About the Author

Patience Gray's (1917-2005) most popular cookery books were Plats Du Jour (1957), written with Primrose Boyd, about French cooking and Honey From A Weed (1986), which was an account of the Mediterranean way of life. She spent her childhood near Godalming, Surrey, and on the Sussex coast. As a teenager she lived with her uncle and aunt in London, attending Queen's college in Harley Street, a prelude to the London School of Economics and a degree under the tutelage of the later Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. In the early 1940s she had two children (Nicolas and Miranda), but separated from their father (whose name she had taken by deed-poll). In the mid-1950s she collaborated with a friend Primrose Boyd to write Plats Du Jour. The book's success led her to work on the women's page of the Observer newspaper. In the early 1960s she met and fell in love with the artist and sculptor Norman Mommens. They embarked on a journey around the Mediterranean to Provence, Carrara, Catalonia, the Greek island of Naxos and, finally, to southern Italy, where they settled in 1970 in Apulia, in a farmhouse named Spigolizzi. She refused to have such modern conveniences as the refrigerator, telephone or electric light at Spigolizzi. She eventually married Norman Mommens in 1994. Ring Doves And Snakes (1989) was about their time on Naxos. She wrote two other books, The Centaur's Kitchen and Work Adventures Childhood Dreams (published 1999), a collection of autobiographical essays.