Honey from a Weed is a passionate record of the life of Patience Gray with her sculptor husband in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. Avena Mansergh-Wallace reads three extracts for us.
Although Patience Gray made her name with her first book, the 1950s classic Plats du Jour, which outsold the books of Elizabeth David, Honey from a Weed, her second, is regarded as her greatest work. The blurb is right when it describes it as '… a passionate autobiographical cookbook' and says:
'It is Mediterranean through and through, and as compelling as a first class novel.'
It combines vivid descriptions of the places and the country people whose way of life she shared and whose methods of preparing, cooking and preserving she learned to follow with mouthwatering recipes.
The extracts Avena reads are:
Fire:
The Guardian of the Temple:
and
Escalivada:
Honey from a Weed is published by Prospect Books, illustrated by Corinna Sargood, two of whose illustrations we have used in the headers with kind permission.
