from Elizabeth David's ITALIAN COOKING (1963 edition)

This is, I think, a book for those readers and cooks who prefer to know what the original dishes are supposed to be like, and to be given the option of making their own adaptations and alterations according to their taste and their circumstances. There is, I know, a school of writers who seem to believe that English housewives are weak in the head and must not be exposed to the truth about the cooking of other countries; must not be shocked by the idea of making a yeast dough, cleaning an ink-fish, adding nutritive value to a soup with olive oil, cutting the breast of a raw chicken in order to fry it in butter rather than buying a packet of something called "chicken parts" from the deep-freeze and cooking them in a cheap fat or tasteless oil substitute.

If I believed that English women really needed this kind of protection -- censorship it almost amounts to -- I would have packed in cookery writing long ago.

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