Patience Gray

Author of 'Plats du Jour' and 'Honey from a Weed'

Patience Jean Stanham (Patience Gray), cookery writer and editor: born Shackleford, Surrey 31 October 1917; married 1994 Norman Mommens (died 2000; one son, one daughter previously with Thomas Gray); died Spigolizzi, Italy 10 March 2005.

Nearly 30 years passed between the publication of Patience Gray's first cookery book and her next. The contrast between the two was startling.

When Penguin published Plats du Jour (1957), written with Primrose Boyd and illustrated by Gray's friend David Gentleman, it sold 50,000 copies in its first 10 months. With the alternative title "Or, Foreign Food" on Gentleman's striking pink cover, Plats du Jour consisted of the sort of dishes post-war London hostesses liked to prepare for dinner parties, and was the height of chic and sophistication until it was superseded by books by Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson that gave more "authentic" versions of the same recipes.

Gray's second book, Honey from a Weed (1986), on the other hand, an "autobiographical cookbook" that told of her back-to-the-earth life with Norman Mommens, and their wanderings around the Mediterranean in search of stone and marble for his sculptures, was genuine peasant food, in that many of the ingredients could only be procured by foraging. Compared to Plats du Jour, it was a manual for hunter-gatherer throwbacks.

What the two books had in common was a love for simplicity and good taste. Patience Gray's life was like that.

It was 1987, soon after Alan Davidson's Prospect Books had published Honey from a Weed, and I was on my way to visit the author. Gray's directions for getting to her house in Apulia, at almost the very tip of the heel of Italy, were clear enough - but it hadn't occurred to her that a visitor might get lost and delayed. The landmarks she described so carefully were only visible by daylight, for hers was not the only house at Spigolizzi, just off the Presicce-Lido Marini road, without electricity. Somehow, I managed to pitch up at the house with the pink tower in time to be fed some delicious dinner, involving an awful lot of pulses cooked in unfamiliar ways, and wild greens that I couldn't have identified even if there had been more light than candles and paraffin lamps. We washed it down with some of Mommens's slightly sour but attractive red wine.

Next morning, I found my thin, willowy hostess stooped over in a parched-looking field opposite her house, harvesting chick peas for our lunch. She was dressed in working clothes like her local peasant women neighbours, and she was engaged in the same labours, which she called "agriculture". Though supple and lithe as a young girl, Gray was certainly in her sixties, and her agriculture involved bending down from the waist to hoe, weed and gather the crops - none dare call it gardening.

She told me about her life. She had been brought up with her two sisters in an Edwardian household run by domestic servants with her misogynist army-officer father, later a surgeon at the London Hospital, the only male. She had had a late-in-life epiphany when she discovered she was the granddaughter of a Polish rabbi who fled from persecution, married a Lincolnshire farmer's daughter and became a Unitarian minister.

Patience Stanham was a very bright child. As she got her university entrance at 16, too young to go up, she was shipped off to Bonn to learn German and study economics, "which I soon abandoned in favour of history of art". Later, she took a BSc (Econ) at London University, where Hugh Gaitskell was her economics tutor.

In summer 1938 Patience set off with her elder sister Tania (who became a photographer) on a mission for the Quakers to establish cultural ties to Romania. When in July Queen Marie of Romania died, Patience was so moved by her subjects' mourning rites that she wrote her first piece of journalism. It appeared in a Bucharest paper, whose editor laid siege to his young writer, filling her hotel room with tuberoses, the fragrance of which always made Patience shudder with remembered horror. She and Tania escaped his attentions by fleeing to the Black Sea in a monoplane piloted by a Romanian prince.

When war broke out, she was sacked from the job she had got at the Foreign Office "for having too many foreign contacts". She became romantically involved with Thomas Gray, a Spanish Civil War veteran, who ran a clandestine counter-insurgency course for the Home Guard at Hurlingham in London. Patience was the secretary of this school for teaching civilians new skills "such as how to make Molotov cocktails".

Thomas Gray was conscripted, leaving Patience the unmarried mother of a son and a daughter (he had a wife), and she took his name by public announcement in The London Gazette. She and the children lived by the South Downs "in a cottage in a wood - a kind of Walden situation - with no telephone, electricity or water laid on". After the Second World War she took the children back to London, hoping to make enough money to pay their school fees.

There she set up a research agency. In 1950-51 she was research assistant to H.F.K. Henrion on the Festival of Britain, and she also worked for Richard Guyatt on Coronation commemoratives. Plats du Jour followed, with Patience Gray doing all the writing and Primrose Boyd contributing some of the recipes.

In July 1958, following a competition that was said to have attracted a thousand entrants, David Astor summoned her to the Editor's office at The Observer, where he told her "unenthusiastically that I had won, and they were prepared to take me on to start a woman's page". At first she was happy, as she herself answered to the easy-going Nigel Gosling. However, George Seddon, her next superior, was convinced that the paper's readers were mainly working-class males, and that Gray's ideas were too arty and too "continental" for them. The arts were in any case well served by Gosling and Peter Heyworth, and Vita Sackville-West looked after gardening. "Youth, mercifully, was a subject relatively untouched", as were modern architecture, design and craftsmanship. "These themes, rather oddly, began to furnish the Woman's Page." Gray stuck it out until 1962, when she began a new career as a textile designer.

The next year she met and fell in love with Norman Mommens, and the marble odyssey began. The subtitle of Honey from a Weed is "Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia", which sums up the couple's itinerary during these years before they came to a halt at Spigolizzi, where in 1970 Mommens bought the masseria of a tumble-down ruined sheep farm. Gray settled into the Apulian house, cultivating her neighbours, especially the women, as she'd done everywhere on their wanderings. From them she learned so much that, by the time I met her, she was regarded as the repository of local lore - especially about edible and medicinal plants - often forgotten by other residents.

Despite their peregrinations, Gray kept up with her old friends and mentors, most particularly the great book collector Irving Davis, whose exceptionally good book of Catalan recipes she edited after his death in 1967 (A Catalan Cookery Book: a collection of impossible recipes, 1969).

The fields about the masseria were scattered with Mommens's phallic sculptures, and there was plenty of room for his studio. But there was no electricity until the 1990s. When I arose before dawn to take my departure, I fell down the stairs. I had been staying in the tower, because the floor of the guest room was covered with ripening tomatoes. We were all lucky to have survived, in fact, for there was no radio or telephone, of course, not even a thermometer. The three of us didn't know that the temperature had topped 45 degrees Celsius (113F), though we had all remarked that none of us had much appetite, that a single glass of wine made us giddy, and that we had all effectively stopped peeing.

I did think it odd that in the two days I was there no neighbours called in. None of us was aware, until I read it in a newspaper on the aeroplane, that 900 Greeks, just across the Ionian Sea from Spigolizzi, had died in the freak July heatwave.

Despite her principled objections to the institution, Gray finally married Mommens in 1994. He died in 2000.

Patience Gray was a fine writer and considerable stylist. She enjoyed the attention and superb reviews she got for Honey from a Weed, as well as the successive editions it underwent and the reissue by Alan Davidson of Plats du Jour. His successor at Prospect Books, Tom Jaine, has kept her books in print, as well as distributing her curious 2000 book, Work Adventures Childhood Dreams, a collection of occasional writings, fascicoli in Italian, which she had printed locally. In no particular order, these tell anecdotes of T.S. Eliot's envy of Henry James, shopping in Lecce before the advent of supermarkets, Stendhal's travel writing, her apparent enthusiasm for Buster Keaton, whose photograph she reproduces, and Irving Davis's reincarnation as a bluebottle.

Prospect Books will be publishing, later this year, Patience Gray's The Centaur's Kitchen, a collection of recipes commissioned in the 1960s by the Blue Funnel Line for their cargo ship Centaur.

Paul Levy