WHETHER or not you are familiar with her name, most will be familiar with the dishes Elizabeth David helped make popular in the UK.

For it was Elizabeth who helped to give vegetables a starring role in cooking, making meat-free meals appetising to a generation who saw vegetable-based dishes as something they had to endure when money and rations were scarce.

And now, in the year she would have celebrated her 100th birthday – and aptly coinciding with National Vegetarian Week, which runs from May 20-26 – a new collection entitled Elizabeth David On Vegetables has been released.

The book will introduce a new generation of food fans to David, who was renowned for her evocative descriptions and innovative recipes and praised by people as far-reaching as Brideshead Revisited author Evelyn Waugh and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver.

“Lots of chefs and often quite unexpected chefs will tell you, 'Oh yes I cook from Elizabeth David',” says Jill Norman, David’s editor, who has written the introduction to the new book.

“You can find it in people like Jamie Oliver who cheerfully acknowledges her influence,” adds Norman, who also cites Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, Mark Hix and Rowley Leigh as fans of David’s work.

“She just had a natural way of writing.”

David, who was born in Sussex in 1913 to parents Rupert Gwynne, an MP for Eastbourne, and Stella Gwynne, the daughter of a former home secretary, was named one of Radio 4’s top 60 Britons to have lived through Queen Elizabeth II’s reign.

Although initially determined to be an actress, the teenage David became fascinated by French food when she moved in with a Parisian family aged 17 while studying history and literature at the prestigious Sorbonne university.

She began recording recipes on her travels which later took her to Greece, Italy and Egypt. When she returned to the UK, to make some money, David started writing Mediterranean recipes for Harper’s Bazaar magazine.

A year later, in 1950, her first collection, A Book Of Mediterranean Food, was published. Seven more books followed and in 1982 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. To top if off, in 1986 David was made a CBE.

Norman thinks David, who died of a stroke in 1992 aged 78, would have been pleased by how our appetites have developed.

Here is a recipe from Elizabeth David On Vegetables, published by Quadrille, priced £20:

Tarte aux asperges

  • Serves 4-5
  • 250g plain flour
  • 175g butter
  • A pinch of salt
  • 1kg asparagus
  • 1tsp sugar
  • 450ml bechamel sauce made with milk or cream
  • 60g grated cheese

Knead the flour, salt and butter together, adding a little water to make a paste.

Prepare the asparagus very carefully, peeling off the dry outer skin of the stalks. Put them into boiling salted water, to which you add also a teaspoon of sugar and cook them for 10 minutes. Drain them and cut each asparagus into pieces.

Roll out your pastry, line a flat buttered pie tin (23-25cm) with it, cover with kitchen paper and put the usual beans into the paper to keep the pastry flat. Bake it in a hot oven (200°C/gas 6) for 20 minutes. Heat up the bechamel gently while the pastry is baking. Now add the grated cheese to the bechamel and the asparagus.

Fill pastry with the asparagus mixture, put it into the oven to brown, and serve hot.