Our measuring jugs are inadequate, too small and too vague.

Our measuring jugs are inadequate, too small and too vague. A half pint seems useless to me, and measures marked on the outside, like the popular and cheap Pyrex glass jugs, don't give accurate reading for small quantities, Enamel jugs get chipped. Plastic jugs are hideous, they don't last, and they are not accurate. That leaved stainless steel. These are expensive, they are reasonably well marked, and they are durable. The only commonly available one in this country is also ungainly, the handle uncomfortable to hold.

E. David, English bread and yeast cookery (1977), 242

Unhurried canal transport certainly was. It was also cheap.

Unhurried canal transport certainly was. It was also cheap. So for that matter was sea transport. In the 1920s, when the railways had largely superseded the canals as a means of internal freight haulage, it was cheaper for American farmers to send wheat 700 miles from St Louis to the port of New Orleans and thence across the Atlantic to Britain than it was for an English farmer to send his wheat by rail freight across three counties from Somerset to London, a distance of about 200 miles.

E. David, English bread and yeast cookery (1977), 16

'Wherefore do ye spend your money for that which is not bread?' demands the Prophet Isaiah

Writing about a subject so ancient and so universal as the baking of bread  it is hard for a modern author to find fresh words to express his views and observations. Over and over again I have found that something I had been struggling for days to put on paper has been said long before, and in rather more graphic words than I could achieve. 'Wherefore do ye spend your money for that which is not bread?' demands the Prophet Isaiah. I doubt if I could ever convey my feelings about shop bread quite so devastatingly.

E. David, English bread and yeast cookery (1977), xvii

I feel as uneasy as I do if there is no evidence of wine glasses or bottles

In fact, if I go into a friend's dining room and see no loaf on the table, I feel as uneasy as I do if there is no evidence of wine glasses or bottles. Now that I've been forced into making my own bread, I often take it with me. Nobody takes any offence ... It's only a matter of time before the braver and angrier among us start taking our own bread to restaurants. After all there are plenty of establishments to which we may take our own wine. I see nothing to prevent us taking our own bread as well. The restaurateurs can always increase their cover charges t include the loan of a bread knife - if they have one.

E. David, 'The Baking of an English Loaf', collected in J. Norman (ed.) Is there a nutmeg in the house? (2000), 220

NB. When Elizabeth David talks of being 'forced' to bake her own bread, she means because commercial bread is substandard, not actually being forced.

The custom of drinking a little glass of rich wine with a sweet dish or fruit seems to me a civilized one

The custom of drinking a little glass of rich wine with a sweet dish or fruit seems to me a civilized one, and especially welcome to those who do not or cannot swig brandy or port after a meal. The great dessert wines of Bordeaux and the Rhine are rather beyond the reach or ordinary mortals and are in any case wines that demand a certain ceremony. Your meal has to work up to them. The wine of Beaumes, although so rare, seems somehow more within the scope of the simplest or even of an improvised meal.

E. David, 'Golden Delicious [The Spectator, 10 January 1964]' An omelette and a glass of wine (1984), 84