300px|thumb|upright=1.5|alt=elderly, clean-shaven white man with full head of longish hair|Alan Davidson ([[Erasmus Prize 2003)]]

Alan Eaton Davidson CMG (30 March 1924 – 2 December 2003) was a British diplomat and writer best known for his writing and editing on food and gastronomy.

After leaving Queen's College, Oxford, in 1948, Davidson joined the British diplomatic service, rising through the ranks to conclude his career as ambassador to Laos, from 1973 to 1975. He retired early and devoted himself to full-time writing about food, encouraged by Elizabeth David and others. He published more than a dozen books between his retirement and 2002, but his magnum opus was The Oxford Companion to Food, a work of more than a million words, which took twenty years to complete and was published to international acclaim in 1999.

Life and career

Early years

Davidson was born in Derry, Northern Ireland, the son of William John Davidson (1899–1959), inspector of taxes, and his wife, Constance, née Eaton (1889–1974). He was brought up in Leeds in the north-east of England, where he attended Leeds Grammar School. His higher education was interrupted by the Second World War, during which he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an ordinary seaman and saw wartime and post-war service in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific, ending the war as a commissioned officer. In 1946 he returned to England to complete his interrupted education at Queen's College, Oxford, where he took a double first in classical moderations and Greats in 1948.|

Davidson took early retirement from the diplomatic service at the age of 51 in 1975. It was a 126-page tract produced on a stencil duplicator and published in 1963. The British cooking guru Elizabeth David gave it a good review in The Spectator and introduced Davidson to Jill Norman, her editor at Penguin Books; in 1972 Penguin published his Mediterranean Seafood, described by his biographer Paul Levy as "a revolutionary combination of scientific taxonomy along with the vernacular names of the fish, visual illustrations of them, and recipes for cooking them". Within four years the book had become "a classic", according to The Times: "a masterly combination of reference book and cook book with a beautifully illustrated and annotated catalogue of fish, plus a collection of remarkable recipes". Further books on the same lines followed, much of the information in them supplied by Davidson's diplomatic contacts: Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos (1975), Seafood of South-East Asia (1976), and North Atlantic Seafood (1979), all of which went through several editions. They also started a magazine, Petits Propos Culinaires "the first serious periodical dealing with food history" (Levy). There were contributions from more than fifty writers, but most of the book was written by Davidson. When the Companion was published in 1999 The New York Times called it "The publishing event of the year, if not the decade", and The New Statesman said, "… the best food reference work ever to appear in the English language … read it and be dazzled."

Davidson died on 2 December 2003 at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, London, of heart failure, aged 79; he was survived by his wife and their three daughters.

Publications

  • Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean, 1963
  • Mediterranean Seafood, 1972
  • Seafood of South-east Asia, 1976, revised edition 2003,
  • Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos, 1975,
  • North Atlantic Seafood, 1980,
  • Oxford Symposium on National and Regional Styles of Cookery, editor, 1981
  • Phia Sing: Traditional Recipes of Laos, editor, 1981,
  • Food in Motion: the migration of foodstuffs and cookery techniques: proceedings, editor, 1983
  • On Fasting and Feasting: a personal collection of favourite writings on food and eating, 1988,
  • Seafood: a connoisseur's guide and cookbook, 1989,
  • 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,
  • Something Quite Big, 1993, . (+ private copies printed in Bangkok, 1972)
  • Oxford Companion to Food, 1999, . 2nd edition 2006
  • Trifle, 2001, with Helen Saberi,
  • The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy: twenty years of the best food writing from the journal "Petits Propos Culinaires" , editor,' with Helen Saberi, 2002,
  • The Penguin Companion to Food, 2000,

References and sources

References

Sources

  • Obituary (in The Guardian)
  • Alan Davidson website
  • Petits Propos Culinaires website