Helena Frith Powell on Glamour

I like the idea that if I read these five books you’ve selected I too will end up a glamorous woman.

Only if you read my book as well!

I did. I was relieved to find out that I can continue to eat foie gras and don’t have to breastfeed. But I never realized that matching underwear was so important.

French women believe strongly that the way you look is linked to the way you feel and the way you behave. It is hard to be in a bad mood when you are wearing exquisite La Perla underwear, for example. And looking at it the other way round, they also feel that a lack of care of yourself is a reflection of an unintelligent mind and lack of thought and possibly laziness.

Oh dear.

But my feeling with glamour — and it’s very much a French feeling, which is why my list is quite French dominated — is that glamour is not only to do with how you look. It’s also to do with how you act, and how you feel, and how well read you are, and how interesting you are. Because a woman can be extremely glamorous even if she’s not pretty. It’s not really to do with prettiness at all. It’s to do with a whole kind of style, a feeling of self-worth, and confidence, and all sorts of things that I think come with knowing how to live, more than anything else.

Which is why one of the books I chose is a cookery book, Elizabeth David’s “Mediterranean Food.” Eating is fundamental to life and to some extent defines you. You don't look good if you live off McDonalds and diet coke. There’s a huge difference between the Mediterranean style of taking time over meals as opposed to just throwing it down or getting takeout. And I think being able to cook well gives a woman a great sense of confidence.

I also chose that book because Elizabeth David was extremely glamorous, and I think she injects a bit of her glamour into everything she does. She left England in 1939, with her lover, intending to travel around the Mediterranean. Then World War II broke out, and she had to leave France. She arrived in Italy only to end up being deported to Greece. And I think she spent the war living a Bohemian kind of lifestyle on one of the Greek islands along with Lawrence Durrell. It was only after the war that she went back to England and started writing about cookery. “Mediterranean Food” was her first book and it made her famous. And to give you an example of how groundbreaking it was, at that time, in the early 1950s, the use of olive oil in cooking was so uncommon in England that she advised her readers to look for it in pharmacies, where it was stocked as a remedy for earache.

So why is it still useful to you today?

For a start, it’s so refreshing to be able to find a cook book that focuses on the actual food rather than the person writing it. Nowadays everything is so celebrity chef-oriented, so terribly hyped up, but in Elizabeth David’s day there was no such thing as a celebrity chef — what joy. She was a terribly low profile person, and she did extremely well.

Her cookbook is very simple and devoid of any hype or any nonsense around it. She uses very simple ingredients, very classic ingredients, and that’s in a way the person she was – she was very simple and very elegant and very classic. And I think that elegance comes across in her cooking.

So “Mediterranean Food” is extremely straightforward and very good. It’s filled with the sort of classic recipes that never go out of style, classic dishes that are also easy to cook.

And it’s also Mediterranean food. Nowadays you can get Mediterranean food anywhere, there’s an Italian theme to cooking everywhere. The ingredients aren’t hard to get hold of any more. So really it’s a classic book, yes, written many decades ago, but it seems to reflect very much the way we eat now. The recipes in it are is still very good. Her manner is very stylish, she has a great appreciation for the simple things in life. For example, one of her other books is called “An Omelet and a Glass of Wine” which really sums up her approach. An omelet and a glass of wine is a very simple meal, but actually it’s one of the great combinations, one of the great things in life.

It’s important to have a cookbook that you know you can rely on for the basic things you want to eat, compared to most of the cookbooks that come out these days, where you kind of lose sight of what the basics are, in favor of trying to be too clever by half .

Is there a recipe in there you particularly like?

I like the pasta ones, because I’m mad about pasta. One I particularly love is with tomatoes and basil. It’s classic, simple and always delicious.

So onto your next book, “Out of Africa.” How does it relate to glamour?

I chose “Out of Africa” because I find Karen Blixen one of the most inspirational women that I’ve ever come across. And this again goes back to my theory that being glamorous is not just out about being beautiful. Karen Blixen wasn’t very beautiful, she was very striking, and the thing about her that made her so appealing was her imagination, and her brain, and her curiosity about life and other cultures, and her capacity for love and her very sympathetic character.