Alan Eaton Davidson: A writer, publisher and diplomat who produced three great seafood books and the Oxford Companion To Food, Alan Davidson, who has died aged 79, was an engaging polymath in all matters of food. He was not just interested in cookery, but also its lore, ethnography and history, as well as the taxonomy of edible species.
He used his postings as a diplomat with the Foreign Office as an opportunity to unearth the culinary secrets of the places he visited, resulting in many place-specific books - often centred on his passion for fish - from his Mediterranean Seafood (1972) to Seafood Of South East Asia (1979).
The son of a tax inspector and proud of his Scottish forebears, he was born in Northern Ireland and educated at Leeds Grammar School and Queen's College Oxford, where he took a double first in classics. His time at university was interrupted by military service in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, from 1943 to 1946.
He joined the Foreign Office in 1948, and his career took in Washington (1950-53), The Hague (1953-55), Cairo (1959-61), Tunis (1962-64), Brussels, as head of chancery of the delegation to Nato (1968-71) and, finally, Laos (1973-75).
During his time in Washington he met and married Jane Macatee, the daughter of an American diplomat.
He put his decision to retire early from the Foreign Office down to strong pressure from his wife and three daughters, to whom he was touchingly devoted. They feared "he would become insufferably pompous if he had another ambassadorial post". He also ascribed the move to irritation with life behind a desk and to the call of a new vocation, to be a writer.
An opportunity to write arose as head of chancery in Tunis in 1961. His wife was muddled by the various names of fish in the local markets, and he promised to compile a list. He did it with the aid of the Italian professor Giorgio Bini, the world's greatest authority on fish in the Mediterranean, fortuitously part of an official delegation to discuss the dynamiting of their catch by Sicilian fishermen.
Out of these ichthyology lessons was born, in 1963, Seafish Of Tunisia And The Central Mediterranean. It was followed by Snakes And Scorpions Found In The Land Of Tunisia. At that stage, his passion seemed to be for taxonomy, not fish dinners.
A colleague, who knew the food writer Elizabeth David, sent her a copy of the fish book, and she reviewed it for the Spectator. From this first contact flowed the process of its conversion from self-published pamphlet to the full-blown work Mediterranean Seafood, published by Penguin in 1972.
Elizabeth David had advised the diplomat to avoid self-publication and had recommended him to her editor at Penguin, Jill Norman. These relationships were to be fruitful, both for later books on fish and food and in the genesis of Davidson's own publishing house, Prospect Books, in 1979, and its journal of food studies, Petits Propos Culinaires, edited and published by Davidson until 2000.
While part of the delegation to Nato in Brussels he buoyed the spirits by composing a thriller of quixotic inventiveness called Something Quite Big. It revolved around the mass kidnap of the alliance's heads of mission by wholly admirable eco-terrorists led by a most gorgeous and purposive heroine (he was always impressed by beautiful women).
Its climax saw the diplomats released, wending their way to safety on bicycles (the book contained much incidental lore on the history of cycling - Belgium's gift to humanity was the bicycle chain).
But permission to publish was refused for the sake of preserving official secrets. He purged his frustration with the less alluring The Role Of The Uncommitted European Countries In East-West Relations, the outcome of a visiting fellowship at Sussex University in 1971-72.
Posted to Laos as ambassador the following year, he navigated the streets of the elegant capital, Vientiane, in his stately Bentley and was witness to the final days of the uneasy coalition between the royal dynasty and the Pathet Lao communist insurgents.
With Mediterranean Seafood now published, he deemed a literal reading of the Foreign Office's prohibition of Something Quite Big to allow private circulation, and so had it printed, with many errors, by a Catholic priest in the back streets of Bangkok.
Curiosity about Laos and its culture resulted in his unearthing a cookery text used in royal circles. This was to become Traditional Recipes Of Laos (1981). His investigations into fish in the Mekong and other inland waters were published as Fish And Fish Dishes Of Laos (1975). (An especially turgid, yet delicate, negotiation with the Pathet Lao was transformed by his queries about snakehead fish that swim in the rice paddies, unstopping a happy vein of reminiscence from the opposition leader.)
Laos produced one more book, Seafood Of South East Asia. It was also the finish of his official duties, with the graceful golden handshake of a short fellowship at St Antony's College, Oxford. Retirement saw a flurry of work, from a translation and abridgement (in partnership with his wife) of Alexandre Dumas's encyclopedia of food, Dumas On Food (1978), to the publication of his North Atlantic Seafood (1979), to putting in place, in 1978, a deal with Oxford University Press to commence his magnum opus, The Oxford Companion To Food, not to see the light until 1999.
He was working at a time when there was a growing eagerness for writing about food and cookery that went beyond the simple recipes for weekend magazines. There was a hunger for fine writing and additions to knowledge that did not indulge the fatuities of gourmets and gastronomes. He never could abide Brillat-Savarin and the panoply of theory around simple issues of hunger and pleasure developed by the French in the 19th century, and blenched at pretension.
His mindset was questing pragmatism, leavened by surreal, puckish humour.
People of a like mind purchased the reprinted classics of the kitchen shelf that he began to issue under the imprint of Prospect Books from 1982 onwards, as well as the original titles about Tibetan, Indonesian or Majorcan food, and a wider public still was to applaud his handsome edition of Patience Gray's timeless contemplation of Mediterranean life and its relation to food and cookery, Honey From A Weed, first published in 1986.
Prospect Books and its associated journal were to swallow much time, too much, indeed, for speedy completion of the Companion. So, too, were the annual gatherings of food enthusiasts (he was careful always to call them "semi-academic"; he disliked arid scholarship) at St Antony's College that he organised with the historian of 19th- and 20th-century France, Theodore Zeldin.
These activities made Alan and Jane's house in Chelsea, London, an international caravanserai of scholar-cooks, many contributing his or her tithe of knowledge to the slowly accumulating Companion.
The Companion appeared at the end of the millennium to just acclaim and gained every prize going for food-writing. More than a million words, mostly his own, displayed wit, humanity, curiosity and knowledge in equal measure. He eschewed the anthropology or sociology of cookery, and indeed the Byzantine ramifications of haute cuisine, for a delight in describing the most arcane ingredients or the complex lineage of food customs, recipes and techniques.
He produced one last book, on trifle (with Helen Saberi) and supervised the republication of his three great seafood books.
He is survived by his wife and daughters.
Alan Eaton Davidson: born March 30th, 1924; died December 2nd, 2003