It was 1986. I had not long arrived in London but regularly visited the fine emporium Books For Cooks in Notting Hill. I was a young cook then and being paid accordingly. What I did not have in cash I made up for in enthusiasm. One day, I approached the table at which sat the formidable Clarissa Dickson Wright who took one look at the pile of books in my arms and said, “Are you really going to buy all those?”

I blushed furiously, trying to respond.

“Here,” she said, “give me those and take this. It has just been published, is brilliant, and you must have it.” And she handed me a book with a beautifully illustrated cover. It was Honey From a Weed by Patience Gray. For ever after I was devoted to Clarissa.

Honey From a Weed is the writings of a woman who followed her man, the sculptor Norman Mommens who moved them to the Mediterranean in search of marble. In endless small steps, Patience Gray turned her back on a life in London as a journalist – she was women’s page editor of the Observer – before settling finally in a farmhouse in Apulia, southern Italy, the kitchen of which is depicted on the cover.

Remarkably ahead of its time, Honey From a Weed is scrupulous in its knowledge of local and seasonal cooking, and forages as part of daily life. They never had a fridge, electricity or running water. The recipes are beautiful and even the alarming recipe for cooking a male fox shot in cold winter months shows humour in the rigorous personality of the author.

I cook several recipes still from this estimable work – a dish of rabbit and prunes and a green vegetable puree among others. But it is the conjuring of time and place that enthrals the reader. The recipes take on an otherworldly quality as evinced in la salsa secca. A fresh tomato sauce is poured cup by cup into many plates then laid out on the roof to be dried with the help of the north wind. The caveat is to beware the sirocco for “it is of no use”.

Honey From a Weed is a great work, beautifully written, a book that encourages taking the time to read quietly, passages that inspire and inform equally of a life and foods quite unique, far removed from the urgencies and furies of modern life.

Spaghettini col piselli – fine spaghetti with peas

An early summer Venetian dish. It is only worth making with very fine pasta and perfectly fresh young peas. For 4 people.

400g spaghettini
1kg new peas
100g fresh butter
1 sweet white onion, finely chopped
salt
leaves of mint
curls of butter

Shell the peas and blanch them in boiling water for 2 minutes. Strain, and reserve their liquor. Melt the butter slowly in a pan, then put in the chopped onion. Simmer for 5 minutes, then put in the peas, salt, mint leaves, and a very little of the pea liquor.

Boil the spaghettini rapidly in plenty of salted water for 4 or 5 minutes, strain and put into deep soup plates. Spoon the peas into the centre of the pasta on each plate, with some of the sauce, and crown each centre with a curl of butter. No parmesan with this.

La truita – the Catalan omelette

The Catalan omelette accommodates a diversity of vegetables like the Italian frittata, but is often folded and presented in the French way.

Taking small artichokes as an example, the prickly Sicilian kind or the unprickly more rounded Roman kind: peel back their outer leaves (they’re tough), then slice off one third of each artichoke at the top and leave a few centimetres of stem which you then trim. Slice each artichoke in half vertically, remove the little choke if there is one, with your thumbnail, then slice each half into four equal sections. Immerse in acidulated water for a few minutes, then drain dry and throw the sections into hot oil in a pan; they quickly brown. Beat up 3 eggs, season, pour into the pan, stir, and fold as for a normal omelette.

Haricot beans (already cooked), raw peppers sweet or hot, onions, boiled roots of chicory and scorzonera are all treated in the same way, as is the much prized wild asparagus.

Bacallà a la llauna – salt cod cooked in the oven in an earthenware dish

One of the best ways of preparing salt cod, using the thickest upper part of the fish. In Catalan, llauna means tin, but llauna paradoxically is also the name of a shallow but robust earthenware dish of antique form with a curved base, used here.

8 pieces of bacallà weighing about I kilo
flour
olive oil
5 cloves of garlic
I kilo of fresh tomatoes
2 more cloves garlic
parsley

Soak the cod the day before (unless sold already soaked, as in Catalan markets), changing the water several times. Cut into neat pieces about 7 x 5 cm. Rinse them and dry them, dust with flour and fry in very hot olive oil for about 5 minutes on each side, to brown them, then remove from the pan. Chop the 5 peeled garlic cloves and quickly brown them in the same pan, then add the tomatoes peeled and crushed. Cook until their liquor has evaporated.

Lightly oil the llauna or other earthenware dish, put in the pieces of cod, cover with the sauce and cook uncovered in a moderate oven for half an hour. Before serving, sprinkle the dish with a picada of finely hashed garlic and parsley. Very simple, very good.

The Italian equivalent of this, baccalà marinato, has less garlic. Green celery, parsley and hot chilli peppers are used in the soffritto, simmered in olive oil, as the point of departure for the tomato sauce.

La soupe au pistou

This Provençal soup, Genoese by birth, is a dense concoction of vegetables given further substance by fresh nouilles [noodles] and/or rice, a celebration of the time of year when everything is tender, sweet and fresh, to which the pistou is added. In this village it was gruyère, not pecorino sardo or parmesan, that was incorporated. Here is the principle:

olive oil
1 sweet white onion
a handful of rice
a handful each of haricots verts, broad beans and peas
a few young carrots
2 or 3 small courgettes
3 new potatoes
a handful of fresh nouilles

For the pistou
3 cloves of new garlic
3 or 4 branches of basil
a few pine kernels
1 tablespoon of olive oil
2 tablespoons of grated gruyère

Put a little olive oil in a pot on a low heat, add the chopped onion and the rice, then the haricots verts (topped, tailed and broken in two), the broad beans sliced in two, the peas, carrots and courgettes, and the potatoes, diced. Sweat for a few minutes, add water to cover and boil quickly for

10 minutes, covered. Put in the nouilles and cook for another 5 minutes. Tum off the heat. Add the well-pounded pistou.

This was the summer evening meal. The soup is sometimes made even more dense by adding an egg beaten with lemon juice, onto which some of the soup liquor is poured, stirred while it thickens, then poured back into the pot. But in this case the cheese is omitted from the pistou.

Sardoni in saor – marinated sardines

This is the poor man’s matafame (hunger-killer) to be found in rosticcerie. A Venetian way of temporarily conserving fish, which are sold from little stalls in winter in Venice, Vicenza, Padua and Treviso with a comforting slab of polenta. It probably originated from the ancient Roman discovery that hot vinegar poured over fried fish conserved it. Versions of this process are found in many parts of the Mediterranean and the method, even if originally Roman, seems to have been transmitted by the Moors.

The Venetian recipe was demonstrated with some ceremony to us by the Mantuan painter Ugo Sissa – men take cooking very seriously, especially when they are gastronomes. Having underlined the importance of the candied peel, he placed the earthen dish outside on a shaded window-sill. Three days went by before we were allowed to enjoy this dish together.

As the sardines improve with keeping, you make more than will be eaten at one sitting.

1kg fresh sardines
flour
olive oil
2 large onions
½ litre red wine vinegar
a few pine kernels and a few seedless raisins
a piece of candied lemon peel, chopped

Leaving the heads on, clean and scale the sardines, dry them and shake them in flour. Cover the bottom of a heavy pan with olive oil, heat it, and gently fry the fish so that they turn golden. Put them in an earthenware dish, having first drained them.

Slice finely the onions in rounds and simmer them in the oil until they are transparent. Pour in the red wine vinegar, already heated to boiling point, add the pine kernels, raisins and candied peel. Pour this hot over the sardines, cover the dish and put it in a cool place. Leave to marinate for two or three days, time for the fish to imbibe the liquor, and turn them over once or twice. Serve with a salad of red chicory .

Pollo alla cacciatora con olive nere – chicken, the hunter’s way, with black olives

The chicken, tender and weighing about 1 kilo, is jointed, then chopped into pieces of the same size – on the small side. These are fried in a heavy pan in olive oil in which 3 crushed but unpeeled cloves of garlic and 2 sprigs of fresh rosemary and some leaves of mountain sage (Salvia sclarea) have first been simmered.

When the pieces are golden, 2 peeled tomatoes are crushed in the pan, salt and a glass of white wine are added, and in this very scarce sauce the chicken cooks more slowly, covered, until most of the liquor is absorbed and the pieces are tender (10 minutes for frying, and 15 minutes once the wine is put in). During the last few minutes a dozen luscious black olives, unstoned, are put into the pan.

Served on a white oval dish with the olives and the scarce sauce, which is passed through a strainer, or should be, to eliminate the aromatics. In fact, in the Osteria da Rizieri, both the rosemary and the thyme, indeed also the garlic, put in an appearance in the dish.

While preparing this, the padrona brought a plate of mountain coppa and mortadella into the vine arbour. The meal finished with pecorino cheese made in the vicinity, a fresh ewe’s cheese served with summer pears.

Honey From a Weed by Patience Gray (Prospect Books, £20). Click here to order a copy for £16 from the Guardian Bookshop