05 Sep 2012 00:47:10
In the 1960s, while working for the Foreign Office in Tunis, Davidson produced "a fairly primitive roneo'd booklet" to help his British friends identify fish in the local markets and restaurants. Elizabeth David later sent it to an editor at Penguin who commissioned Davidson to write Mediterranean Seafood, published in 1972. A revised edition (which appeared just before the author's death in 2003) and North Atlantic Seafood (1979) are now culinary classics, despite the author's modest self-description as an "amateur". Like his original booklet, they are handbooks, beginning with a multi-lingual catalogue of fish, crustaceans and molluscs. The second half of both books consists of recipes, listed according to country. Mediterranean Seafood, written in Tunisia, contains recipes for everything from the Andalucian "soup of the dead" to Maltese turtle stew and hammerhead shark ("the flesh was excellent"). All are liberally seasoned with classical allusions, such as Oppian on the "cunning art" of the crab. Erudite, entertaining and always mouth-watering.
