This book is perhaps the jewel in Prospect Book's 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.'; Jeremy Round called Patience Gray 'he high priestess of cooking';, whose book pushes the form of the cookery book as far as it can go. 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.…
"Well, it’s all over Italy actually. Patience Gray was kind of a Hampstead-living freelance journalist mother-of-two until her 40s and then escaped everything and ran off to Europe with a Dutch sculptor and they followed marble all over the place. They went first to Italy, then they lived on Paxos in Greece. They were following stone. And other stone from which he carved his sculptures. But the point is that wherever Gray was, she soaked up the local culture, to such an extent that she became the local witch. She was extremely learned in the classical sense but also she wanted to find out about the authentic ways of cooking wherever she was, and then she recorded it all in this wonderfully eccentric but fantastically enjoyable book. It’s about foraging too. Ways of living with the land which we’ve lost and which we’ll gradually have to go back to. She’s really way ahead of all of us in the sense that we have to go back to older ways of learning to live with what we’ve got. When you read Patience Gray, it’s a lot to do with cooking outside: ‘Light your fire and then jump in the sea and swim across the bay, and when you come out it will be ready.’ If you’re living in the East End, there are lots of wonderful recipes for chickpeas and lentils, paellas, all kinds of rustic foods. Get an allotment! And while she’s telling you about those, she’ll quote Herodotus. Yes, the anarchist mentality of the Carrera quarry workers, which sprang from the danger of moving huge blocks of stone around all day. They had this kind of ethos where there was one man in charge, but if there was sudden danger the man who spotted the danger was immediately in charge of the situation. It gave them a real, communal, anarchic sort of individuality. If they didn’t feel like working that day, they didn’t have to. They always did what they wanted. Then the big machines came and they couldn’t keep up. Well, there’s no softness in Patience Gray either. She’s not macho, but she’s certainly not soft. She moved to the heel of Italy, where she lived a very Spartan sort of existence. Her editor came to stay for a bit and came back horribly shaken because there was no running water and it was all about cooking on the fire."
