Grace DiNapoli

2005 | No. 69

Patience Gray
Appreciating One of the Finest of All Writers about Food

By Edward Behr

Patience Gray died at the age of 87 in March, 2005, at Spigolizzi, her home on the Salentine Peninsula of Puglia. She was the author of one of the best books that will ever be written about food: Honey from a Weed, published in 1986. It achieved critical success in both Britain and the United States although never financial success. I visited Spigolizzi twice in the 1990s, and for a few years I exchanged letters with Patience. By this time she was frail and slight, and unexpectedly to me she was devoted to cigarettes, with a smoker’s deep wrinkles and gravelly voice. Honey from a Weed bears the subtitle Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. She was led to those four places, in the 1960s and 70s, when modernity had not yet quite arrived, by Norman Mommens, with whom she lived for almost 40 years. He was a sculptor in search of stone. As a result of their migrations, she found herself in “the mysterious grip of olive, lentisk, fig and vine.” Honey from a Weed is a cookbook intended largely for urbanites, but it describes mainly peasant food and makes little allowance for modern ways of thinking.

In a stylish literary voice, the author addresses the reader as if she were giving advice to a daughter or a friend. Her tone is authoritative and yet often humble, as if Patience were merely a student — as she was, of the cooking of her neighbors. A reader might not be conscious of the large quantity of practical instruction, because of all the interspersed stories, deepening the portraits of the food, and because of Patience’s delight in that food, in nature, and in the history alive in the ancient places where she dwelled.

At times, she seems to be telling fairytales — the black and white drawings by Corinna Sargood only enhance the effect. Patience writes of staying with friends in Vendrell in Catalonia, “The Portal del Pardó is a palace of many rooms and part of it is a 14th century tower which forms an arched entrance into the town-village. I slept on a mattress of hay in this tower on a remarkable 16th century bed”. The room contained almost nothing else.“ I used to lie on the hay mattress and listen to the carts tinkling and rattling under the wide arch below, rumbling like chariots, at four o’clock in the morning as the men of Vendrell rode out to the dustblown fields.”

Even the instructions of a recipe can be written as a story: “We plucked the birds, emptied their crops, removed their entrails and severed their necks and coral feet; stuffed sprigs of thyme inside them with a garlic clove and salt and applied some salt outside; then trussed them, laid them in a deep dish and anointed them with a little olive oil.” That is most of the first paragraph of the recipe for pernice con passione, which continues for five paragraphs.

The book teaches a way to think about food, a generally reductive approach. “Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance,” Patience says. She relates the fasting practiced on the island of Naxos at Advent and Lent to the times of year when there was little left to eat. “Fasting is therefore in the nature of things, and feasting punctuates it with a joyful excess.”

As much as Patience loved books, Honey from a Weed records mostly what she learned “from people who have never read a book.” She writes, “In my experience it is the countryman who is the real gourmet and for good reason; it is he who has cultivated, raised, hunted or fished the raw materials and has made the wine himself. The preoccupation of his wife is to do justice to his labours and bring the outcome triumphantly to table”. She didn’t dismiss grand cooking, far from it, but she traced its origins to those roots. “It sometimes seems as if I have been rescuing a few strands from a former and more diligent way of life, now being fatally eroded by an entirely new set of values”. Patience became for me an anchor.

The first chapter of Honey from a Weed is titled “Fire.” An outdoor fire should be “set between stones and oriented according to the wind.” She describes the effects of a dozen kinds of wood. For cooking on that fire, she gives specific advice only on fish: “Large fishes are best left unscaled . . . the skin and scales are then removed entire.” She proceeds from “Fire” to “Pots and Pans.” That chapter presents the mere eight items found in a Greek island kitchen (one of them is a chimney hook) and goes on to enumerate the contents, which might be acquired over time, of a more elaborate batterie de cuisine, including mortars in both marble and wood (required to prepare certain recipes in the book), stoneware and earthenware pots, but also a balloon whisk. There is, of course, a chapter on edible weeds, and there’s one on wild mushrooms. Three pages are given over to “Pasticceria and the Apulian Baroque.”

“Good cooking is the result of a balance struck between frugality and liberality,” she writes, “something I learned in the kitchen of my friend Irving Davis.” He was a bibliophile and antiquarian book dealer who opened his first shop with an Italian partner in Florence in 1911. “At Irving’s table I learned the full poetic meaning of the word ‘classical,’ in which all forethought, selection, trouble, timing — the mechanics of creation — were erased by the disarming simplicity of the outcome, precipitating pleasure and delight.” Davis had a perfectionist’s disposition. Once in London, he was disappointed with his preparation of a duck and, before his guests, flung it from the window. It caught on a drainpipe, where it hung until firemen rescued it after neighbors complained of the smell.

Honey from a Weed is a sensual book, and yet one of the more sensual recipes, for Catalan pa amb tomàquet, was cut from the manuscript. Patience wrote to me, “It was there [in the Priorat] at breakfast one morning that we had Pa amb Tomàquet at its origins, quite other than you could possibly find at sea level in modern life. It was Alan who crossed my recipe out of HFAW because he wanted to write a genteel description for townees! And wouldn’t believe that the tomato is crushed on both sides of a slab of country bread!” Alan Davidson of Prospect Books was the book’s editor and publisher; he devoted much of his own labor to bringing the book into being. Patience thought of sending me the excised words, but she said in a postscript: “I looked at my recipe, it is too simple the explanation of what happens at table: the preparation. It is simple but there is a certain hysteria around it, truly Catalan, as everyone knows how to do it, but differently! I left out the bowl for the crushed tomatoes (thrown away) and the knife and fork . . . I don’t send it.”

The wealth of knowledge and wisdom represented by the past around her invigorated Patience. The last thing she wanted to do was interfere by making what some might consider to be improvements. She was appalled when she heard that a writer had advocated mixing the cornmeal for polenta all at once into cold water, to avoid lumps, rather than letting it fall slowly from one hand, while carefully stirring with the other, into boiling water. The cold water was to her a dishonor to all the good women who had ever made polenta.

She was born Patience Jean Stanham in Surrey on October 31, 1917 and grew up in a house of stultifying respectability under the cloud of her father’s temper. He was a military man and then a photographer, who disliked foreign things and was unhappy to be surrounded by a family entirely of women. His mysogynistic unkindness was so extreme that Patience decided never to marry. Eventually, she discovered that his father had been a rabbi in Poland who fled an 1861 pogrom; in England, he married the daughter of a Lincolnshire farmer and became a Unitarian minister. Patience passed her university exams at 14, two years too early to enter. Instead she went to Bonn to study German, economics, and art history and later earned a degree in economics from the University of London. She never married Thomas Gray, the father of her two children, who in fact was already married, but she took his name and brought up her children herself. She supported her family through various jobs, among them journalist and textile designer. With Primrose Boyd, she wrote a best-selling cookbook, Plats du Jour, published in 1957, a work based largely on reading and practice at home. Patience was also a translator of the Larousse Gastronomique.

It may have been just a year later that she fell in love with Norman. When I knew him, he wore his white hair long and full, and he had a full beard to match. They both followed world events closely. Norman read the far left newspaper Il Manifesto and took an apocalyptic view of the world, especially its environmental state. (He was haunted by the time he had spent as a forced laborer in Germany, where he had experienced General Patton’s bombardment during the crossing of the Rhine.) But he seemed to have a calm strength, being completely kind and warm. With Norman, Patience took up the portable craft of making silver and gold jewelry.

Spigolizzi, the farmhouse they bought in 1970, lies on high, stony ground about ten miles from the tip of the heel of the Italian boot, where the Ionian and Adriatic seas meet. From the house, you see nearly 180 degrees of water, with Calabria visible in the distance when the sun sets behind it. Attached to the house, known as a masseria, is a square two-story tower, an accommodation for guests, which Norman built himself and painted pink. All around are primordial stone walls, and not far away is a stone threshing circle. The house was furnished with little money. In the kitchen, center of social encounters when the garden was too cool or hot or wet, two old bentwood chairs were each draped with a woolen pelt for softness. On the walls, Norman had painted extraordinary symbolic images, looking like folk art but with a breath of Modernism. The company they liked, they adored. “It was a euphoric evening,” Patience might write. It was the euphoria of talk.

When I visited Spigolizzi, there was no telephone; a little photovoltaic current ran one or two lights. Mostly, there was flame, from the fire, candles, and lamps. Running water came from a tank on a roof that was filled from the well using a hand pump; in other homes they had had to carry water. They drank the wine Norman made, consumed the oil from their olives (60 liters of it a year!), and ate the peas and beans they grew, in all the stages from sweet through increasingly starchy and then dried. There were ironies. One summer, their neolithic activities were so frequently interrupted by so many unannounced visitors on vacation that Norman began to keep count until there were so many that he gave up. Oversized concrete poles running past their house carried electric power to the second home of a couple from the north of Italy, a new building that Patience avowed to be illegal.

Not all of Patience’s writings were about food. She compiled some of her autobiographical writings and published them herself in 1999 in a book called Work Adventures Childhood Dreams. She wrote Ring Doves and Snakes about the year she and Norman spent on Naxos. She edited the posthumous publication of Irving Davis’s A Catalan Cookery Book: A Collection of Impossible Recipes. Prospect Books has reprinted her 1964 Centaur’s Kitchen, recipes that she wrote for the Chinese cooks of the Centaur, a ship of the Blue Funnel Line.

Like her conversation, Patience’s letters were a great pleasure; they arrived like gifts. But she was an intimidating correspondent, to me, sometimes in the intellectual content of her letters and often in their frequency. She wrote hundreds of letters in a year. “It’s a vice,” she told me. The letters were typewritten, sometimes with a black-and-red ribbon, which allowed emphasis in red. She also liked Capital Letters and stressed words by underlining them or by placing a period under each letter, which gave a magical lilt. She liked her name and its meaning, liked signing it in Italian: Pazienza.

In 1994, almost with regret and not wishing the news to become widespread, she and Norman married. After he died in 2000, Patience’s son Nicolas and his wife Maggie moved to Spigolizzi to watch over her, and they installed the conveniences of telephone, electricity, and a small refrigerator.

One can no longer choose to live as Patience and Norman did — and as some others did, too, in the second half of the 20th century — close to the land among Western European peasants. While there may still be enough unspoiled land, there are no longer the people who live so differently from the rest of us. ●


From issue 69

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