In the last thirty years of his life, Alan Davidson made a name for himself as a writer on food, and especially on fish and seafood. Had he turned to golf in his retirement instead, he would be remembered for the quiet but distinguished contribution he made to British diplomacy in his middle years. In the course of a 27-year career he saw service in Washington, The Hague, Cairo and Tunis, headed two important Foreign Office departments, served as head of chancery in the British delegation to Nato in Brussels, and went on to a final appointment as ambassador to Laos at a time when the aftermath of the Vietnam War was consuming Indo-China.

Alan Eaton Davidson was born in 1924 and educated at Leeds Grammar School. He joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as an ordinary seaman in 1943 and saw wartime and post-war service in the Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific, ending the war as a lieutenant. In 1946 he came home to complete his interrupted education at Queen’s College, Oxford, where he took a double first in classical moderations and Greats, and in 1948 he joined the Foreign Service.

It set him to work on junior desks in London, in Washington and then the Hague. But by the age of 35 he had attained real responsibility in the embassy in Cairo, wrestling first with the tangled problems of restoring British property in the Egyptian capital seized at the time of Suez, and later with the overall co-ordination of the work in the embassy. He seemed destined for great things.

Appointment as the ambassador’s deputy in the small embassy in Tunis followed. It was a happy post, and it was here that Davidson laid the basis of his later career, with Seafish of Tunisia and the Central Mediterranean (1963), which with the encouragement of Elizabeth David would become the basis for Mediterranean Seafood ten years later.

But after two years there he was called away to sterner tasks as head of the Foreign Office’s perversely named Central Department, which at the time dealt with those European countries, several of them geographically peripheral, which were committed neither to the Warsaw Pact nor to Nato. Change was in the offing, and would lead in due course to the West German Government’s Ostpolitik opening to the east, to the four-power Berlin agreement, and to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, in which the European neutrals played a valuable role.

In 1968 Davidson moved on once again, to the post of head of chancery in the British delegation to Nato. It is a traditionally demanding job, co-ordinating the work of a mission in which political and defence considerations can too easily collide and in which allies can prove as trying as adversaries. Davidson proved himself up to it, and at the end of it, after a sabbatical year thinking about Europe at the University of Sussex, he was brought back to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office once again, to fill a centrally important role there.

He became the head of the Foreign Office’s defence department, putting to work the experience he had gained in Brussels. He remained only for a year, 1972-73, in which hard-won détente in Europe was already beginning to look threadbare and the build-up of Soviet strength in Central Europe was arousing concern and anxious discussion.

It was at this time that he published The Role of the Uncommitted European Countries in East-West Relations. In it he summarised the impressions he had formed in his time in Central Department and the work he had done in Sussex. The book still provides a valuable sidelight on diplomatic doings in Europe at that distant time.

In 1973, at the age of 49, Davidson was appointed ambassador in Vientiane, a post in which he stayed until his retirement two years later. They were intensely difficult years. The last American troops left Vietnam in March 1973. Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975. During Davidson’s time in Vientiane, Laos experienced American bombing and North Vietnamese invasion. He was far from Britain’s vital interests, yet intimately engaged in matters of life and death importance for the Laotians among whom he lived and worked.

On the completion of his mission in Vientiane, Davidson retired. He was only 51, and had in theory a clear nine years until mandatory retirement. But Diplomatic Service promotion prospects were at the time unusually parlous. His time in Laos had taken its toll. He could not look forward to the glittering appointments to which his double first at Oxford had seemed to point. But above all, he had other interests — in food, fish and the sea — to pursue. He determined to change course when he was still young and energetic enough to enjoy the new life he had in mind.

At 51, then, he embarked full-time on what he considered his third career: as a food writer and publisher. He had already compiled Fish and Fish Dishes of Laos (1975); North Atlantic Seafood (1979) had been commissioned, and his wife Jane was translating Alexandre Dumas’ encyclopaedic Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. Warning them not to expect large financial reward from their labours, Jane Grigson recommended the couple to Time-Life Books, whose 30-volume series entitled Good Cook was masterminded by Richard Olney.

To help to provide previously published recipes for the project, in 1979 they set up and edited the food history journal Petits Propos Culinaires, which is now owned and run by Tom Jaine. They also founded Prospect Books, which specialises in food titles and reprints of major works.

In 1981, while spending a year as an Alistair Horne Fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford, Davidson and his co-chairman, Theodore Zeldin, launched what was to become the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. Now an educational charity, the symposium was the world’s first international conference on food and food studies, and has spawned similar institutions all over the world.

In 1999 Davidson published his magnum opus The Oxford Companion to Food. It is an extraordinarily comprehensive volume which took 20 years to research and prepare, and of which he himself wrote 80 per cent of the content. He was awarded the Erasmus Prize a few months ago in recognition of his contribution to the cultural life of Europe.

Even at the Oxford symposium, a menu rarely includes both caviar and kippers, followed by trifle. But these were some of Alan Davidson’s favourite foods; and his favourite meal was high tea. His influence means that food studies and food history may soon become an academic subject at a British university — a prospect that delighted him.

He married Jane Macatee in 1951. There were three daughters of the marriage.

Alan Davidson, diplomat and food writer, was born on March 30, 1924. He died on December 2, 2003, aged 79.