Honey from a Weed

 

Do you like to read recipes for dishes that you will almost certainly never get to cook or even to taste? Recipes for wild game that’s now protected or vanishingly rare? For wild plants and mushrooms that people don’t gather any more? Recipes for cooking in primitive kitchens without running water or a consistent supply of cooking fuel? Dishes to cook at an open fire over twigs and weeds and aromatic gathered plants? What about fish that can no longer be found in their original habitat? What about wine that has no name, that’s just made in small batches by men only, who crush the grapes that grew in their vineyards with their bare feet, and have no pretensions? Drinking wines like “the golden muscat wine, Ugentine… and a dark red wine.” (p. 283) 

Patience Gray’s memoir and cookbook Honey from a Weed tells many thing like this, with various details of her life, and of her very interesting relationships with the villagers where she lived. Among the strangest and most unlikely recipes I’ve selected some of the most extremely strange and unlikely. These are given as entire recipes with all the details, including digressions on the sizes of mortars for pulverizing ingredients, or the materials to use for cooking pots. I suspect that these instructions really could not be followed now:

 “This is called the fishermen’s romesco. … First of all, take a plane to Barcelona, then drive to Calafell, then find your fishermen and go with them about four o’clock to Villanova and get them to choose the fish as it is landed… In a large upright saucepan (marmite) brown twelve cloves of garlic in oil …. put in two of the chili peppers, opened but whole of which you have removed the seeds. After two or three minutes add the slice of bread… pound very fine in a mortar….” The cut-up fish is added several steps later! (p. 112-113)

“Donna Adeline’s fig jam. Pick in the early morning some small butter-yellow figs, the ones that ripen at the end of August, often growing in the wild, having insignificant seeds. Choose only those figs that show a little bead of nectar at the opening, then sit down in the shade and carefully peel them, putting the peeled fruits unbroken in an earthenware pot. Pour over them an equal quantity of sugar, cover, and leave to make some syrup in a cool place until the next day. Put figs and syrupy sugar in a preserving pan and cook on a lively heat, stirring with a wooden spoon.. Add some dried fennel seeds 2 bayleaves, the zest of lemon cut into tiny strips and its juice…. This is nectar.” (p. 306)

“Here are the recommendations given to me by an old anarchist in Carrara for cooking a fox: A male fox, shot in January or February. Skin it and keep the carcase in running water for 3 days, or otherwise, hang it up outside in the frost. Clean it and cut it up into joints like a rabbit, then put it in a lidded pot with some olive oil on a slow fire … add 3 unpeeled cloves of garlic, slightly crushed, raise the heat and brown the pieces, sprinlking them with mountain herbs… Add a little salt… The ‘preliminaries’ are vital, since they remove the rather bitter ‘foxy’ taste.” (p. 241)

For years, I’ve been meaning to reread Honey from a Weed, which was first published in 1986. The book describes Gray’s experiences in several Mediterranean villages during the 1950s through the early1980s, when the local people were quite isolated from modern life, modern cooking equipment, or a large supply of foods other than what they grew or gathered. She sketches the lives of people whose children and grandchildren were already moving on to a different and probably urban life, and whose knowledge is most likely now lost. At the end she writes:

“The recipes in this book belong to an era of food grown for its own sake, not for profit. This era has vanished. If cooking and eating were all I had had in mind when writing them down, the pleasure they might afford would be largely nostalgic.” (p. 326)

I finally bought and read a copy of the book this week. When I read it in the early 1990s (from the library), I had read very few food books, and nothing similar to this. In fact, Honey from a Weed still stands out in my reading experience. More recent best-selling memoirs of rustic life in France or Italy are rather pale and indulgent in comparison.

Honey from a Weed — Illustrations by Corinna Sargood

I chose this image including a wine bottle and a
water bottle to share with the bloggers who
each week celebrate drinks of all sorts.

Who was Patience Gray? 

She was a writer of just a few books, born in 1917, died 2005. Honey from a Weed is her best-known work, a kind of a foodie cult classic.

Patience Gray and her partner Norman Mommens who shared the experiences that she related in Honey From a Weed. She refers to him throughout the book as “The Sculptor,” and their choice of places to live was driven by his need to be near one of the famous marble quarries in the area to obtain material for his art. (Photo source: New York Times)

Review © 2022 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot.com