine). Then her two French books, French Provincial Cooking and French Country Cooking. Then Italian Food and Summer Cooking.

She appeals at three levels: to the romantic, in the way she evokes memories of the pleasure of food; to the scientist, in the way she is scholar and researcher; and to the ordinary cook, producing workable recipes explained step by step, with enormous patience, recipes tested and tested again.

She alone among cookery writers can be so aloof as to say of some classic dish, of French onion soup, for example, that she doesn't like it, and therefore won't give the recipe.

Elizabeth David, to meet, is a slender woman, looking younger than her early fifties, shy, graceful, feline. There's something of the goddess about her. A faint trace of the Sarah Bernhardt. Something of a Victorian engraver's study -- this one called Diffidence. She is, in turns, sad, distracted, frail, then breaks into charming laughter, catches a mood of gaiety and pursues a gently mocking line about someone's unusual characteristics.

The archaic English of the English girls' boarding school breaks through. "I was cross as two sticks", "what a fag" and "ghastly disaster". She seldom looks at the person she is speaking to and, like a cat, goes her own way. Sometimes she turns on you and, again like a cat, gives you her rare, fascinated attention. She doesn't like being questioned about herself, and finds the search for answers a strain, forcing out names and dates and places. It's as if to say, what do they matter - lost in the past among dreams and teeming memories of happinesses and unhappinesses? She makes you feel it's wrong to try to call back the past...

She was making bread when I went to see her. She lives in a quiet street in Chelsea, in a house where you wend your way down to the kitchen, the key room, of course, sunk deep down, right at the back. There's an impression of confusion, but only an impression. Everything has a deliberate place and Mrs David is constantly putting things back. The bread was to be photographed for an advertising pamphlet. "No, not advertising bread -- advertising vodka, actually. But they pay off on the nail, which is jolly. Unlike editors."

She smokes a lot; the strong-flavoured Gauloise. "It's a fairly disgusting habit. I tried eating sweets instead, but all I managed to do was dislodge several very expensive fillings. And so I started again."

I ask her about her writing. "I don't like writing. Writing doesn't come easily to me. It gets more and more difficult. I do a lot of work -- you should see what I don't use. I'm very interested in my new kitchen equipment shop. I've started it with two friends. I want to get out of writing. I can't do all the work. I can't do all the research I need to do for it. But I don't want to have to depend on writing. I don't want to be writing little bits about how to cook haddock when I'm 70.

"When I write I find I can say what I please. You're restricted by time really. There's so much you want to find out. You're not really qualified to write about things unless you see them from the start. I mean, milk the cows, see the wheat being ground.

"I don't copy recipes without trying them out. I don't reprint without trying them again. It's the sort of trap people fall into. The sort of thing that happens when people translate, other people copy it, and it didn't occur to them to give some detail that seems obvious to them. When it says sausagemeat they don't mean English sausagemeat which is half bread and rusk. In France and Italy it is pure pork. An awful lot of people think it's easy to lift recipes out."

When she speaks her mind, she's liable to get into trouble. "I once said it was better not to use soup cubes, and Oxo took it as personal. Would I withdraw, the editor asked me? I said no. I don't believe you can. Stock cubes, I don't know. I think it's a few chicken bones and lots of monosodium glutamate." Being shown over a factory didn't alter her strong views.

Indeed, the only other thing any other cookery writer has against her is the fact that she is so critical of English foods so often. She says it's not true, and that she's writing a book of English cookery.

One thinks of Elizabeth David as the pinnacle of perfection, never going wrong.

"No. Of course I make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. But what goes wrong really when you're putting a meal together? Panic. You should have raspberries. There aren't any. Somebody's husband is not going to be happy without potatoes. Put some French beans in. Already you are overloaded. It destroys you, it destroys the meal. And don't forget, for a cookery writer giving someone a meal is pretty nightmarish. I don't care, but if someone goes away and says, all I got was a pork chop... so what do you do if they don't enjoy a pork chop and a salad?" s

The full version of this interview can be found in the book 'Cooking People', a series of interviews and profiles of food personalities by Michael Bateman