The ever popular, ever great cook/history/lifestyle book.
Within a few months of its first appearance in 1986 Honey from a Weed was hailed as a modern classic. Fiona MacCarthy wrote in The Times that, ‘the book is a large and grandiose life history, a passionate narrative of extremes of experience.’ Jeremy Round called Patience Gray ‘the high priestess of cooking’, whose book ‘pushes the form of the cookery book as far as it can go.’ Angela Carter remarked that ‘it was less a cookery book that a summing-up of the genre of the late-modern British cookery book.’
The work has attracted a cult following in the United States, where passages have been read out at great length on the radio; and it has been anthologised by Paul Levy in The Penguin Book of Food and Drink. It was given a special award by the André Simon Book Prize committee in 1987. Prospect Books issued the first hardback edition for the UK, selling US rights. This first edition is now out of print. A UK paperback was produced in 1987 with the original drawings by Corinna Sargood and the same text in the same generous format of the original hardback. The beautiful original cover is being still being used. Although more than a cookery book – being a musing on a life lived on the shores of the Mediterranean, particularly wherever marble suitable for sculpture can be found – it contains many vibrant and useful recipes, making it a bible for lover of Mediterranean food. Fish, wild plants, game and tomatoes are just some of the foodstuffs that get treatment of an impeccable sort.
Paperback.
