OP: Honey From a Weed (hardcover, first printing)

Harper & Row, 1987. Hardcover. Near Fine. First printing.

Patience Gray (1917–2005), one of the less widely known figures in the world of food, was, at the same time, highly influential. She served as a beacon for many of her contemporaries such as Alan Davidson, Jane Grigson, and Richard Olney, as well as for food ethnographer Paula Wolfert, explorer of basic cooking John Thorne, traveler and tireless writer Ed Behr, and even scientist Harold McGee. 

English-born, Gray began her working life writing for magazines and serving for a time as the women’s page editor of the prestigious Observer. In 1957, she co-authored an immensely successful, all-purpose cookbook called Plats du Jour. Shortly after this, she met sculptor Norman Mommens, who would become her life partner. 

With Mommens constantly in search of good stone, he and Gray began an odyssey documented in her second book, Honey from a Weed (1987). She tells how she and Mommens—never named but referred to only as “The Sculptor''—formed a deep connection to the land and people wherever they were. 

Rustic and hearty recipes are seamlessly woven into the text, and they tend to involve making good food from what can be found in nearby lands and waters or what others produce locally. That means in many cases finding a way to turn tasteless roots, tough vines, and bitter leaves into food that will nourish and satisfy, learning from local traditions.

It is a complex and satisfying read. It could be called a cookbook, although it is also very much a memoir, a near-ethnographic assemblage of material on rural folklore and tradition, a historical work, a botanical guide, and a treatise on a dying way of life that Gray acutely felt had to be preserved. Very worthwhile.

The book was published jointly in the UK by Alan Davidson’s Prospect Books and in the US by Harper & Row. Our copy is a stated first printing, the book block Fine and the jacket price-clipped and lightly shelfworn.