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![Honey from a Weed( Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany Catalonia the Cyclades and Apulia)[HONEY FROM A WEED][Paperback]](https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51hlX-7ZZAL._AC_UL160_SR160,160_.jpg)
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'Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance...'
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 September 2007
This edition is the updated version with foreword from John Thorne & is interspersed with charming black & white illustrations, from Corinna Sargood.And since Rick Stein mentioned it in his latest TV series, 'Mediterranean Escapes', the few copies that were still available have flown out of Amazon and off the shelves of the second-hand bookshops!Now it is getting rather hard to find!📝 'Patience Gray, known for her 1950's classic, Plats Du Jour, has written a passionate autobiographical cookery book, Mediterranean through and through, and as compelling as a first-class novel.Sharing her life with a sculptor it was his appetite for marble and sedimentary rocks which took them to Tuscany, Catalonia, Naxos and Apulia.These are the places which in turn inspired, 'Honey From a Weed'...The recipes in this book accumulated during this 'marble odyssey' in the 60s and, went on accumulating when in 1970 we settled in the vaulted workspaces of a ruined sheep farm in the Salentine peninsula, exchanging marble for Lecce stone and tufa. Here, like so many others ~ foreshadowing the age to come ~ inscribed as artisans we also cultivate some acres of stony red earth. Living in the wild, it has often seemed that we were living on the margins of literacy. This led to reading the landscape and learning from people, that is to first-hand experience. This experience is both real and necessarily limited...Everywhere, she has learned from the country people whose way of life she shared, adopting their ways of growing, cooking, and conserving the staple foods of the Mediterranean. She describes the rustic foods and dishes with feeling and fidelity, writing from inside, not outside, and with a deep sense of the history and continuity of Mediterranean ways...''...A few words remain to be said about how to read this book. Like many cookbooks it is set out into chapters, each of which is given its separate culinary subject...followed by the recipes that relate to it.I think it is a mistake to read the book straight through. The narrative is one of intricate connection, with one dish...place...person evoking the thought or memory ~ and hence description ~ of another.Each of these should be seen as the stroke of a brush, a brush that is art work on many parts of the canvas at once... '...Good cooking is the result of a balance struck between frugality and liberality...It is born out in communities where the supply of food is conditioned by the seasons. Once we lose touch with the spendthrift aspect of natures' provisions epitomized in the raising of a crop, we are in danger of losing touch with life itself.When Providence supplies the means, the preparation and sharing of food takes on a sacred aspect.The fact that every crop is of short duration promotes a spirit of making the best of it while it lasts and conserving part of it for future use...In my experience, it is the countryman who is the real gourmet and for good reason; it is he who has cultivated, raised, hunted, or fished the raw materials and has made the wine himself...perhaps this very old approach is beginning once again to inspire those who cook in more complex urban situations...In my view it was not necessarily the chefs of prelates and princes who invented dishes. Country people and fishermen created them, great chefs refined them and wrote them down...'Measuring around 22.5 cm x 15 cm, the colourful cover opens to 374 reasonable quality, matte finish pages, split over main chapters:Beans, Peas and Rustic SoupsPotato and Egg DishesPast'asciutta and Pasta in BrodoFish, Shellfish, Crustaceans; Smoked and Salt FishVegetable HeritageEdible WeedsLa polentaSome Products of the PigBoar, Hare, Fox, Pheasant, Partridge, PigeonQuail, Rabbit, Guinea Fowl, Turkey, ChickenCalf, Cow, Ox, Horse, BuffaloLamb and KidA few SweetsPreservesA few ConservesSome Flower Buds, Leaves, Seeds, Pods, Fruits...winding up with:~ BIBLIOGRAPHY~ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS~ INDEX (TITLES OF THE RECIPES ARE CAPITALISED)The back cover illustration draws the eye out through the open door (image below refers).[11 images attached ©️Patience Gray & Corinna Sargood/1986]
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 19 September 2007
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