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'In the 1960s, Elizabeth David started to become a symbol of the transformation of English middle-class eating habits.Before that 'Plats du Jour' was the favourite and influential French cookery book.'ooOoo~ 'PLATS DU JOUR OR FOREIGN FOOD'~ A PENGUIN HANDBOOK~ PATIENCE GRAY & PRIMROSE BOYD~ ILLUSTRATOR: DAVID GENTLEMAN'Primrose Boyd proposed joining forces with Patience Gray 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 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. There was little consensus among the tweed-jacketed editorial staff as to what sort of thing might appeal to women: advice on household gadgets perhaps, but little else by way of inspiration. Handed carte blanche, Patience filled it to good effect. Women, she felt, did not want to acquire, but to learn. And she set about instructing them in European art, design, thought and habits. 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.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 & America, was rhapsodic, and it had all the makings of a cult classic.'
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'In the 1960s, Elizabeth David started to become a symbol of the transformation of English middle-class eating habits.
Before that 'Plats du Jour' was the favourite and influential French cookery book.'
ooOoo
~ 'PLATS DU JOUR OR FOREIGN FOOD'
~ A PENGUIN HANDBOOK
~ PATIENCE GRAY & PRIMROSE BOYD
~ ILLUSTRATOR: DAVID GENTLEMAN
'Primrose Boyd proposed joining forces with Patience Gray 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 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. There was little consensus among the tweed-jacketed editorial staff as to what sort of thing might appeal to women: advice on household gadgets perhaps, but little else by way of inspiration. Handed carte blanche, Patience filled it to good effect. Women, she felt, did not want to acquire, but to learn. And she set about instructing them in European art, design, thought and habits. 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 [[ASIN:190301820X 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.
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 & America, was rhapsodic, and it had all the makings of a cult classic.'
Before that 'Plats du Jour' was the favourite and influential French cookery book.'
ooOoo
~ 'PLATS DU JOUR OR FOREIGN FOOD'
~ A PENGUIN HANDBOOK
~ PATIENCE GRAY & PRIMROSE BOYD
~ ILLUSTRATOR: DAVID GENTLEMAN
'Primrose Boyd proposed joining forces with Patience Gray 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 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. There was little consensus among the tweed-jacketed editorial staff as to what sort of thing might appeal to women: advice on household gadgets perhaps, but little else by way of inspiration. Handed carte blanche, Patience filled it to good effect. Women, she felt, did not want to acquire, but to learn. And she set about instructing them in European art, design, thought and habits. 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 [[ASIN:190301820X 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.
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 & America, was rhapsodic, and it had all the makings of a cult classic.'
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 22 October 2011
