Alan Davidson (food writer)

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Alan Eaton Davidson (March 30, 1924 – December 2, 2003) was a British diplomat and historian best known for his writing and editing on food and gastronomy. He was the author of the 900-page, encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Food (1999).

The son of a Scottish tax inspector, Davidson was born in Northern Ireland. He studied classical languages at Oxford. During World War II, he served in the Royal Navy.

In 1948, Davidson joined the Foreign Office and served in diplomatic posts in Washington, Tunis, Brussels, Cairo, the Hague; from 1973 to 1975, he was ambassador to Laos. While living in Tunis, his wife asked him to look for a cookbook on fish because she did not recognize any of the local varieties. Not being able to find one he wrote one himself together with an Italian ichthyologist who happened to be visiting. The original manuscript was copied with a stencil machine. A copy of Seafish Of Tunisia And The Central Mediterranean reached the British cooking guru Elizabeth David, who passed it on to Penguin Books, which published it in 1972 as Mediterranean Seafood. The book has since become a standard reference work, and is characterized by its creative mixture of biology and recipes.

This was followed by Seafood Of South East Asia (1979) and North Atlantic Seafood (1979), for which he travelled throughout the region, gathering thousands of recipes from Portugal to Iceland. He was a noted expert on Lao cuisine, which he introduced to the West through his two books, Traditional Recipes of Laos, and Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos.

Davidson was the founder in 1979, and long-time editor of Petits Propos Culinaires, a journal of food studies and history, published by Prospect Books, which he also founded in 1979; and also the founder and organizer of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery.

[edit] Bibliography

Mediterranean seafood, 1972
Fish and fish dishes of Laos, 1975. ISBN 0-907325-95-5
Seafood of South-east Asia, 1977. Revised ed. 2003. ISBN 1-903018-23-4
North Atlantic seafood, 1980
editor, Oxford Symposium on National & Regional Styles of Cookery, 1981
editor, Phia Sing: Traditional Recipes of Laos, 1981. Illustrated by Soun Vannithone. ISBN 0-907325-02-5
editor, Food in motion: the migration of foodstuffs and cookery techniques: proceedings, 1983
On fasting and feasting: a personal collection of favourite writings on food and eating, 1988
Seafood: a connoisseur’s guide and cookbook, 1989. Illustrated by Charlotte Knox. ISBN 0-85533-752-4
A kipper with my tea: selected food essays, 1990
The Cook’s room: a celebration of the heart of the home, 1991
Fruit: a connoisseur’s guide and cookbook, 1991. Illustrated by Charlotte Knox. ISBN 0-85533-903-9
The Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford, 1999; 2nd ed. by Tom Jaine, 2006. ISBN 0-19-280681-5
editor with Helen Saberi, The wilder shores of gastronomy: twenty years of the best food writing from the journal Petits Propos Culinaires, 2002. ISBN 1-58008-417-6
editor, Petits Propos Culinaires (periodical), 1979– , ISSN 0142-4857.