Patience Gray

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

Life and work

Beginning life as Patience Jean Stanham at Shackleford, near Godalming, Surrey, she was the second of the three daughters of Hermann Stanham, then an artillery officer, and his wife Olive. She spent her childhood in Surrey and on the Sussex coast. As a teenager she lived with her uncle and aunt in London, attending Queen's College, a school for girls in Harley Street, a prelude to the London School of Economics and a degree under the tutelage of the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.

Patience discovered late in life that her father, at various times a surgeon, a pig farmer, and finally a photographer, was the son of a Polish rabbi called Warschavski who had arrived in England in 1861 and become a Unitarian minister.

In the early 1940s she had two children, Nicolas and Miranda, but later separated from their father, whose name she had taken by deed-poll. In the mid-1950s she collaborated with a friend Primrose Boyd to write Plats du Jour, which was reprinted by Persephone Books in 2006. Its success led her to work on the women's page of the Observer newspaper.

In the early 1960s she met and fell in love with the Belgian artist and sculptor Norman Mommens. They embarked on a journey around the Mediterranean to Provence, Carrara, Catalonia, the Greek island of Naxos, and finally southern Italy, wherein 1970 they settled in Apulia, in a farmhouse named Spigolizzi. She writes about this journey in Honey From a Weed, a book about rural life, folklore and cookery, full of recipes featuring peasant food.[1] She refused to have such modern conveniences as the refrigerator, telephone or electric light at Spigolizzi. Ring Doves And Snakes (1989) was about their time on Naxos. In 1994 she eventually married Mommens, who died in 2000.

She wrote two other books: The Centaur's Kitchen (1964, but published posthumously in 2005), a set of recipes for the Chinese cooks of the Blue Funnel Shipping Line aboard the newly launched cargo liner, the Centaur, plying from western Australia to Singapore; and Work Adventures, Childhood Dreams (published 1999), a collection of autobiographical essays.[2]

Books

References

  1. ↑ Behr, Edward. "Patience Gray". The Art of Eating. Retrieved 27 September 2012.
  2. ↑ The Guardian, Friday, March 18, 2005, Retrieved 23 June 2011; ODNB entry. Retrieved 23 June 2011.