Patience Gray

Cookery writer who introduced Mediterranean tastes to Britain

Patience Gray

Cookery writer who introduced Mediterranean tastes to Britain

Patience Gray, who has died, aged 87, following a short illness, will be remembered for two seminal cookery books: Plats Du Jour (1957), written with Primrose Boyd, and Honey From A Weed (1986).

The first of these guided aspiring hostesses towards the proper execution of French and continental bourgeois cookery; it was almost the earliest international cookery book aimed at the mass market, and sold more than 50,000 copies in its first year, dwarfing the impact of such early prophets as Elizabeth David. The second book was a startling, impassioned and inspiring account of the Mediterranean way of life that transcended the idea of the cookery book as a DIY manual.

Patience was the second of the three daughters of Olive and Hermann Stanham, and spent her childhood near Godalming, Surrey, and on the Sussex coast. Her father, the son of a Polish rabbi who had fled the pogroms of 1861, had married a Lincolnshire farmer's daughter, become a Unitarian minister and changed his name from Warschavski when he joined the Royal Horse Artillery during the first world war.

While her elder sister was packed off to finishing school in Switzerland, and her younger sibling allocated the role of tomboy, Patience was allowed to be "the brainy one". A parental shortness of funds meant she was taken up by an 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. A gap year in Bonn, and student travels with her sister to Budapest and Romania, afforded her an uncommonly broad grounding for a member of the county set.

Patience never settled to a career, in the 1930s sense of the word. The onset of war and the birth of her two children, while refusing to marry or live with their father (whose name she took by deed-poll just to save red faces), were perhaps factors. Office jobs were not then well-suited to maternity, and she survived on temporary jobs for literary and artistic folk.

Among these was the designer FHK Henrion, who was in charge of the Country Pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain. Primrose Boyd was a colleague, and it was she who proposed joining forces with Patience to write Plats Du Jour, experimenting in the mid-1950s with dishes as then outlandish as goulash and paella. The illustrator David Gentleman, then just finishing his studies, designed a memorable cover and drawings.

The book's success (it is due for reissue later this year) was the impetus needed for Prudence's break into national journalism, which came in 1958 when she beat 1,000 applicants for the job of putting together the women's page on the Observer.


This almost surreal embrace of modern Europe did not last beyond the arrival, in 1961, of her new chief, George Seddon, who felt that daily problems of shopping, buying and choosing of more import to readers than modern architecture in Milan.

Patience's departure from the Observer, and the passing of her children through schooling, coincided with her falling in love with the artist and sculptor Norman Mommens. Precipitately, they embarked on a Mediterranean odyssey that would take them 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.

Patience described this journey with passion and eloquence in Honey From A Weed, a book that combined learning, wide reading, folklore and cookery in a disconcerting and inimitable manner, and in which she gnomically referred to Mommens as "the sculptor". The darker side of life, when peasants and primitivity can overwhelm the outsider, she portrayed in her account of their season on Naxos, Ring Doves And Snakes (1989).

Patience was a woman of strong emotions and opinions, her prose muscular and full of character. So, too, was her cookery. While Plats Du Jour had been largely derived from books and home experiment, Honey was more in the way of field notes of an anthropologist, but one who had gone native herself. To her last years, she would not have the normal conveniences of refrigerators, gas cookers, electric light, telephones or water closets at Spigolizzi. It was only growing frailty, and the urging of her son Nicolas, that allowed some compromise with modernity.

When she finished Honey From A Weed in 1983, Patience had no publisher in mind. The literary agent Deborah Owen tried to find a London house to take it, but only succeeded after she approached the former diplomat and food writer Alan Davidson, who ran, with his wife Jane, a tiny venture called Prospect Books.

The final printed text was a credit to his diplomatic skills, just as the book was gloriously embellished by the drawings of Patience's then daughter-in-law Corinna Sargood. Its reception by enthusiasts for intellectual cooking, both in Britain and America, was rhapsodic, and it had all the makings of a cult classic. It has never gone out of print.

Patience wrote two other books: one was a commission, in 1964, by the Blue Funnel Shipping Line to compose a set of recipes for the Chinese cooks of their newly launched passenger-cargo liner, the Centaur, plying from western Australia to Singapore. It will be published by myself (now Prospect Books) later this year. The other was called Work Adventures Childhood Dreams, and was published by Patience herself in 1999. Nearly an autobiography, it conveys much of her essence, and the prose is as sinewy as it ever was.

Encounters with Patience were memorable. She had a way of speaking that was at once delphic, world-weary and delightfully mischievous. Her political antennae were very sensitive and, to the end, she rampaged against the polluters and destroyers. She adored her fans, and they would travel far to reach her. Her friendships ran deep, always with people of European, not merely English, sensibilities. It looked as if she would never marry but, in the end, she did tie the knot with Norman in 1995. He died in 2000.

Nicolas and her daughter Miranda survive her.

· Patience Gray, writer, born October 31 1917; died March 10 2005