Patience Gray

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Patience Gray (October 31, 1917 – March 10, 2005) was a British cookery writer of the mid 20th century. Her most popular cookery books were Plats Du Jour (1957), written with Primrose Boyd, about French cooking and Honey From A Weed (1986), which was an account of the Mediterranean way of life.

[edit] Early Life

Born Patience Stanham, she was the second of the three daughters of Olive and Hermann Stanham, and spent her childhood near Godalming, Surrey, and on the Sussex coast. She lived with her uncle and aunt in London, who put her through Queen's college, in Harley Street, a prelude to the London School of Economics and a degree under the tutelage of the later Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.

In the 1930s she had to 2 children (Nicholas and Miranda), but refused to marry or live with their father (whose name she took by deed-poll). In the mid-1950s she was persuaded by a friend Primrose Boyd to collaborate and write Plats Du Jour. The book's success led her to work on the women's page on the Observer newspaper.

In the 1960s she met and fell in love with the artist and sculptor Norman Mommens. They embarked on a journey around the Mediterranean to Carrara, Catalonia, the Greek island of Naxos and, finally, to southern Italy, where they settled, in 1970, in Apulia, in a farmhouse named Spigolizzi. This journey is written about in Honey From A Weed, a book that combined rural life, folklore and cookery. She refused to have any modern conveniences such as refrigerators, gas cookers, electric light, telephones or toilet at Spigolizzi. She eventually married Norman Mommens in 1995. He died in 2000.

Ring Doves And Snakes (1989) was about their time on Naxos.

She wrote two other books : to compose a set of recipes for the Chinese cooks of the Blue Funnel Shipping Line their newly launched passenger-cargo liner, the Centaur, plying from western Australia to Singapore in 1964. The other was called Work Adventures Childhood Dreams, a semi autobiography and was published in 1999.

[edit] Books

Plats Du Jour, 1957 ISBN 1903155606
Honey From A Weed, 1986 ISBN 190301820X
Work Adventures Childhood Dreams, 1999 ISBN 8887809011
"Ring Doves and Snakes", 1989 ISBN 0333486129
"The Centaur's Kitchen: A Book of French, Italian, Greek & Catalan Dishes for Ships' Cooks on the Blue Funnel Line", 2006 ISBN 978-1903018404