Honey From a Weed

This book was deemed a modern classic by the media within a few years of its first appearance in 1986. Fiona MacCarthy wrote in The Times that the book is a ‘large and grandiose life history’, while Jeremy Round described Patience Gray as ‘the high priestess of cooking’ and said that her work pushed the form of the cookery book as far as it could go. Angela Carter remarked that this work was less a cookery book than a summing up of the genre of late-modern British cookery books. The work has attracted a cult following in the United States, where passages have been read out at great length on the radio; and it has been anthologized by Paul Levy in The Penguin Book of Food and Drinks. It was given a special award by the André Simon Book Prize committee in 1987.