{"title":"Patience Gray","description":"\u003cp\u003eDiscover the evocative world of Patience Gray, where food writing meets memoir and travelogue. Explore her unique perspectives on rustic living, Mediterranean cuisine, and the art of simple pleasures.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"honey-from-a-weed-book-patience-gray-9781903018200","title":"Honey from a Weed","description":"Winner of a special special award by the Andre Simon Book Prize committee in 1987 This book is perhaps the jewel in the Prospect Books' crown. 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.' Angela Carter remarked that 'it was less a cookery book that 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. Currently, we publish the book in paperback, with the original drawings by Corinna Sargood and the same text in the same generous format of the original hardback. The beautiful original cover features, the Mellona, the Roman goddess of honey from which the book takes its title. Although more than a cookery book - being a musing on a life lived on the shores of the Mediterranean, particularly wherever marble suitable for sculpture can be found - it contains many vibrant and useful recipes, making it a bible for lover of Mediterranean food. Fish, wild plants, game and tomatoes are just some of the foodstuffs explored and she anticipated the contemporary interest in wild and foraged foods as noted in an article about Gray that appeared in the Guardian in 2017. If you want to know how to marinate sardines or what to do with cuttlefish, Gray will tell you. But it is the bitter weeds - among them comfrey, sorrel, broomrape, fat-hen and tassel hyacinth - on which Gray and Mommens feasted every other night that she eulogises, making these modest, wild plants sound both delicious and life-giving: a kind of holy medicine. 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.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49569429782801,"sku":"GOR001677546","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49661702373649,"sku":"GOR007892627","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49733530517777,"sku":"NGR9781903018200","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":49989806293265,"sku":"CIN190301820XA","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50036213350673,"sku":"GOR008845545","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50109813489937,"sku":"GOR003383165","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50328400625937,"sku":"CIN190301820XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50571688706321,"sku":"CIN190301820XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/190301820X.jpg?v=1751281182"},{"product_id":"centaur-s-kitchen-book-patience-gray-9781903018408","title":"The Centaur's Kitchen","description":"A new paperback edition of a wonderfully evocative cookery manual by one of England's greatest modern food-writers. The Centaur's Kitchen had never (before 2005) been shown to the public, except in the galleys and state-rooms of the ships that once sailed under the ensign of the Blue Funnel Line. It was written in 1964, at the request of the company chairman, to better instruct their Chinese cooks in cooking fresh and flavoursome food. In a few short chapters, Patience Gray lays out a whole repertoire, drawn mainly from the Mediterranean and France, that might be cooked on board ships. Her aim was to wean the cooks off frozen, dried and packeted food and to respond to both the seasons and the supplies available at ports of call. The style of cookery was much as in her earlier, and first, book Plats du Jour (1957): retro to us, bourgeois French in another form of shorthand. The style of writing is eloquent and prescriptive: the author keen to impart good habits as well as good cooking. Thus there are chapters about equipment and kitchen basics as well as mere recipes. The text has been illustrated by Miranda Gray, the author's daughter. Many of the pictures, just as the title, draw on Greek mythology. The reason for this is the Blue Funnel Line's custom of naming its ships for mythological figures (Centaur, Ariadne, Neptune, etc). Other drawings evoke the author's life beside the Mediterranean in Italy and the Greek isles. Patience Gray died in 2005. Her work has always been the intellectual acme of the cookery-book world. 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