By the time Elizabeth David published Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen during 1970, she had been lionized in Britain for three decades. One biographer describes her as “undoubtedly the greatest English writer on food” of the 1900s, and no less a stickler than Auberon Waugh maintained that “she… brought about a greater change in English life than any other woman this [twentieth] century.” H10