Patience on a monument

As a food writer Patience Gray (1917–2005) merits shelf-space with M.F.K. Fisher, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Fleeing from the dreary predictability of her Home Counties upbringing, Gray became, among other things, the first women’s page editor of the Observer; co-author of a bestselling cookery book (the 1957 Plats du Jour with Primrose Boyd); and, nearly 30 years later, sole author of a classic, the 1986 Honey from a Weed. She was also a jewellery maker; textile designer; student at the LSE, where one of her tutors was Hugh Gaitskell; an intrepid traveller; research assistant to H.F.K. Henrion, one of the designers of the Festival of Britain; something or other in the Foreign Office; a struggling single mother; and the partner (from 1963 until she finally married him in 1994) of the Belgian sculptor Norman Mommens (1922–2000), who worked in marble.

Honey from a Weed, though it contains plenty of recipes (such as one that tells you precisely how to butcher a young lamb to cook its pluck and gut on a spit), is also a trove of botanical lore, and of superlative travel writing and autobiography.