Bohemian recipe
PAUL BAILEY Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray By Adam Federman Chelsea Green Publishing £23 Oldie price £12.97 inc p&p Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed is one of those rare cookery books that can be read as a work of literature. It was published in 1986 to considerable acclaim, not least by the writer Angela Carter, who compared Gray’s prose to that of Sir Thomas Browne, the great 17th-century polymath. It’s not such a wild comparison, as Adam Federman is at pains to demonstrate in his even-handed biography of a woman with an adventurous nature and a constantly
inquiring mind. In 1937, just before her twentieth birthday, she travelled to Hungary with her best friend, Betty Barnado, hitch-hiking through Belgium, Germany and Austria, before going down the Danube to Budapest.
She was always happiest when away from England and the stifling conventions of middle-class life. She was at home in four, or perhaps five, European languages, and was formidably well-read.
She grew up in what sounds like a rural paradise, in Surrey and then Sussex. The family could afford servants and a gardener, thanks to the fact that her mother, Olive, had inherited a fortune. Her father, Hermann, who kept his Jewishness a secret, was a distant, officious figure to his three daughters. The couple hid their dislike of one another behind a carapace of gentility. Patience found their hypocrisy insufferable and escaped as soon as she could. When Hermann was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1935, Olive was desolate. Patience would write, years later, that she had loved him, despite the barriers he set up to ward off affection.
In London, she lived a life of wellheeled bohemianism, working for a time as a secretary at the Foreign Office. She met Thomas Gray, one of those professional charmers who flit in and out of the lives of pretty young women. They had two children, Nicholas and Miranda, but they never married. He was not the trustworthy type, and she feared the domestic routine of marriage.
She was that rare thing in the 1940s, a single mother living off her wits. She was shunned by family friends and the word ‘sinful’ was applied to her. The muchmaligned Olive, a source of considerate kindness in Federman’s pages, was there to look after her grandchildren and give her difficult daughter financial support.
She started to write in earnest and was employed as Women’s Editor by the Observer in the 1950s, when the arts pages were filled with lustrous names. She tried to dispense with the idea of the suburban housewife and her ideal home with all the latest gadgets. She wrote and commissioned articles on design, with emphasis on jewellery and ceramics, and even suggested that her readers might actually be interested in the latest philosophical ideas that were being discussed in Paris. A little existentialism might be the perfect accompaniment to the Sunday breakfast.
It was in the 1950s, too, that she produced, with Primrose Boyd, the still useful cookbook Plats du Jour, with illustrations by David Gentleman. Adam Federman has a lot of gossipy fun recounting the publishing history of this pioneering work, which deserves its place on kitchen shelves alongside Elizabeth David (who made typically acidic comments on the flaws in the first draft, which were later corrected at the editor’s insistence) and Jane Grigson.
The truth is that Gray and Boyd really couldn’t bear each other, to such an extent that their contributions were delivered to the publisher separately. A much-needed reprint was stopped in its tracks because the authors couldn’t agree about the royalties they were due. Patience Gray wanted a larger share.
At the heart of Fasting and Feasting is the deeply romantic story of Patience’s love for the Belgian sculptor Norman Mommens, with whom she lived and worked for more than three decades. They set up home in Carrara, then Catalonia, on Naxos and then, lastingly, in Spigolizzi in a remote part of Puglia, southern Italy. Wherever they went, she took notes about the local flora and fauna, writing down recipes that were passed on by people who often couldn’t read or write.
They had no electricity, no telephone, and what plumbing there was could best be described as ‘basic’. Eventually, she wrote an account of their enchanted lives. In manuscript, it bore the title Adam Federman has chosen for this entertaining Life. It did the publishing rounds for years before the food writer Alan Davidson rescued it from oblivion. His firm, Prospect Books, brought it out as Honey from a Weed and it is now regarded, rightly, as a masterpiece.
It only remains to say that, in times of financial stress, Olive – who lived to a great age – invariably sent a rescuing cheque.