Want fewer ads?

Alan Eaton Davidson (30 March 1924 — 2 December 2003) was a British diplomat and historian best known for his writing and editing on food and gastronomy. He was the author of the 900-page, encyclopedic The Oxford Companion to Food (1999, second edition 2006).

The son of a Scottish tax inspector, Davidson was born in Londonderry, Northern Ireland. His family travelled around the UK because of his father's job, but they eventually settled in Leeds, where Davidson attended Leeds Grammar School. Davidson studied classical languages at Queen's College, Oxford. During World War II, he served in the Royal Navy as an officer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

In 1948, Davidson joined the Foreign Office and served in diplomatic posts in Washington, Tunis, Brussels, Cairo, the Hague; from 1973 to 1975, he was ambassador to Laos. While living in Tunis, his wife asked him to look for a cookbook on fish because she did not recognize any of the local varieties. Not being able to find one he wrote one himself together with the Italian ichthyologist Giorgio Bini, the world's greatest living authority on seafish in the Mediterranean at this time, who happened to be visiting. The original manuscript was copied with a stencil machine. A copy of Seafish Of Tunisia And The Central Mediterranean reached the British cooking guru Elizabeth David, who passed it on to Penguin Books, which published it in 1972 as Mediterranean Seafood. The book has since become a standard reference work, and is characterized by its creative mixture of biology and recipes.

This was followed by Seafood Of South East Asia (1979) and North Atlantic Seafood (1979), for which he travelled throughout the region, gathering thousands of recipes from Portugal to Iceland. He was a noted expert on Lao cuisine, which he introduced to the West through his two books, Traditional Recipes of Laos, and Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos.

Davidson was the founder in 1979, and long-time editor of Petits Propos Culinaires, a journal of food studies and history, published by Prospect Books, which he also founded in 1979; and also the founder and organizer of the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery.

In 2003 Davidson was awarded the Erasmus Prize.

On 17 March 2010, BBC Four televised in the UK a documentary called "The Man Who Ate Everything", a portrait of Alan Davidson by Andrew Graham-Dixon.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alan Davidson", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0