Patience Gray

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

Early life

Born Patience Stanham, she was the second of the three daughters of Olive and Hermann Stanham, and spent her childhood near Godalming, Surrey, and on the Sussex coast. As a teenager she lived with her uncle and aunt in London, attending 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.

In the early 1940s she had two children (Nicolas and Miranda), but 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 has subsequently been reprinted by Persephone Books. The book's 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 artist and sculptor Norman Mommens. They embarked on a journey around the Mediterranean to Provence, Carrara, Catalonia, the Greek island of Naxos and, finally, to southern Italy, where they settled in 1970 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. She refused to have such modern conveniences as the refrigerator, telephone or electric light at Spigolizzi. She eventually married Norman Mommens in 1994. He died in 2000.

Ring Doves And Snakes (1989) was about their time on Naxos.

She wrote two other books : The Centaur's Kitchen (1964, but published posthumously), 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; Work Adventures Childhood Dreams (published 1999), a collection of autobiographical essays.

Books

• Plats Du Jour, 1957 ISBN 1-903155-60-6, Reprinted by Persephone Books 2006
• Honey From A Weed, 1986 ISBN 1-903018-20-X
• Work Adventures Childhood Dreams, 1999 ISBN 88-87809-01-1
• Ring Doves and Snakes, 1989 ISBN 0-333-48612-9
• The Centaur's Kitchen: A Book of French, Italian, Greek & Catalan Dishes for Ships' Cooks on the Blue Funnel Line, 2006 ISBN 978-1903018404

Notes

The Guardian UK. Friday March 18, 2005 http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,1440814,00.html