Jill Norman is a British editor and food writer. She published authors such as Elizabeth David for Penguin Books and then started writing books about food herself.[1][2] In 2001 she published the 564-page New Penguin Cookery Book.[3]
Jill Norman grew up in the Midlands region of England. Her father owned a large market garden and vegetable shops, so from an early age she ate well.[4]
After university, she joined Penguin Books as an editor. One of her responsibilities was to expand the list of food and wine books.[4][6] In the 60s and 70s, there were few cheap cookery books on the market, and so the list took off with authors who became household names like Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, Claudia Roden and Alan Davidson.[6]
There was no test kitchen at Penguin Books so Jill Norman used to test out any recipes in the books she was working on which she thought sounded interesting or 'rather dodgy'.[6] Through the testing she says that her family ate food from all over the world and she became a 'reasonable' cook.[6]
By the time she left Penguin, she was responsible not only for food and drink but also social sciences, education and more.[4]
Jill's first meeting with Elizabeth David was about a new cover for a book. They saw each other frequently for work and became friends.[4] After Elizabeth David's death in 1992, as the literary executor of Elizabeth David's work, Jill Norman found a box with articles, recipes and notes about Christmas. Elizabeth David had intended to publish them as a book. Jill Norman put the material together as Elizabeth had intended in a book about Christmas that was published in [7]
Jill finished editing Elizabeth David's last book, Harvest of the Cold Months, a book about the Social History of Ice and Ices, after David's death. It was made up of two anthologies and unpublished work.[6]
