Harvest of the Cold Months

A splendid tale of human ingenuity in the service of taste, sedulously researched and told with great flair.'' Loyd GrossmanSunday Times

Author of such cookery classics asItalian FoodandFrench Provincial Cooking, Elizabeth David (1913-1992) found that the literature of cookery, as well as the practical side, was of absorbing interest, and she studied it throughout her life.Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchenwas published in 1970, followed byEnglish Bread and Yeast Cookery, for which she won the Glenfiddich Writer of the Year award, in 1977. At the time of her death in 1992 she was working on this equally epic study of the use of ice, the ice-trade and the early days of refrigeration, which was published posthumously in 1994 asHarvest of the Cold Months.

''An awe-inspiring feat of detective scholarship, the literally marvellous story of how human beings came to ingest lumps of flavoured frozen matter for pleasure ... There is much, much more - about the making and breaking of reputations, the founding of Parisian café culture, the great and rivalrous confectioners of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London, about Russian ice-cream (surprisingly superior) and Persian sherbets ... sumptuous.''Independent on Sunday

''This survey of the use of ice in cookery takes us on a fascinating journey from 1581, where in Florence they put snow in the wine glasses, to that modern phenomenon, the growth of the ice-cream business. A scholarly social history, which makes a fitting finale to the work of the greatest of our writers on foods and its contexts.''Harpers & Queen