David’s “Indian Picnics: Picnic at Kutub Minar” is an anecdote related in Summer Cooking (1955). This moonlight picnic is held at Kutub Minar, a leaning tower (238 feet) now in ruins just outside Delhi. David says that if the picnic was wrong from the start, it was not the moonlight or the food, but the wild dogs.” Scarcely had wee time to draw the cork of a bottle of the Rheingold Australian hock, David avidly recalls, the picnickers were surrounded by howling dogs that could not be “shoo-ed” away. Forced to act, the picnickers packed up, got into their cars, “leaving them in possession of their ruin.”
Featured Image: Adrian Daintrey’s cover for Cooking, 1st edition, 1955
See Elizabeth David. Summer Cooking. Rev. ed. London: Penguin Press, 1963