Honey From a Weed - Softcover

Gray, Patience

Softcover

ISBN 10: 190301820X ISBN 13: 9781903018200

Publisher: Prospect Books, 2001

Synopsis

This book is perhaps the jewel in Prospect’s crown. Within a few months of its first appearance in 1986 it 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 anthologized 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.

About this title

Review:

Simply put, Honey from a Weed is a jewel of a book. Reading it, one realizes the true artistry of the author, a person whose relationship with the world around her is both intimate and immediate--someone who can transform the fruits of the earth--beans, potatoes, garlic, herbs--into a gustatory masterpiece. The subtitle of Gray's book is Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia, but there's far more feast than famine in this culinary odyssey. Recipes for such Mediterranean favorites as rabbit with garlic sauce or polenta punctuate wonderful reflections on such varied topics as wine, pigs, and edible weeds; chapters on feasts and festivals; and sharp-eyed observations about the lives of those Gray has lived among for so many years.

Literate and lyrical, Honey from a Weed is a feast for both body and soul. Read Gray's wonderful portraits of the places she's lived and the cooks she's learned from, and let your mind wander over the sunbathed hills, through the rustic villages and deep quarries Gray knows so intimately. Though reading Honey from a Weed may not influence you to take up stone-carving or cooking, at least you'll have spent your time in charming company.

From the Back Cover:

Honey from a Weed is a Mediterranean odyssey. Patience Gray, who has lived and traveled widely in the region's countryside for over twenty-five years, brings to life its people, their culture, and most of all their rustic cooking, with sumptuous prose and reverence. (6 X 9, 384 pages, illustrations, maps)

About this edition

• Publisher: Prospect Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 190301820X
• ISBN 13: 9781903018200
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 375