By Karen Hall

Staff Writer

Thanks to the 2009 movie "Julie and Julia," starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, a new generation is acquainted with Julia Child, and some, perhaps, have bought "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and started using it.

Two contemporaries of Child's are worth getting to know because they also profoundly influenced the way people cook and eat today.

M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992) and Elizabeth David (1913-1992) were both beautiful women, who led interesting and unconventional lives.

Mary Frances Kennedy was born in Michigan and grew up in California, the daughter of a newspaper editor. You could say her life, especially in relation to food and drink, started in 1929 when she moved to France as a newly wed with her husband Al Fisher. M.F.K. Fisher adored France, and returned to it over and over again, and wrote prolifically about her experiences there.

Elizabeth David was born Elizabeth Gwynne into an upper-middle class family in southern England, but rebelled against the restrictions this imposed on her. She became an actress, though by her own admission not a good one, and left England in 1939 to sail to Greece with her lover. World War II broke out when they were anchored in southern France. They left France, but were caught and interned in Italy, then moved to Greece, and finally to Egypt, where Elizabeth met and married Tony David. She returned to England after the war. All her stored possessions had been destroyed in the bombing of London, rationing was still in force, and everywhere seemed cold and dismal. Perhaps to counteract this, she began to write about food, instead of merely collecting recipes. "A Book of Mediterranean Food" was published in June 1950.

Many of the ingredients in David's recipes were unobtainable in England at the time, but the book was an inspiration. As Jane Grigson said, "Basil was no more than the name of bachelor uncles, courgette was printed in italics as an alien word, and few of us knew how to eat spaghetti or pick a globe artichoke to pieces....Then came Elizabeth David like sunshine, writing with brief elegance about good food, that is, about food well contrived, well cooked. She made us understand that we could do better with what we had."

Fisher's first book was "Serve It Forth," which came out in 1937. In the introduction she writes, "Now I am going to write a book. It will be about eating and about what to eat and about people who eat." She writes about foods of history, as far back as the Greeks and Romans, but she also writes about the food and the people she ate it with during her early trips to France. Fisher's own life and experiences were often the subject of her writing. She occasionally provoked the rage of family and friends by changing the facts to make a better story.

David, on the other hand, says very little about herself. The first pages of "French Provincial Cooking" very poetically describe meals she ate while traveling in France, but nothing of her companions or what she felt about them. Only the dedication, "To P.H. with love" reveals her feelings for long-time lover Peter Higgins.

David and Fisher knew each other's work, of course, and had many mutual friends, including Child, but they never met.

David visited California several times in the '80s, and one year her host tried to arrange for the two renowned authors to meet.

David was unenthusiastic, according to biographer Artemis Cooper, and said, "What on earth would we two old women have to talk about?"

Perhaps she remembered what a friend told her about Fisher's "Two Towns in Provence." Anthony Denney wrote to David, "She describes proudly how she was able several times to resist being told and shown the preparation of calissons d'Aix."

"For Elizabeth, who never turned down an opportunity to see how a local specialty was made, this just about summed up the difference between herself and Mrs. Fisher," wrote Cooper.

Calissons, by the way, according to Wikipedia, are a traditional French candy consisting of a smooth, pale yellow paste of candied fruit (especially melons and oranges) and ground almonds topped with a thin layer of royal icing. Calissons have a texture not unlike that of marzipan, but with a fruitier, distinctly melon-like flavor.

If you want to get acquainted with these remarkable women, I recommend the biographies "Writing at the Kitchen Table - The Authorized Biography of Elizabeth David" by Artemis Cooper and "Poet of the Appetites - The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher" by Joan Reardon.

If you want them in your kitchen, my favorites are David's "French Provincial Cooking" and "Italian Food." They can be read over and over again, and contain many wonderful recipes.

If you start cooking from David's recipes, you'll be in good company.

"The recipes of Elizabeth David and Richard Olney provided a starting point and inspiration to us," said Alice Waters, owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif. Chez Panisse, founded in 1971, is now ranked one of the best restaurants in the world, known for its celebration of the very finest of regional food products.

My copy of David's "French Provincial Cooking" falls open at Ratatouille Nicoise (eggplants, tomatoes, onions and peppers stewed in oil) and the fading pages are marked with blots and splashes. "Italian Food" has even more spots and turned-down page corners, and I still wish I could get in America the ingredients for Torrone Molle, which I made often in Spain.

When Fisher died, the London Weekly Telegraph's obituary said, quite correctly, "Fisher...was no compiler of kitchen manuals, but the creator of a new genre of elegant, literate food writing, which appealed to a wide non-cookery readership."

Five of Fisher's books are collected in one fat paperback. Called "The Art of Eating," it contains "Serve It Forth," "Consider the Oyster," "How to Cook a Wolf," "The Gastronomical Me," and "An Alphabet for Gourmets." By the time you've read all the way through it, you'll know a great deal about Fisher's life and loves. If you haven't also developed a desire to start cooking, or to learn to cook better, I'll be surprised.

Copies of all the books mentioned may be purchased from www.amazon.com, and used ones are inexpensive.