What do you think?
Rate this book
Honey From a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia
This book is perhaps the jewel in Prospect Book's 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.'; Jeremy Round called Patience Gray 'he high priestess of cooking';, whose book pushes the form of the cookery book as far as it can go. 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. It was given a special award by the Andre Simon Book Prize committee in 1987.
375 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
77 people are currently reading
2616 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews
September 3, 2012
I want to grab your shoulders and shake you while yelling, " you don't understand! This book, this history, this cookbook, this novel! THIS is my #1 book. I shall always make pesto with mortar and pestle now because of this book. I shall always think of man as "nostalgia and a search for communion." Chickpeas, broad beans, quince jams, ewe's cheeses, pigeons, weeds, bilberries and little almond cakes dance in my head!"
November 1, 2017
This is a strange time to be alive, and I am a strange age to be. (Although, honestly? Every age is a strange one to be.) I am old enough to remember life without a lot of technology, and to have been raised by people without a lot of technology, and I am young enough to have had enough technology that I would look like a spaceman to my great grandparents. I feel like all I've been doing for the past 8 to 10 years, though, is watching things disappear.
That's why this book is a pleasure. A really weird, interesting pleasure. Patience Gray lived among Mediterranean peasants for a while, trailing a particular vein of marble she wanted to work with. She cooked in ancient ways. It might as well have been the 1760s rather than the 1960s. This is a lot of fun to read, even if you only have a passing interest in food, because it's like escaping to another world that you sort of know a trace of, from something your grandmother maybe said, a long time ago.
That's why this book is a pleasure. A really weird, interesting pleasure. Patience Gray lived among Mediterranean peasants for a while, trailing a particular vein of marble she wanted to work with. She cooked in ancient ways. It might as well have been the 1760s rather than the 1960s. This is a lot of fun to read, even if you only have a passing interest in food, because it's like escaping to another world that you sort of know a trace of, from something your grandmother maybe said, a long time ago.
January 19, 2016
Perhaps my favourite cookery book ever: discursive, erudite, amusing, delicious - it's a reflection on a near-vanished Mediterranean culture of poverty and community, fast and feast, without once becoming cloying or sentimental. It's shot through with Gray's acerbic wit and wisdom, as she follows her stonemason around quarries from Carrara to Naxos. It teaches you more about cuisine than fifty other plump illustrated cookbooks might - and connects food to place, perfectly.
March 14, 2023
An essential read for anyone who loves food writing. This book is half recipes and indexes of common ingredients in mediterranean cooking and half meditation on a simple, slow, community-driven way of life that feels as though it must have been disappearing even in the time it was written. The recipes are about simplicity of technique, old ways handed down over generations, the best ways to bring out flavors inherent in good ingredients, and while I don't know if I'll necessarily cook from them often, I feel inspired by depth of knowledge of the craft of cooking and the love of food that they display. This is the kind of book that makes you want to roll up your sleeves and cook over an open flame, seek out the freshest fish, try cooking with an overlooked ingredient. My used copy is already dog-eared and underlined and I can already see myself coming back to it over and over again for inspiration.
June 29, 2022
Just lovely, a mix a traditional recipes from the Mediterranean with literary and folkloric connections, historical musings, and occasional anarchist agitation.
February 6, 2019
I put this on my list after listening to a podcast interview with Samin Nosrat, who cited this as one of the fundamental books she was required to read in order to work with Alice Waters. It's a very interesting food book - technically it's a cook book, although I think it's much more literary than what we typically classify in that genre. It reminded me of a blend of styles, as if a hippie had cobbled together the styles of Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Taste with the collected work of M.F.K. Fisher and focused the content completely on the coastal Mediterranean regions. The effect is crunchy and timeless, and I think this book is more relevant now than it was even when published. I will say that it's almost more of a philosophy of cooking- you'll get more about the aesthetic feel of making a recipe than steps towards pure technique - but if you pick through it you can find some delicious recipe combinations using basic, quality ingredients. I can see the influence of this all over the food world now that I've read it and I'm glad I picked it up. For actually making food, I'd use another cookbook (this would just frustrate me in its formatting) - so overall I'd give this about 3.5 stars.
February 19, 2016
Pista e Coza
In this town there were still some old quarrymen left, whose working day for 40 years began at 3 o'clock in the morning by making breakfast, before walking up the mountains to the quarries, carrying their boots to save the leather, with a fiasco of wine and a merenda tied in a bundle. A retired quarryman called Catossi had a great reputation as a gran' mangiatore, a real gourmand, and this is what he cooked.
Getting up in the dark, he took his stonemason's hammer and banged that recalcitrant object, a stoccafísso, unsoaked, to shreds on the marble kitchen table. He then pounded some tomatoes, parsley and garlic in a mortar, threw the shredded stock fish and pounded odori (the aromatics above) into a large earthenware casserole (padella), added a liberal quantity of olive oil (no water), and simmered it until all liquid was absorbed. He ate it with a slab of polenta. The colossal thirst this induced he slaked with alternate glasses of water and grappa.
In this town there were still some old quarrymen left, whose working day for 40 years began at 3 o'clock in the morning by making breakfast, before walking up the mountains to the quarries, carrying their boots to save the leather, with a fiasco of wine and a merenda tied in a bundle. A retired quarryman called Catossi had a great reputation as a gran' mangiatore, a real gourmand, and this is what he cooked.
Getting up in the dark, he took his stonemason's hammer and banged that recalcitrant object, a stoccafísso, unsoaked, to shreds on the marble kitchen table. He then pounded some tomatoes, parsley and garlic in a mortar, threw the shredded stock fish and pounded odori (the aromatics above) into a large earthenware casserole (padella), added a liberal quantity of olive oil (no water), and simmered it until all liquid was absorbed. He ate it with a slab of polenta. The colossal thirst this induced he slaked with alternate glasses of water and grappa.
March 14, 2017
"The recipes in this book belong to an era of food grown for its own sake, not for profit."
Food writing excellence. Gray and her husband, a sculptor, lived in various rural areas of the Mediterranean in order to be near marble quarries. A passionate historical record, a joy to read. I especially loved all the information about edible wild plants.
Consult this if you want to make pig brains into a smooth sauce, learn how to abolish the acrid taste when preparing fox or badger ("applies equally to goat"), or are in the mood to try Calves Tongues with Morello Cherry Sauce.
Food writing excellence. Gray and her husband, a sculptor, lived in various rural areas of the Mediterranean in order to be near marble quarries. A passionate historical record, a joy to read. I especially loved all the information about edible wild plants.
Consult this if you want to make pig brains into a smooth sauce, learn how to abolish the acrid taste when preparing fox or badger ("applies equally to goat"), or are in the mood to try Calves Tongues with Morello Cherry Sauce.
September 16, 2023
When it comes to food, Europeans have great traditions. In America, on the other hand, we make ourselves an easy target of ridicule. For example, think of drive-through windows at restaurants. Not only is fast food crappy tasting and terrible for your health, but eating a meal in your car is just downright gross. No class, no style, no elegance, no taste. People turn their vehicles into motorized garbage cans this way. I realize not every meal can be gourmet, but with a minimal amount of effort you can be a little less trashy. And its nice that we have a much broader range of ethnic options than we used to, but so many of these restaurants Americanize their food to the point where they no longer resemble the authentic dishes you get in their nations of origin. I’ve had Thai curries that were so sweet they tasted like desserts and larb without fish sauce. Ask for something spicy and they dump a ton of salt in it. Burritos, nachos, and fajitas aren’t eaten in Mexico. Hummous and falafels aren’t Greek, having their origins in Palestine. Greek people eat massive amounts of seafood but you never see fish on a Greek menu in America. The vomit they serve at The Olive Garden bears little resemblance to real Italian food. Don’t get me going on how fake our Chinese food is. Our fruits and vegetables taste like plastic, unlike the produce in other countries. Obviously not all food in America sucks, but more than half of it does. At least we have better food than British people do. What hell is marmite? Industrial sludge on bread?Axle grease in a jar? It tastes like cigarette ashes with shoe polish.
Mediterranean people, on the other hand, know all about food. So when I heard about Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed, I knew I had to read it. The author spent time living in rural Mediterranean countries during the 1960s and 1970s with her husband, an artists she calls The Sculptor rather than using his real name. She witnessed the farming lifestyle of people in Catalonia, Tuscany, the Greek island of Naxos, and Apulia, the part of Italy shaped like the heel of the boot, a place where the local language is a mixture of Italian and Greek. As she wrote down her collection of recipes, she decided to put them into context with passages about how the cooking materials were collected or harvested, and detailed all this with short passages about the culture of the people she encountered. What results is a cookbook you can read as part ethnography, part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophical discourse examining what it means to live a good life.
The recipes cover a wide range of ingredients with chapters on farmed vegetables, wild herbs, mushrooms, seafood, and game. If you’ve ever wondered how to cook a fox, a horse, or a sea urchin you need look no further. If you want to cook everyday items like chicken, mussels, or zucchini you can find that here too. A lot of the recipes are redundant, being variations of food fried in olive oil with garlic and diverse seasonings, occasionally with anchovies or tomatoes thrown in. But here is the catch: the types of tomatoes, or other vegetables used, depends on the season since different kinds of produce naturally ripen at different times of the year depending on the season and climate. These people did not have supermarkets that have the same industrially-grown, genetically altered produce all year long the way we do in the 21st century. European farmers lived so close to nature that the seasons dictated what kind of game you had, what fruits you could pick, or what kind of wine you could drink. It may have been a harder life, but the food was of much higher quality. In the 1970s, Patience Gray realized these cultures were vanishing so she wrote all her observations down for posterity.
The author, rightly so, must have thought that not many people would be interested in a cookbook full of recipes that most people probably wouldn’t use or even couldn’t use considering that some of these food items no longer exist. Some of the cooking utensils are rare or obsolete. In my favorite chapter of all, she gives a detailed analysis of how cooking over open flames with different varieties of wood complement the flavors of all kinds of dishes. With this in mind, you begin to see why these traditions couldn’t survive. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources to find twenty different kinds of wood to cook twenty different meals.
But to get back to the main point, she made this book readable by adding in passages about the different places she lived in. There are descriptions of villages, architecture, farms, kitchens, and landscapes. She makes mention of some of the rural people and their customs along with musings on their religious and political beliefs. With a healthy contempt for the fascism of Mussolini, she points out that these rural people were mostly anarchists or communists. In our day you can criticize these ideologies all you want, but with hindsight you have to realize that when industrial capitalism is the dominant economic system and your community is famished and living at the edge of death, all those “isms” looked like desirable alternatives.
Finally, Gray iterates her own philosophy, simply put, that lacking something is what makes it pleasurable when you get it. Tomatoes taste like ecstasy when they are harvested because the farmers can’t have them for three-quarters of the year. It’s like saying Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if you have it every day. This might be a cause of such widespred psychological dissatisfaction in our times. At least that’s what The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski said. In our age of abundance and mass conformity this might not be so clear, yet we may still know it by unconscious instinct. It is why a rare book might sell for $500 while a mass-produced Harry Potter novel will get a book dealer little more than fifty cents. The problem is that Patience Gray states her philosophical position but never explores it in depth.
In fact, she doesn’t explore many ideas at all in depth. Her writing just isn’t that good. It’s interesting that she created a cookbook you can read, but the things to be read are not always clear or even interesting. The recipes get redundant and a bit of a chore to read and some of the rest of it is just weak in its execution. I am in love with the idea of this book, but not the final product.
Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed is not one of the most memorable books I have come across, but I don’t regret reading it. Having traveled and studied a lot, I can’t say I’m lacking in alternate perspectives on the world and the current state of our society, but I did enjoy imagining myself being in the Mediterranean places she described. It also gave me renewed inspiration for cooking; I learned the best way to cook radicchio and was reminded that I haven’t had any scungilli in a really long time. Once was enough though and I probably won’t be re-reading it this the future.
Mediterranean people, on the other hand, know all about food. So when I heard about Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed, I knew I had to read it. The author spent time living in rural Mediterranean countries during the 1960s and 1970s with her husband, an artists she calls The Sculptor rather than using his real name. She witnessed the farming lifestyle of people in Catalonia, Tuscany, the Greek island of Naxos, and Apulia, the part of Italy shaped like the heel of the boot, a place where the local language is a mixture of Italian and Greek. As she wrote down her collection of recipes, she decided to put them into context with passages about how the cooking materials were collected or harvested, and detailed all this with short passages about the culture of the people she encountered. What results is a cookbook you can read as part ethnography, part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophical discourse examining what it means to live a good life.
The recipes cover a wide range of ingredients with chapters on farmed vegetables, wild herbs, mushrooms, seafood, and game. If you’ve ever wondered how to cook a fox, a horse, or a sea urchin you need look no further. If you want to cook everyday items like chicken, mussels, or zucchini you can find that here too. A lot of the recipes are redundant, being variations of food fried in olive oil with garlic and diverse seasonings, occasionally with anchovies or tomatoes thrown in. But here is the catch: the types of tomatoes, or other vegetables used, depends on the season since different kinds of produce naturally ripen at different times of the year depending on the season and climate. These people did not have supermarkets that have the same industrially-grown, genetically altered produce all year long the way we do in the 21st century. European farmers lived so close to nature that the seasons dictated what kind of game you had, what fruits you could pick, or what kind of wine you could drink. It may have been a harder life, but the food was of much higher quality. In the 1970s, Patience Gray realized these cultures were vanishing so she wrote all her observations down for posterity.
The author, rightly so, must have thought that not many people would be interested in a cookbook full of recipes that most people probably wouldn’t use or even couldn’t use considering that some of these food items no longer exist. Some of the cooking utensils are rare or obsolete. In my favorite chapter of all, she gives a detailed analysis of how cooking over open flames with different varieties of wood complement the flavors of all kinds of dishes. With this in mind, you begin to see why these traditions couldn’t survive. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources to find twenty different kinds of wood to cook twenty different meals.
But to get back to the main point, she made this book readable by adding in passages about the different places she lived in. There are descriptions of villages, architecture, farms, kitchens, and landscapes. She makes mention of some of the rural people and their customs along with musings on their religious and political beliefs. With a healthy contempt for the fascism of Mussolini, she points out that these rural people were mostly anarchists or communists. In our day you can criticize these ideologies all you want, but with hindsight you have to realize that when industrial capitalism is the dominant economic system and your community is famished and living at the edge of death, all those “isms” looked like desirable alternatives.
Finally, Gray iterates her own philosophy, simply put, that lacking something is what makes it pleasurable when you get it. Tomatoes taste like ecstasy when they are harvested because the farmers can’t have them for three-quarters of the year. It’s like saying Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if you have it every day. This might be a cause of such widespred psychological dissatisfaction in our times. At least that’s what The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski said. In our age of abundance and mass conformity this might not be so clear, yet we may still know it by unconscious instinct. It is why a rare book might sell for $500 while a mass-produced Harry Potter novel will get a book dealer little more than fifty cents. The problem is that Patience Gray states her philosophical position but never explores it in depth.
In fact, she doesn’t explore many ideas at all in depth. Her writing just isn’t that good. It’s interesting that she created a cookbook you can read, but the things to be read are not always clear or even interesting. The recipes get redundant and a bit of a chore to read and some of the rest of it is just weak in its execution. I am in love with the idea of this book, but not the final product.
Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed is not one of the most memorable books I have come across, but I don’t regret reading it. Having traveled and studied a lot, I can’t say I’m lacking in alternate perspectives on the world and the current state of our society, but I did enjoy imagining myself being in the Mediterranean places she described. It also gave me renewed inspiration for cooking; I learned the best way to cook radicchio and was reminded that I haven’t had any scungilli in a really long time. Once was enough though and I probably won’t be re-reading it this the future.
August 7, 2020
This is delightful window on the kind of rural life in southern Europe, which must have all but disappeared now.
I've had this book on my shelves for many years, ever since I visited the village of Apollona in Naxos in the late 1980s. I've dipped into a few of the recipes from time to time, as evidenced by the stains on some of the pages, but I've never read the book from cover to cover.
It's a fascinating evocation of traditional ways of growing, harvesting and eating, and people's connections to the land, peppered with anecdotes of the author's interactions with the locals, and descriptions of the strange and sparse places in which she lived with 'the sculptor', who worked with the local stone in each location.
You wouldn't even begin to try many of the recipes, but the depth of knowledge, and the history behind the ingredients and methods make for an interesting and satisfying read.
I've had this book on my shelves for many years, ever since I visited the village of Apollona in Naxos in the late 1980s. I've dipped into a few of the recipes from time to time, as evidenced by the stains on some of the pages, but I've never read the book from cover to cover.
It's a fascinating evocation of traditional ways of growing, harvesting and eating, and people's connections to the land, peppered with anecdotes of the author's interactions with the locals, and descriptions of the strange and sparse places in which she lived with 'the sculptor', who worked with the local stone in each location.
You wouldn't even begin to try many of the recipes, but the depth of knowledge, and the history behind the ingredients and methods make for an interesting and satisfying read.
Want to read
November 1, 2017Recommendation from NPR: Books - 10/31/2017
February 12, 2020
This is a combination memoir, travelogue, and cooking book. The author, and her sculptor husband, lived in Southern Italy, Greece, and Spain (specifically Catalunya) beginning in the 1960s in search of marble for her husband to work. They lived in extremely austere circumstances often without electricity, running water, or a modern stove. She spent lots of time learning about the local food traditions from her rural neighbors. The book is a wonderful look into how mediterranean people lived long ago, much of the food and the way she cooks it (often over open fires or in ancient wood fueled bread ovens) probably hasn't changed much in a thousand years. She also writes very colorfully about her neighbors and their day to day life.
She includes recipes, but please note that most of them assume you are cooking over an open fire, so you'll need to make some adaptations to cook them in a modern kitchen. Many of them sound delicious so I think it will be worth the trouble.
She includes recipes, but please note that most of them assume you are cooking over an open fire, so you'll need to make some adaptations to cook them in a modern kitchen. Many of them sound delicious so I think it will be worth the trouble.
December 24, 2020
One day, I hope to be the sort of hirsute old man Gray describes, snacking on fried anchovies and rough red wine. Good food can (should be?) simple, and apart from the rather baroque recipes for things like hare and fox there are interesting, simple recipes for good food here. The whole idea of edible weeds is salutary in a time when we are learning about the negative effects of excessive meat consumption on our health and on the environment.
It’s not just about the food, though. It’s about a mystical connection to the rhythms of the earth. It is a field guide to the edible flora and fauna of parts of the Mediterranean. It has anarchism! It has opera! It is a cookbook that makes you think. It is a cookbook whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve only cooked a few of the recipes, but the way of life she describes inspires me daily to roll up my sleeves in the kitchen.
It’s not just about the food, though. It’s about a mystical connection to the rhythms of the earth. It is a field guide to the edible flora and fauna of parts of the Mediterranean. It has anarchism! It has opera! It is a cookbook that makes you think. It is a cookbook whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve only cooked a few of the recipes, but the way of life she describes inspires me daily to roll up my sleeves in the kitchen.
August 15, 2012
Wonderful, a good read as much as a cookery book
August 4, 2020
Given that most of my favorite food bloggers, podcasters and writers cite this as one of their favorite books, I was predestined to love this and love it I did. It's a fascinating, wonderfully escapist glimpse into Gray's several decades cooking, foraging, and documenting the disappearing food traditions of remote locales within Italy, Greece, and Spain. She was married to Norman Mommens (a sculptor) and it seems all the good marble is located in ancient mediterranean villages evocative of classic Greek myths and a deep nostalgia for a simpler (if brutally ascetic) way of living. In fact, she repeatedly insists how very difficult and punishing it is to survive in these oft-romanticized places, but it wasn't at all convincing! Take this passage from her time in Apollona, Greece:
I mean....come on! Yes, I love innovation and progress and technology and all the attendant perks of civilization. However, by the end of the book I just wanted to sell all of my belongings and go forage for weeds and wild walnuts before enjoying a glass of bootleg grappa with Patience and Norman. And apparently they got this a lot. In one of the final passages, a visitor exclaims what a paradise their home/life is. The sculptor replies "Ma l'inferno purtròppo è tanto più comodo!"/ "Here is a real paradise. But hell is so much more convenient! An iconic line that will stay with me for years to come.
The bricks were cemented at the precise distance to support a large black pot over a twig fire...This was ideal for summer, and as the sea was at the door, I was able to light a fire, start the pot with its contents cooking, plunge into the sea at mid-day and by the time I had swum across the bay and back, the lunch was ready and the fire a heap of ashes.
I mean....come on! Yes, I love innovation and progress and technology and all the attendant perks of civilization. However, by the end of the book I just wanted to sell all of my belongings and go forage for weeds and wild walnuts before enjoying a glass of bootleg grappa with Patience and Norman. And apparently they got this a lot. In one of the final passages, a visitor exclaims what a paradise their home/life is. The sculptor replies "Ma l'inferno purtròppo è tanto più comodo!"/ "Here is a real paradise. But hell is so much more convenient! An iconic line that will stay with me for years to come.
February 17, 2021
Classic book about the people and cuisine of Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades& Apulia from around the mid sixties where British expats were still something of an anomaly.
Beautifully written, literary in style with humorous moments (as in the chapter on ‘The Threat of Bombardment’ following beans consumption and a mention of the ‘salutatory effects of garlic.’ ;) Gray documents the lives and seasons of the people around her with warmth and integrity.
Seasons, places, and people are portrayed through a literary style, and historical annexes are outlined as appropriate(Classic Greek & Roman history as well as science & intellectual debate). One cannot help but think Gray was a brilliant person... I cannot help but think of her research in putting this whole thing together.
Re some of the criticisms of ‘not finding a recipe you’d use’ - try a simple spaghetti & garlic, or uncooked tomato sauce, or the infamous ‘double sauce’ - all, easy to prepare recipes. Sure there are recipes for wild boar, fox, pheasant, & rabbit which most North Americans probably won’t use, but you read this book not only for the recipes but to learn about a people and a cuisine.
Re the ‘weeds’ of the title- Gray uses Latin names as well as local & popular British nomenclature so looking up vegetable species in a guidebook is possible. Substitutes are listed as well.
Gray has documented the culinary history of a time and a place, and is well versed in the philosophy of ‘eat fresh, eat local’ well before it became popular & trendy.
Highly recommend for people who love food and cooking; and appreciate a literary and historic read.
Beautifully written, literary in style with humorous moments (as in the chapter on ‘The Threat of Bombardment’ following beans consumption and a mention of the ‘salutatory effects of garlic.’ ;) Gray documents the lives and seasons of the people around her with warmth and integrity.
Seasons, places, and people are portrayed through a literary style, and historical annexes are outlined as appropriate(Classic Greek & Roman history as well as science & intellectual debate). One cannot help but think Gray was a brilliant person... I cannot help but think of her research in putting this whole thing together.
Re some of the criticisms of ‘not finding a recipe you’d use’ - try a simple spaghetti & garlic, or uncooked tomato sauce, or the infamous ‘double sauce’ - all, easy to prepare recipes. Sure there are recipes for wild boar, fox, pheasant, & rabbit which most North Americans probably won’t use, but you read this book not only for the recipes but to learn about a people and a cuisine.
Re the ‘weeds’ of the title- Gray uses Latin names as well as local & popular British nomenclature so looking up vegetable species in a guidebook is possible. Substitutes are listed as well.
Gray has documented the culinary history of a time and a place, and is well versed in the philosophy of ‘eat fresh, eat local’ well before it became popular & trendy.
Highly recommend for people who love food and cooking; and appreciate a literary and historic read.
July 29, 2021
Patience Gray travelled the Mediterranean following her sculptor husband in search of the perfect stone whilst she sought out the perfect local dishes. Recipe book, travel, horticulture, language, customs, culture; a cornucopia of food knowledge gained from her rural neighbours wherever they stopped. Italy, Naxos (Greece), Catalan and Provancal recipes are described with charm and delight conjuring another world that can be traced back thousands of years of European history to those depicted in ceramics from ancient Greece. I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of feasting, with course after course of amazing food washed down with wines from the surrounding vineyards. Travel the Mediterranean from your armchair & re-create the dishes from the detailed recipes & methods. A delightful book that will be consulted for a lifetime. Loved it.
October 12, 2020
This was painful to get through. Though I'm a big fan of Mediterranean cuisine, the different translations into 4 romance languages, the lack of a story line, the erudite style was just too heavy handed for me. This book took itself too seriously, no humor. It took me a long time to finish it because it was just too academic. I admit I have not tried cooking from any of the recipes. Not sure how they'll turn out since everything seemed to be cooking in the rustic manner on an open fire... If I hadn't used an Amazon giftcard to buy this book, I'd feel worse. Now I just have it in my collection only because the public library didn't carry it. I can see why they don't because it seems out of date; no one cooks like this anymore.
July 25, 2025
This wonderful book follows Patience Gray and a husband she calls only “The Sculptor” from Catalonia to Liguria and from the Greek island of Naxos to their final home in Apulia in the extreme south of Italy. In a certain sense it is a cookbook, but it is also and more importantly a description of a frugal lifestyle in deep harmony with nature, and an account of the so-called Mediterranean diet, the healthiest way to eat, in all its variations.
July 22, 2024
I stumbled upon this book while searching for works illustrated by Corinna Sargood (earlier this year I was blown away by the excellent book Wise Children, which has amazing endpaper illustrations by Sargood).
This book is beyond a cookbook. It has qualities of a well-researched anthropology, history, and travel diary as well as useful recipes.
This book is beyond a cookbook. It has qualities of a well-researched anthropology, history, and travel diary as well as useful recipes.
March 8, 2020
An excellent and well researched meditation on the communities Patience Gray lived in. Working class food in Italy, Catalon, and Greece. It can drag at times when talking about different recipes but Gray really knows how to make food writing pop.
January 11, 2020
a way of thinking about ingredients
July 25, 2021
delightful content and interesting albeit challenging recipes. Writing style is all over the place and definitely not a flowing narrative.
October 10, 2021
I loved this book - food, history, Italy, wonderful writing - what more could I want!
July 7, 2024
I loved this book so much. Definitely saw the link to Salt Fat Acid Heat. I had to return it to the library before I finished.
Read
September 23, 2024i read this because they talked about it on npr. i never listen to npr but i did that day and then i read this book.
March 22, 2025
Oh this is the stuff of a life
September 7, 2019
This is a mystical person in food and life.
A total person.
Powerful book about living life in total.
She and her lover, partner, husband Norman Mommens get beyond the basics of living and actually turn the corner.
One of the best books I have ever read.
A total person.
Powerful book about living life in total.
She and her lover, partner, husband Norman Mommens get beyond the basics of living and actually turn the corner.
One of the best books I have ever read.
November 9, 2019
Patience forever
Displaying 1 - 30 of 54 reviews