'Fasting And Feasting': The Remarkable Life of Patience Gray
A British food writer, Gray advocated slow food and foraging long before the rest of the food world. Her work had outsized influence on chefs from Alice Waters on. A new biography tells her story.
In 2005, writer Adam Federman came across an obituary that recounted the remarkable life of a British food writer named Patience Gray, 87, whose works exerted an outsized influence on chefs ranging from April Bloomfield to Alice Waters. The piece extolled Gray's most famous book, Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia (1986), as "one of the best books that will ever be written about food." Yet Federman, a former line cook, bread baker and pastry chef, was completely unfamiliar with both Gray and her masterwork.
The obituary, which appeared in the food journal would influence the course of Federman's life for the, released this fall.
