Honey from a Weed - Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia

Patience Gray was first known for the 1950s classic, Plats du Jour.  She shared her life with sculptor, Norman Mommens, whose appetite for marble and sedimentary rocks took them to Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades (Naxos) and Apulia. These are the places which 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 con­serving 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.  Patience Gray’s first book was  Plats du Jour (with Primrose Boyd, published in 1957); she then wrote a cookery book for a shipping line, The Centaur’s Kitchen with illustrations by her daughter Miranda Armour-Gray (available from Prospect Books). She described her life on Naxos in Ringdoves and Snakes and her life and work in general in Work Adventures Childhood Dreams. Patience Gray died in 2005. Corinna Sargood’s drawings, in another dimension, evoke the under­lying spirit of the book, which has to do with the landscape, people, art, imagination, as much as with fasting and feasting.