Elucidating the edible: Juliet Renny and Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking (1960)

By the mid to late 1950s, cookbook illustration was changing. Reflecting rising levels of economic and cultural stability after a period of austerity, illustration now functioned as an archive, or instruction manual. Cookbooks were distinctive in the ways they instructed readers to look beyond information already found in the text, leading them to transcend their role of home cooks.
During my PhD studies, I undertook an in-depth analysis of the illustrator Juliet Renny’s illustrations for Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking (Michael Joseph, 1960). Renny, born in Surrey in 1936, studied at Guildford School of Art in the 1950s, receiving an NDD (National Design Diploma). During the first four years she studied painting and lithography, spending another year studying graphic design and typography (Wondrausch 2008: 12). This article explores how her visual interpretation of regional cooking implements illuminated David’s transformation from traveller to culinary scholar, collector and archivist, as well as a corresponding transformation in her readers. Renny’s innate sense of order and precision instructed David’s readers to create an authentic ‘batterie de cuisine’, which was becoming increasingly available through kitchen equipment shops that catered for the needs of the serious amateur cook (David 1965: 56). Here the practicality of Renny’s illustrations is detailed, and the impact David’s cookbooks had on her middle-class readership.