The most popular book written by the British food writer Peter Graham, who has died aged 80, was his last – an evocative account of the many meals he ate, and the many years he lived, in a small village in a quiet part of central France. Mourjou: The Life and Food of an Auvergne Village (1998) was suffused with a deep knowledge of France, and was every bit as seductive as the work of his more celebrated compatriot, Peter Mayle, author of A Year in Provence.
Mourjou is constructed category by category as a conventional cookery book, but you soon become aware that it is really an account of two decades of living in a shrinking village in the centre of France (down from 1,100 inhabitants in 1850 to 300 today). Peter was soon on visiting terms with many of his neighbours – visiting as in sharing their tables, experiencing quite surprising examples of Auvergnat cooking.
“I’ve got something for you,” said Jeanne Chabut as he passed by her door one morning. The “something” was a plate of coagulated blood from a chicken she had just killed, mixed with chopped onions, which was to be fried, flipped over and fried again. “It was very tasty,” he reports, “and had a curious, almost rubbery, texture reminiscent of overcooked crème caramel.”
Not all his dishes are as outré, but they are studiously authentic and involved both plenty of local interaction and a determined sampling of virtually every proper restaurant within 20 kilometres. It is a book replete with local colour, served with gentle but consistent scholarship.
Peter’s writing revealed a limitless enthusiasm for eating, a sensitive and intelligent palate, a wide base of reading and an enlightened curiosity about the meaning of the words used in French cooking – be they from French dialect, Occitan, Provençal or Ligurian Italian. His recipes, too, were eminently do-able, as he demonstrated in another well-received and enduring book, Classic Cheese Cookery (1988), which won the André Simon Memorial prize for the best food book of the year.
Born in Newbury, Berkshire, Peter grew up in London, where his father, Richard Graham, was a copywriter and his mother, Anne (nee Scratchley), had been a ballet dancer. After attending University College school, Hampstead, he went to King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied classics, was editor of Granta (1961–62) and became a keen student film-maker.
Soon after university he moved to Paris, and he lived in France for the rest of his life. In his early days there he directed a couple of short films, Edith Piaf (1968) and Au Bout des Fusils (At Gunpoint, 1971), which depicted the slaughter of hand-reared pheasants in the Sologne region and was filmed by the Polish director Walerian Borowczyk.
However, Peter’s career soon turned to words rather than images: he began to teach English, did some translating, and wrote about film for English-language publications in France. His pamphlet The Abortive Renaissance, Why Are Good British Films So Bad? (1963) was followed by A Dictionary of the Cinema (1964) and a collection of essays he edited entitled The French New Wave, Critical Landmarks (1968).
By this time Peter had begun to shift his interest from film to his other love, food. He began writing about food and cookery for the International Herald Tribune, the Sunday Times and the Guardian during the 1970s, eventually editing the International Herald Tribune Guide to Business Travel and Entertainment and contributing large chunks of text to the American Express Pocket Guide to Paris. For Guardian Weekly Peter chose articles from Le Monde, and while the emphasis was on political coverage his enthusiasm for pieces about culture and the arts shone through.
After a long period of travelling and tasting, he decided to change the rhythm of his life by moving away from Paris and into deepest France. In 1978 he bought a former cafe and grocer’s shop in Mourjou with a large enough room for his grand piano, harpsichord and euphonium (he was a talented musician as familiar with Scarlatti as Fats Waller). From that base, and with the support of a welcoming village community, he began to pursue various food writing projects, beginning with a translation of a Jacques Médecin recipe book, Cuisine Niçoise: Recipes from a Mediterranean Kitchen (1983).
In 2004 I reissued his book on Mourjou at Prospect Books, and it remains in print. His writing was again acknowledged in 2019 with a prize for an article in a language other than French, organised by the state-funded tourist agency, Atout France. It was on stockfish, unsalted wind-dried cod.
As a measure of the respect and affection with which Peter was held in Mourjou, the locals, for whom the surrounding groves of chestnuts have been an important source of food for centuries, bestowed upon him the title of Grand Master of the Chestnut Confraternity. These days the nuts are the focus of green tourism, and the October chestnut festival brings thousands to the village. A chestnut museum – the Maison de la Châtaigne – was created in a barn that once belonged to him, and he lived in the village for the rest of his life, with visiting friends finding a welcome table and a perceptive host.
He is survived by his sister Elizabeth, a niece, Sarah, and two nephews, Adrian and Siy.
• Peter John Graham, author, born 8 December 1939; died 6 July 2020
