Patience Gray

Patience Gray’s greatest work was the passionate autobiographical cookery book Honey from a Weed. It is Mediterranean through and through and as compelling as a first-class novel. Within a few months of its first appearance in 1986, it was hailed as a modern classic. Fiona MacCarthy wrote in The Times that ‘the book is a large and grandiose life history, a passionate narrative of extremes of experience.’ 

Jeremy Round called Patience Gray ‘the high priestess of cooking,’ whose book ‘pushes the form of the cookery book as far as it can go.’ Angela Carter remarked that ‘it was less a cookery book than a summing-up of the genre of the late-modern British cookery book.’ The work has attracted a cult following in the United States, where passages have been read out at great length on the radio, and it has been anthologized by Paul Levy in The Penguin Book of Food and Drink. The André Simon Book Prize committee gave it a special award in 1987.

Patience Gray shared the life of a sculptor, Norman Mommens, whose appetite for marble and sedimentary rocks took them to Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades (Naxos), and Apulia. These are the places that, in turn, inspired this rhapsodic text.

Everywhere, she learned from the country people whose way of life she shared, adopting their methods of growing, cooking, and con¬serving the staple foods of the Mediterranean. She described the rustic foods and dishes with feeling and fidelity, writing from the inside and with a deep sense of the history and continuity of Mediterranean ways.

Her life in the Salento contrasted with an earlier, and indeed glittering, career in Fleet Street, but she sacrificed the deadlines of the past to the rhythm of wine-making, seasonal sowing, and gathering. Patience Gray died in 2005.