There are two types of people in this world: those who think Margaret Costa is one of the most influential food writers of the twentieth century, and those who haven’t yet read her.
There’s a good chance that, if you fall into the latter camp, you haven’t even heard of her. Costa didn’t enjoy the of-her-own-time influence of Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden or Jane Grigson, or the revival or rediscovery that we’ve seen for Patience Grey, Arabella Boxer or Dorothy Hartley. But for those in the know, it’s impossible not to mention Margaret Costa in the same breath.
She is, in many ways, the cookery writer’s cookery writer. Delia Smith describes her as ‘the best-kept culinary secret in the entire history of British cooking’. Indeed, when Simon Hopkinson couldn’t lay his hands on a copy of her then out-of-print cookbook, Delia gave him hers. He thought calling it a classic was ‘almost an understatement’, while Nigel Slater has said, ‘If I had to choose only one book to cook from for the rest of my life it would be this one.’
Margaret Costa was born on 30 August 1917 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father was working for the colonial government. The family moved to England in 1932. Costa studied French at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, before moving to London during the Second World War, where she worked as an air-raid warden, a senior civil servant and in the theatre before she began to write about food. Her first journalism appeared in columns for Farmer’s Home and in 1965 she became the Sunday Times’s cookery writer, as well as writing regularly for the American magazine Gourmet. Her predecessor at the Sunday Times had taken his readers on a culinary world tour. She took a different route, introducing her readers to the power of good produce. In 1970, she wrote her only cookbook, the Four Seasons Cookery Bo
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Subscribe now or Sign inThere are two types of people in this world: those who think Margaret Costa is one of the most influential food writers of the twentieth century, and those who haven’t yet read her.
There’s a good chance that, if you fall into the latter camp, you haven’t even heard of her. Costa didn’t enjoy the of-her-own-time influence of Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden or Jane Grigson, or the revival or rediscovery that we’ve seen for Patience Grey, Arabella Boxer or Dorothy Hartley. But for those in the know, it’s impossible not to mention Margaret Costa in the same breath. She is, in many ways, the cookery writer’s cookery writer. Delia Smith describes her as ‘the best-kept culinary secret in the entire history of British cooking’. Indeed, when Simon Hopkinson couldn’t lay his hands on a copy of her then out-of-print cookbook, Delia gave him hers. He thought calling it a classic was ‘almost an understatement’, while Nigel Slater has said, ‘If I had to choose only one book to cook from for the rest of my life it would be this one.’ Margaret Costa was born on 30 August 1917 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father was working for the colonial government. The family moved to England in 1932. Costa studied French at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, before moving to London during the Second World War, where she worked as an air-raid warden, a senior civil servant and in the theatre before she began to write about food. Her first journalism appeared in columns for Farmer’s Home and in 1965 she became the Sunday Times’s cookery writer, as well as writing regularly for the American magazine Gourmet. Her predecessor at the Sunday Times had taken his readers on a culinary world tour. She took a different route, introducing her readers to the power of good produce. In 1970, she wrote her only cookbook, the Four Seasons Cookery Book. So what was it about Costa and Four Seasons that was so ground-breaking? Well, ironically it can be hard to tell when reading it now. Four Seasons is organized not by the usual starters–main courses puddings of the time, but by the four seasons, and the star ingredients or dishes within them, for example crab, asparagus or sorrel. Today, there is nothing remarkable in this, but in 1970 seasonal cooking was not only rarely written about but was seen as a bit eccentric. Four Seasons broke the mould, and in doing so, Margaret Costa changed the way readers (and future writers) thought about seasonal cooking. It’s not just the architecture of the cookbook that gives Costa’s writing longevity, it’s her style. Her enthusiasm and chattiness represented a sea change from the tone of previous recipe writers, who either tended to talk down to their readers or failed to adapt their professional techniques to domestic kitchens:they are maddeningly vague about times and temperatures, they use words which create total, unreasoning panic in the mind of the ordinary cook: déglacer, dégorger, tomber, revenir, beurre manié – no wonder we lose our heads. Even the words we think we recognize – blend, beat, sieve – all mean something different to them because they use different equipment. And then they are used to having things to hand. ‘Garnish with truffles,’ they cry, ‘cook in clarified butter, stuff with a duxelles, finish with a spoonful of hollandaise.’
Costa is able to pinpoint the anxieties, the hopelessness that those books bring to the home cook and remedy them. Her writing, though instructional, is charming, laced as it is with her personality. Of a gazpacho, she writes, ‘I was once told this recipe had become “the rage of Great Missenden”’, while an Escalope de dinde cordon bleu is, she says, ‘very rich indeed . . . all that I can face afterwards is a raspberry sorbet’. She is deliciously practical too: ‘Escoffier didn’t flame crêpes Suzette at all, but everyone would feel cheated if you did not.’ Her descriptions are both delightful and vivid: rhubarb is ‘shrilly pink’, gooseberries ‘rain into the pan like hail’, and a properly steamed Christmas pudding is ‘as black as your hat and twice as shiny’. She has the ability to conjure a scene or feeling in a few short sentences: ‘Just listen to the next big party you go to: a party where there are enough nice little things to eat, that has a warm, contented sound, a sort of purr, quite different from the harsh, strident noise where there’s nothing but alcohol and cigarette smoke’. You can imagine the party, can’t you? When she describes rows of jams and jellies ‘shining like good deeds in a naughty world’ she taps into the precise joy that preserving bestows upon its creator, ‘the satisfaction no other branch of cookery can give – the chance to contemplate at leisure the work of your hands before it disappears’. Isn’t that exactly how you feel after shelving a batch of homemade preserves? Her pleasure is infectious. Costa’s apparently effortless style was the product of a lifetime of cooking, hosting and – crucially – loving good food. Her passage on omelettes is masterful: first of all, she sagely cautions that ‘it requires a great concentration to learn how to make an omelette successfully from reading a book’. ‘However,’ she goes on, ‘I shall try to describe it all the same.’ What follows is perhaps a thousand words of unbroken text on how to make an omelette. And despite her protestations, I find things I don’t know about omelettes, things that will improve my next attempt. Amid the instructions, she tells a story about a chef at the Savoy – Monsieur Laplance – who showed her how to cook an omelette just as he was taught. He cooked it on a back gas ring, with the naked flame on the ring in front beneath his wrist. ‘You soon learned that way that an omelette must be cooked quickly.’ It’s hard to imagine a more useful observation on omelette-cooking. The wealth and generosity of her knowledge and skill are staggering. Each paragraph is bursting with ideas, with recipes within recipes, with knowledge and advice. In a short section on how to make ‘basic’ fish stock, she offers suggestions for thickening fish soup and making fish pie or ‘fish cakes for breakfast’. One single paragraph about pigeons (within a whole chapter on pigeons) contains thirteen different ideas for how one might cook them. When she gives suggestions for stuffing in the duck and chicken chapter, I count twelve separate possibilities for stuffings. Parentheses abound, a syntactical manifestation of her exuberance and enthusiasm, her very real desire to convey to the reader all the different things they can do with beautiful, seasonal produce. And yet it never feels chaotic. Like a doll’s house, Four Seasons is filled with so many intricate details, you find something new every time you look. If, like me, you have become too used to modern cookbooks, Costa requires concentration. Handholding has become the norm since we’ve lost our inherited culinary knowledge: the size of pan, the precise heat, the length of time, it all needs to be spelled out. ‘Prepare the pastry,’ Costa’s recipe for a black Scotch bun begins, with no further elucidation – because the pastry, a shortcrust, isn’t the com plicated or interesting bit. This refusal to pander makes her writing lighter, crisper. We focus in on the meat of the matter, not weighed down by the unnecessary. ‘Roast a duckling in the usual way,’ she begins at one point, and I initially feel affronted before realizing, yes, I probably can work my way through roasting a duckling. I find that I engage my brain more as I follow her recipes, rather than switching off and rigidly following each instruction. I’m more present, and it’s surprisingly liberating. For ten years, Costa ran a restaurant, Lacy’s on the Charing Cross Road, with her third husband Bill, a chef. Lacy’s was adored by many, and it’s clear that really, what Costa wanted was to host a glorious, endless supper for friends. And she did it brilliantly. She was less brilliant when it came to business: she would charge diners based on how much wine had been drunk from a bottle, an unusual system which was blatantly taken advantage of by her thirsty waiting staff. She was generous to a fault, opening expensive bottles of wine for visiting American guests, and pulling up a seat at the table of unhappy diners and plying them with house wine. After the restaurant closed in 1980, and she and Bill lost their money, they spent some time living in their car. Her book fell out of print, but it was reissued in 1996, the same year the Guild of Food Writers honoured Costa with an award for her special contribution to food writing. But by that point, she was suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and had been in a nursing home for some time. She died on 1 August 1999. Today, there’s a vogue for talking about cookbooks you take to bed with you, the idea being that the book is valued for its comforting writing as much as for its recipes. But while Costa’s writing is immersive, almost compulsive, that’s not really what Four Seasons is for. Brenda Houghton, Costa’s editor at the Sunday Times, wrote that ‘where other cookery writers were read in the living room, Margaret was read in the kitchen, spoon in hand’. That is her magic. Costa is a cook to cook with – the pencilled amendments by previous owners of my copy in the Christmas cake pages, along with tell-tale sticky orange marks in the tea bread section, are testament to this. Perhaps it’s the ease with which Costa suggests whipping up a sabayon sauce or having a go at a lapin moutarde that makes me return to her. I fizz with the recipes I want to try – now! – a black currant flummery, an ‘everlasting’ lemon syllabub, a grouse steamed pudding. Recipes I wouldn’t have contemplated are suddenly fair game in Costa’s hands. Usually a strict planner when it comes to cooking, I begin to be more spontaneous. A final clutch of rhubarb from the single pot in my garden, which would usually be consigned to a compôte, becomes the base of her rhubarb ginger cake, which I knock up late at night. I happen to pick up my copy around Shrove Tuesday and, as if by magic, it opens at the pancake chapter. That evening I pull out the Cointreau from the back of the cupboard and make crêpes Suzettes. One day, I find myself standing in the supermarket, eye to eye with a whole salmon. And I buy it, confident that Margaret will tell me what to do with it. Now, thanks to her, I am quietly emboldened.Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 89 © Olivia Potts 2026
About the contributor
Olivia Potts is a chef and food writer. She is the author of Butter and A Half Baked Idea, which won the Fortnum & Mason Debut Food Book Award. The illustrations in this article are by John Tribe.
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