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. Gray’s introduction says, ‘A vein of marble runs through this book. Marble determined where, how and among whom we lived; always in primitive conditions.’ In 1987, like subsequent foodie visitors, I somehow managed (in the dark) to find the masseria — the tumbledown sheep farm — Spigolizzi, in Puglia, where she and Norman lived without electricity, telephone or any other accoutrements of contemporary life, save running water. Next morning saw Patience in a parched-looking field opposite her house, harvesting chickpeas for lunch. In working clothes like her peasant women neighbours, she was engaged in their same labours, which she called ‘agriculture’. Though supple and lithe as a young girl, she was 70, and agriculture involved bending down from the waist to hoe, weed and gather the crops.