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.
