A Good Life in the Mediterranean

by

Paul Clark

When I was a sophomore in college, I moved out of a dorm and into my first apartment. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I was declaring, among other things, my culinary independence. Separated from both my mother’s kitchen and the campus cafeteria, I was faced with a simple fact of life—I had to learn how to shop for food and how to cook what I bought.

I have an early September birthday, so before I went off to school that year, I received as presents a couple of cookbooks, a small sauce pan, a skillet of dubious quality, a can opener, and a couple of wooden spoons. I have a vivid memory of one of the early days in my kitchenette. On the table was a can of tuna fish, a small jar of mayonnaise, some celery, and a bowl. I then called one of my sisters, asking for instructions on how to mix all these ingredients so I could make myself a tuna fish sandwich.

I don’t have many other memories of that first year of cooking. I had two roommates and we decided early on that we would each take a day of the week to prepare a meal for everybody. This lasted about two weeks. By that time, we each had had enough of each other’s attempts at cooking, and it was every man for himself for the rest of the year.

It took me a couple of years to master a small repertoire of dishes. The key was when I stopped cooking for either myself or for other men, and started cooking for women. Girlfriends or potential girlfriends were the beneficiaries of some of my best meals in my early twenties. Since those years were also the years that I was making a living as a bookseller, and whatever I cooked had to be simple and inexpensive. I had no grandiose thoughts of cooking organic, or vegetarian only, or only with imported ingredients. I mastered a few meals that could make two people very happy, for very little money.

My early days of learning to cook came to mind as I flipped through my copy of Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed over the past two weeks. Gray, who was born in 1917, is best known for two unique books about food (calling them cookbooks is a disservice to their uniqueness). Plats du Jour, published in 1957, introduced English readers to traditional French and Mediterranean cooking. Honey from a Weed, published in 1986, is an eclectic memoir cum cookbook about Gray’s life in several Mediterranean locales.

In the 1960s and 70s, Gray and sculptor Norman Mommens lived in various places around the Mediterranean—Carrara, Catalonia, the Greek island of Naxos—wherever Mommens, who Gray just refers to as “The Sculptor” in her book, could find good marble to work with. Finally, in 1970, they moved to Apulia, in southern Italy, settling into a farmhouse they named “Spigolizzi.”

Honey from a Weed shifts back and forth from Gray’s narrative of life in rustic towns, living on the edge of poverty, but gaining every ounce of pleasure out of whatever the local farmers and fishermen had to offer. She writes, “If you are poor and proud enough the half can be made to seem far better than the whole.” In the places she lived, the local residents arranged their lives not just by the seasons of nature, but also by the liturgical seasons of the Catholic church. So the life she lived was a continual balance between “fasting and feasting” (part of the subtitle of her book). The fasting was not only a reality for the four weeks of Advent and six weeks of Lent, but also due to living in places where a vast variety of food might be available in the summer, but where winter meals depended on whatever had been preserved from the summer’s bounty.

In Honey from a Weed, chapters alternate between Gray’s stories of life in these different places and chapters of recipes arranged by types of food. So a chapter on fasting on the island of Naxos is followed by a chapter of simple recipes for beans, peas, and rustic soups. A chapter on the search for a living and working space in Apulia is followed by a chapter of recipes for calf, cow, ox, horse and buffalo. A chapter on a magnificent feast at an Italian villa—spaghetti, scorpion fish, young lamb (slow roasted with red peppers), red mullets, a salad of bitter greens and goat cheese, almond cakes, and two types of wine—prepared from ingredients scoured from four local villages, is followed by a chapter on preparing lamb and kid.

Gray writes, “Good cooking is the result of a balance struck between frugality and liberality . . . It is born out in communities where the supply of food is conditioned by the seasons.” She is never condescending toward the local people or the local ways of living in the different communities she describes in the book. “Living in the wild, it has often seemed that we were living on the margins of literacy,” she wrote. “This led to reading the landscape and learning from people, that is to first hand experience. This experience is both real and necessarily limited.”

Gray adapted her northern European, English ways to the rhythm of the places she moved to, especially her final stop, Apulia. “I am interested in growing food for its own sake and in appetite. The health-giving and prophylactic virtues of a meal depend on the zest with which it has been imagined, cooked and eaten. It seemed to be appropriate to show something of the life that generates this indispensable element at a time when undernourishment bedevils even the highest income groups.”

I bought my copy of Gray’s book sometime in the late 1980s, at a Crown Superstore in suburban Chicago. I can’t remember if I bought the book because I had read a review or if I was just attracted to the unusual size, striking cover art, and unique layout of the book (illustrations by Gray’s daughter-in-law are thoughtfully laid out throughout the book).

I do know that in my early self-apprenticeship years of cooking, I bought a lot of cookbooks. At one point, I had over 300 cookbooks. Oddly, I don’t think I ever made a meal specifically from a recipe included in Gray’s book. But when I purged my book collection last year, Gray’s was one of the few cookbooks I kept. This is because I think that the spirit of what she portrays in the book—buy your food locally, taking advantage of local harvests; make every meal a feast, even when times are hard; share your bounty, and your hard times, with others—is essential for good living. So even though I don’t depend on Gray’s book for recipes, the book never fails to give me quiet moments of pleasure when I pull it off the shelf and read a random chapter or two.

Gray died at her farmhouse in Apulia, at the age of 87, in 2005.


Paul Clark is a writer in suburban Chicago. By day he edits a variety of print and online business and legal publications. By night, he sometimes writes for pleasure, though he keeps these writings under a bushel, and the bushel he keeps in a dark shed outdoors. Paul co-wrote a humor column called “Loose Canons” for the late, lamented Readerville Journal. He recently purged the majority of his books from his shelves. Over a series of essays, he will write about the books that remain and why they are important to him. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it