Image: Bill Kuykendall · Public domain
Honey from a Weed
- Year
- 1986
- Era
- 20th century
- Origin
- England · Europe
- Language
- English
- Category
- English 20th C
Honey from a Weed, issued by Prospect Books in 1986, gathers Patience Gray's observations on peasant cookery gleaned from years of itinerant life in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. Part recipe collection, part meditation on foraging, hunger and craft, it broke with the conventions of the cookery genre and has come to be regarded as a landmark of late twentieth-century English food writing.
Cooking from this book
Lepre in Salmì
Signature dishThis slow-braised hare in dark wine sauce stands as an emblem of Patience Gray's wandering kitchen, gathered during her years living among quarrymen and peasants in Tuscany, Catalonia, Naxos and Apulia. The dish embodies her central theme: that real cooking grows from scarcity, hunting, foraging and the rhythms of poor stony landscapes. Like the book itself, it is patient, wild in origin, and deeply rooted in Mediterranean rural tradition rather than restaurant refinement.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
