Month: January 2024

Of all the books I read last year the one I think I shall remember longest is Patience Gray’s book, “Honey from a Weed”  subtitled “Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia”.

It’s a book about food – the ingredients, the recipes, the methods of cooking that she learned as she and her partner – always referred to as ‘the Sculptor’ – moved around the Mediterranean Sea, following the stone he needed for his work. She describes the people she met and communities they settled amongst. Relatively poor themselves that were able to draw close to the lives of the people they lived amongst, sharing in both the lean times and the times of plenty, of fasting and feasting.

The book records a way of living that was fading even as Patience Gray began to document it. ‘Convenience’ – in food and in energy – was imminent and put a period to many of the old ways of cooking as well as the recipes that suited them. Gray records the link as old as prehistory between people, land and seasons. It is povera cucina reveals a had evolved around would mark the loss of centuries old traditions – ancient recipes, in the arrival of manufactured on its way was published in 1985 and looked back over the previous thirty years and stands as both a record of the foods they cooked and ate and a hymn to the communities that welcomed them, the traditions of cooking she found and adopted and the understanding this gave her of the ancient and complex relationship between the life lived and the world they inhabited.

In a way the extract I have chosen is unrepresentative – there are no recipes, no classification of ingredients, no scholarly citations linking experience to academic research – it is simply a recollection of feasts she and the Sculptor enjoyed but it does, for me, capture some of the strangeness and beauty of the book – its flavour if you will – that sets food at the heart of life, giving us – if we treat it seriously – purpose, meaning and beauty. She writes:

“I recall the summer banquet under the glistening leaves of a towering Spanish chestnut in the mountains above Carrara overlooking Fosdinovo and the Lunigiana, where a lovely Israeli singer bewitched the countryside; a band of hunters, slung with cartridge belts and guns, crept silently out of the groves and advancing, formed a mesmeric circle around the singer. This feast ended in a wrestling match in the back of the lorry between a Michaelangelesque Israeli sculptor and a fierce little Mexican, as we hurtled down the mountain to Carrara at dusk.

The wedding feast of Angelo’s son Mitsos took place in the high-up village of Komiáki above Apollona on Naxos. This was distinguished by the size of the cauldrons of macaroni cooked out-of-doors, which recalled the cauldrons of old, accompanying the seven goats well-spitted and roasted on open fires, and by the luminous green-gold wine, 17° in strength. Angelos, the patriarch, treated us like honoured guests in the Homeric way, as if, as strangers, we were conferring a dignity on the occasion. It ended with the bride and groom treading an endless dance, the grape-treading Naxian dance: timelessness intrudes again.

I shan’t forget once wandering on foot through the Veneto and reaching, on a summer mid-day, a ruined castle in a stretch of uncultivated land, a kind of heath. Out of an upper window a marvellous baritone voice was singing, a troubadour in a waste land. When this voice stopped singing I made my way round to the other side of the castle and discovered a wedding feast in full swing at long tables, laden, in the ruined courtyard.

There was the feast in the house of the vine grower in the Priorat, the mountain fastness behind Reus in Catalonia. This ended with a neolithic cake of pressed dried figs flavoured with aniseed and bayleaves, and with it a hundred year old wine. Fenosa played Sor on the guitar.

And the feast of the Three Fishermen of Calafell, recorded by Irving Davis, a garlic feast, if ever there was one, in the old palace at Vendrell. We celebrated Fenosa’s hundredth birthday in anticipation; the Sculptor, in a fantastic disguise, became the magician who bridged by mime the linguistic shortcomings of the company

It is a rare joy of a book, still relevant today as we relearn the lesson that, however convenient, food that is manufactured, ‘ultra processed’ will harm and change us. Patience Gray set her face against that sort of convenience many years ago, writing ‘I am interested in growing food for its own sake and in appetite. The health giving and prophylactic virtues of a meal depend on the zest with which it has been imagined, cooked and eaten[…] abstinence, enjoyment, celebration, all have nature’s approval; if you practice the first, you maintain what is priceless – enjoyment, and at its crown, celebration.’