I had spent months thinking about her. Memoirs and diaries had been ransacked. Family and friends had been grilled. Secrets had been given up and, sometimes, withheld. Even so, I didn’t realise just how strongly I felt about the food writer Patience Gray – she had, without my even noticing it, become a kind of heroine to me – until long after the book in which I put her was published.
I was talking about this book, a collection of biographical essays, at a festival almost a year after it came out. The day was fine, and the audience large and attentive, but towards the back of the marquee, I sensed mutiny. Sure enough, no sooner had I finished speaking than a hand went up, sharp as an exclamation mark. The woman on the other end of it was tight-lipped. “My problem is that I don’t really like any of the women in your book,” she announced. “They all behave so badly.” With some deliberation, she began to read out a list: a charge card of my subjects’ crimes and misdemeanours. “Take Patience Gray,” she said. “She abandoned her children in Italy. They had to hitchhike home to London on their own.” An accusatory pause. “What kind of woman does that?” My smile was cool. “The kind of woman I rather admire,” I found myself saying.
This October, the extraordinary, mould-breaking Patience Gray, who died in 2005, would have been 100 years old, an anniversary that has already been anticipated by the arrival of a new biography by Adam Federman. For all that I’m proprietorial, I’m glad about this book: it’s excellent. But how dispiriting it is, too, that only a tiny specialist publisher (and an American one, to boot) was willing to take a bet on his manuscript. Yes, Gray remains a cult figure: her work, like her personality, doesn’t play to the crowd. But in recent years, interest in her has grown incrementally, people having come to understand both the crucial role she played in helping to change life in post-war kitchens and her influence on the way we eat now (Honey From A Weed, the cookbook she published in 1986, and which has never been out of print, must take at least some of the credit for our passion for rocket and pesto). Among her fans these days are Jeremy Lee of Quo Vadis, and Jacob Kenedy of Bocca di Lupo – the latter being the only place I’ve ever seen a hyacinth bulb (something Gray also liked to eat) on a menu. Her life, moreover, was singular and wild. Beside her adventures, the antics of her near contemporary, Elizabeth David, about whom two fat biographies have been already been published by mainstream houses, can seem positively suburban.
This might be one reason why David claimed to have loathed Gray. But another might be that they had too much in common. Both, after all, came from the upper middle classes, growing up in huge houses where nursery food was served by maids. Both, too, were clever, fiercely independent, well-travelled, beautiful and inclined to vagueness when it came to the details of their private lives. David was first into print, publishing A Book of Mediterranean Food in 1950, but it was the more user-friendly Plats du Jour, which Gray and Primrose Boyd published in 1957, that would become the bestselling cookbook of the 50s. In old age, admittedly, they would have made an odd pair. Gray, whose love for the stove never dimmed, wouldn’t have understood David’s late life diet of cigarettes and Ritz crackers, for all that she was a passionate smoker herself, with a face to prove it; the soigné David would have been appalled by Gray’s tangled hair and unpowdered face. Nevertheless, somehow they belong together – not least because any cook worth their salt wants to have both their books on their shelves.
Gray’s story begins in rural Surrey. The second of the three daughters of Olive and Hermann Stanham, her first home was Mitchen Hall, near Godalming: an idyllic house with oak-panelled rooms, a tennis court and a lawn on which tea was taken in the summer. But things there were not as they seemed. As she would later discover, her father, a major in the Royal Field Artillery, had his secrets. When she was six, moreover, his pig farm went bust, at which point the family moved to Sussex, where its members would live in altogether more straitened circumstances. Gray, though, stayed with her aunt Dodo in London during term time (she was at Queen’s College in Harley Street), and it was there that the seeds of her rebelliousness were sown. Already longing for “air and flight”, she was determined to disobey the bullying Hermann. Rather than returning home as he demanded, she decided to read for an economics degree at the University of London, where her tutor was Hugh Gaitskell.
In 1938, after her graduation, Gray set off with her sister for Romania, using a grant from the Society of Quakers (the story goes that having written about the death of Queen Marie for a local newspaper, she fled its editor’s amorous overtures in a monoplane, with a Romanian prince at the controls). After this, she took a job at the Arts Council in London, where she met Thomas Gray, a married man whose name she would take and with whom she would have two children, Nicolas and Miranda. Thomas was running a clandestine counter-insurgency course for the Home Guard, teaching civilians “how to make Molotov cocktails”, and for a while she helped him to do so, or so she claimed. But he was also a womaniser, and when he tried to seduce one of her friends, Gray resolved to give him up, moving to a remote cottage – no telephone, no electricity, no water – that her mother owned on the South Downs. Unfortunately, by now she was pregnant again. The baby girl was given up for adoption, but when she fell ill, Patience agreed to nurse the child (only mother’s milk would, it was thought, return her to health). This was a miserable period. Terribly alone, she was frightened of the warplanes she could often hear overhead. When the baby later died, the adoptive parents would not let her attend the funeral.
Gray, though, was ever resilient – it’s the quality that marks her out as a person, a writer and a cook. In 1947, she returned to London, and was soon appointed research assistant to FHK Henrion, one of the designers of the Festival of Britain – and it was there that she met Primrose Boyd, with whom she would write Plats du Jour. Meanwhile, she moved into the billiards room of a Victorian mansion by Hampstead Heath called the Logs. In photographs, this room looks so modern – and it was, for no one had then heard of open-plan living. Admittedly, the kitchen, where she would later test their recipes, was a mere alcove; the dining table was a wooden shelf attached to a wall. But no matter. Necessity (by which I mean poverty) had turned Gray not only into a master forager – in a favourite picture of mine, she is holding a basket lined with moss in anticipation of the mushrooms it would soon hold – but also into an excellent cook. She liked to shop in Soho, her favourite store (for kit rather than ingredients) being Cadec’s in Greek Street, where she could gaze at the ceramic terrines and tin moulds.
With its encouraging, non-intimidating recipes for such dishes as moussaka and ratatouille, Plats du Jours, published as a Penguin paperback with its famous cover by David Gentleman, was a huge success, selling 100,000 copies before the decade was out – and it helped Gray to land her next job, as the editor of the Observer’s new woman’s page. She wasn’t terribly happy at the newspaper – her ideas, which were esoteric, were out of kilter with those of her editors – but this didn’t seem to matter much, perhaps because by this point, she was bang in the middle of a platonic love affair with her great mentor, the antiquarian book dealer and superlative cook, Irving Davis (“His dishes were invocations to the ideal,” as she would write in Honey From a Weed). Incidentally, it was Davis who was her companion when she told her children, then 15 and 16, to scarper back to London from Italy – and while I can’t excuse this, exactly, I will tell you that brother and sister did make it home safely. No harm done.
Great lives often have two acts, and so it was with Gray. In 1962, she was fired by the Observer. But in the same year, at Furlongs, the Sussex house owned by the designer Peggy Angus, she met the sculptor Norman Mommens. They fell in love, and 12 months later, left Britain for Greece, the start of an odyssey – Mommens was on the hunt for marble – that would take them from the Cyclades to Tuscany, from Catalonia to the Veneto, and, finally, to Apulia, where in 1970 they moved into the vaulted barn of a ruined sheep farm (a masseria) called Spigolizzi. Rough and ready – electricity was not installed until the early 90s – they lived just like their peasant neighbours, subsistence farmers whose lives were dictated by the weather and whatever windfall it might bring (or not). Spigolizzi would be home for the rest of their lives, and they loved it, for they felt it had taught them how to live. “When providence supplies the means,” she would write in Honey From a Weed, the extraordinary and prescient book that was born of this life, “the preparation and sharing of food takes on a sacred aspect.”
Hard as it is to believe, Gray struggled to find a publisher for Honey From a Weed. This was, remember, years before the advent of Fergus Henderson, and his nose-to-tail eating; René Redzepi, the chef at Noma in Copenhagen was still at school. No one knew what to make of a book that included, among other things, a recipe for fox, one that had been given to Gray “by an old anarchist in Carrara” (the carcass, she notes, must be kept in running water for three days before it may be cooked). In 1986, however, it was finally taken on by Alan Davidson, the food historian who founded the tiny Prospect Books.
The reception to its publication was in the main positive, even a little rhapsodic. Angela Carter, for instance, acclaimed it as “unique and pungent… a baroque monument”. But others were more wary. In her review, the biographer Fiona MacCarthy noted the book’s “quality of lunatic conviction”. And it’s true: it does have such a quality. Yes, there are perfectly straightforward recipes among its pages for wild boar and fish soup, risotto and pasta; 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. Still, what looked like madness yesterday may seem utterly sane the next. As we move into an increasingly uncertain future – a report by leading academics recently suggested that Britain is “sleepwalking” into post-Brexit food insecurity – the message of Honey From a Weed, by turns ascetic and celebratory, may come to seem more powerful still. When she wrote it, Gray knew that she was recording the past, rescuing “a few strands” from a former way of life like some social anthropologist out in the field. What she can’t have known then is that her book would also be shot through with a pungent taste of the future.
Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray by Adam Federman (Chelsea Green). Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties by Rachel Cooke (Virago).
