In his review of The Oxford Companion to Italian Food for the Guardian in 2007, John Dickie advised that the author needed to be “brave, brilliant, learned and almost certainly a little unhinged”. The food historian and typographer Gillian Riley, who has died aged 90, fulfilled all these requirements when composing that very book. That a single person was able to master the labyrinthine complexities of Italian food culture, embracing history, literature, the visual arts, politics and an infinite quantity of processes, ingredients and recipes is remarkable. That it was done with humour, humanity and lashings of erudition was the needful icing to make it digestible.
Gillian’s career in food history occupied the second half of her life, although she was always a “greedy” girl, her family asserts, and ever a fine cook, but at the outset she was a book designer and typographer. It was through art history, more specifically the depiction of food and foodstuffs in paintings, that she first made her mark, by seeing the food on the canvas and then pursuing it back to the kitchen, market stall or botanic garden.
She made culinary sense of those 18th-century Spanish still-lifes, by Luis Meléndez for example, being more than random jumbles of store cupboard items; she chased with determination the appearance of New World foods in Renaissance European narrative paintings. These perceptions she then filled out with admirable commentary and recipes drawn from contemporary sources.
The translation and discussion of these sources, principally Italian, was another string to her bow. Her first published book, in 1989, was a translation of Giacomo Castelvetro’s Brief Account of the Fruit, Herbs and Vegetables of Italy (a work which existed only in manuscript), which Castelvetro, an Italian Protestant living in exile in England, dedicated to Lucy Countess of Bedford in about 1614, doubtless hoping for a secure berth after a lifetime of pillar to post.
Gillian went on to translate, and comment upon, the critical 15th-century Italian recipe book by Maestro Martino of Como. (It is a pity that this was available only on a CD-rom published by Octavo in the US in 2005.) Martino’s instructions were relied upon by Bartolomeo Platina, the humanist author of Europe’s first book on gastronomy, Of Virtuous Pleasure and Good Health, printed in 1474.
Building on this foundation of art studies and extensive reading of early Italian material – allied to fluency in the language and many years of travel and consumption in the country of her choice – Gillian embarked on the mammoth project of an Oxford Companion, largely written by herself.
The venture might also be called intrepid, for the intellectual elephant traps are as common as potholes on an English minor road, and any error liable to be excoriated by a battalion of scholars and suchlike. How could she misidentify pampetato for panpetato when describing the Ferrarese panforte? they asked. But the result is arresting: infused by a down-to-earth realism; eager to chase down the precise, yet impossibly confusing, topographies of Italian foods and recipes; anxious to involve her beloved painters and artists in the long history of cookery. It has much to satisfy every sort of reader – chef, cook, amateur and academic.
Gillian was the elder child of Major Riley and his wife Millicent (nee Lees). Her father was an artist turned teacher, the founding principal of Selby College of Art and Crafts in North Yorkshire and later an inspector of art and technical schools, while her mother was a textile artist. After Selby girls’ high school and Cheadle Hulme school in Manchester, Gillian went on to Girton College, Cambridge to study history.
While at Cambridge she got involved in the historicising Water Lane Press created by the bibliographer Pip Gaskell in an undercroft of King’s College using original Caslon type and an early iron press. There she met her lifelong partner James Mosley, who was to direct the typographical and printing library at St Bride’s, Fleet Street, for more than 40 years. They eventually married in 2000.
Gillian first worked as a designer and typographer at the publisher Thames & Hudson before taking on freelance design work, which kept her occupied until well into the 1980s. Her first book, the Castelvetro translation, was followed in quick succession by four short monographs on art and food published by Pomegranate Artbooks in California, and then a larger survey, A Feast for the Eyes, mixing masterpieces and recipes for the National Gallery, which appeared in 1997. Her work in this field was compressed into a single volume called Food in Art which came out in 2015.
Although Gillian was a welcome attendee and contributor to various conferences and symposia, her work in journalism was restricted to a highly entertaining cookery column in her local community newspaper, the Hackney Citizen, near her home in London. However, she managed, more than many, to bridge two worlds.
She is survived by her husband, and by her sister, Joanna.
• Gillian Riley, food historian, born 20 November 1933; died 11 November 2024
