INSCRIBED TO GEORGE LASSALLE
English Bread and Yeast Cookery
Lane, 1977.
First edition. Original heather boards with gilt titles and vignette on the spine in a pictorial dustwrapper featuring an adapted advertisement for Webb's Flour, c.1910. Pictorial endpapers with illustrations by Lady Llanover from her 'Good Cookery' (1867). Author's presentation copy, inscribed "For George with love / E.D" on the half title and signed again by the author over her own name on the title page. Twenty four monochrome photographic plates and illustrated throughout with fine-line drawings by Wendy Jones. A very good copy indeed, with some pushing to the spine head and tail, in a very good dustwrapper, with some staining to the top edge, spanning both covers.
Hailed as a 'masterpiece of scholarship', this book took David five years to research and write. The following year, the book won her the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year Award.
David and Lassalle first met around 1940 in Ciaro where Lassalle was stationed as an intelligence officer. They had a brief affair, which was rekindled after the war. In 1946, David and Lassalle visited Ross-on-Wye together, where Lassalle encouraged David to commit to writing her distate for British cooking and the food they had been served under post-war rationing. Spurred by her lover's suggestion, her abhorrance at the tastes of the nation, and her reminiscences of the food she'd eaten in France, Greece, and Egypt, her musings became the foundation of her first published book, 'A Book of Mediterranean Food' (1950). This copy's charming association hints to Lasalle's continued closeness to and influence on David and her work.
Given to George Lassalle by the author.
Stock ID: 47104
£2,250.00
