Honey from a Weed

By Patience Gray

Book Overview

Winner of a special special award by the Andre Simon Book Prize committee in 1987 This book is perhaps the jewel in the Prospect Books' 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.' 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. Currently, we publish the book in paperback, with the original drawings by Corinna Sargood and the same text in the same generous format of the original hardback. The beautiful original cover features, the Mellona, the Roman goddess of honey from which the book takes its title. Although more than a cookery book - being a musing on a life lived on the shores of the Mediterranean, particularly wherever marble suitable for sculpture can be found - it contains many vibrant and useful recipes, making it a bible for lover of Mediterranean food. Fish, wild plants, game and tomatoes are just some of the foodstuffs explored and she anticipated the contemporary interest in wild and foraged foods as noted in an article about Gray that appeared in the Guardian in 2017. 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. Patience Gray was first known for the 1950s classic, Plats du Jour. She shared her life with sculptor, Norman Mommens, whose appetite for marble and sedimentary rocks took them to Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades (Naxos) and Apulia. These are the places which in turn inspired this rhapsodic text. Everywhere, she learned from the country people whose way of life she shared, adopting their methods of growing, cooking and conserving the staple foods of the Mediterranean. She described the rustic foods and dishes with feeling and fidelity, writing from the inside and with a deep sense of the history and continuity of Mediterranean ways.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 190301820X
• ISBN13: 9781903018200
• Release Date: March 2001
• Publisher: Prospect Books (UK)
• Length: 375 Pages
• Weight: 1.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.8" x 9.8"

Customer Reviews

Real Food for the Soul

Honey From a Weed provides a feel for a life of love and a lust for life. Here we have the essence of the Slow Food Movement, healthy heart, and devotional spiritual life -- love the Earth and be loved by the Earth. I once asked the great Portland Chef Greg Higgins to identify his favorite cook book . He said he buys Honey from a Weed for his friends so they can forage together in the fields and steams of the Northwest. This is as good as it gets. 1. Stunning writing as good a food literature ever becomes. 2. Fresh and found ingredients as all food is local and right outside the door - between the rows of corn and the among the vineyard weeds. 3. Slow and steady and simple. This puts a spear right through the heart of the royal and the pompous food world. 4. Peasant food is the food that 90 percent of the world eats and holds up to God at sunrise. 5. Simple tools. Forget the newest and fanciest electronic gadget and go to the thrift store if you want to be a great cook. 6. One or two dish meals. What is better than crusty bread, tomatoes, olives, garlic, local cheese, basil and red wine? Do we really want or need more? 7. Family food for one or two or three or friends or village. 8. What recipes? See, gather, prepare, cook, eat, devote. 9. Spiritual life in the garden and in the field. The hills glow with the peasant energy of Jean Giono. I read this book every year. It is nourishing in every dimension -- the body, the brain, and the spirit. Get it and live a better life.

A Fascinating Window on Rural Greek and Italian Life and Eating

Traditional cultural habits of eating, involving foraging for foods growing wild in the area, have always fascinated me, but I have found that most books talk about the foods harvested in general terms, and give little of substance to work with. Patience Gray opens the door to the world of wild food foraging, describing and discussing in great detail the species used, with the local names for each, when they are used, and how they are collected for everything from spring salads to autumn seafood, and how wild and cultivated foods are integrated with one another into the day to day cuisine. The best book on European cooking I have ever read. It is so good it has become one of my favorite gifts to give to f riends.

A rare treasure

This is a wonderful book, a true and rare treasure, full of hunger and appetite, joy and toil. Books like this are sometimes called "a labor of love", which is somewhat of a cliche, but this book is brimfull of all the labor and love that goes into gathering, harvesting, preserving and cooking food grown for its own sake. Here, food is not a commodity to be bought and sold but a mainstay of life, a vital ingredient for happiness, a celebration of simple and good - but hard - life. The book would be valuable enough if that was all but there are also so many delightful recipes, so many wonderful anecdotes and descriptions, so much interesting autobiographical material. I've seen someone compare Honey from a Weed to Frances Mayers tedious Tuscanny books but don't let that mislead you; this is a very different book, written with immense sensitivity and hard-earned knowledge of the land the author has cultivated and the people she lived with and learned from.

If Gauguin wrote cookbooks...

I first read Ms. Gray's book looking for a specific recipe, how was I to know it was not just a 'cookbook', but a charming look at life? Ms. Gray's stories about life among the stonecutters, peasants and artists of Greece and Italy was a delight to read. I'm buying extra copies to pass them around to cooks and non-cooks alike, anyone who needs to see firsthand that living well, often on a shoestring, can be the best revenge. Wonderful illustrations, simple recipes for soul-satisfying food...and one woman's recipe for a simpler life. If this doesn't make you long to quit the 'day job' and run off to live on grilled sardines and fresh tomatoes in Tuscany or Naxos, call Tech Support, you've got some wires disconnected.