Patience Gray: Patience Gray, who has died, aged 87, will be remembered for two seminal cookery books: Plats du Jour (1957), written with Primrose Boyd, and Honey from a Weed (1986).
The first of these guided aspiring hostesses towards the proper execution of French and continental bourgeois cookery; it was almost the earliest international cookery book aimed at the mass market, and sold more than 50,000 copies in its first year, dwarfing the impact of such early prophets as Elizabeth David. The second was a startling, impassioned and inspiring account of the Mediterranean way of life that transcended the idea of the cookery book as a DIY manual.
Gray was the second of the three daughters of Olive and Hermann Stanham, and spent her childhood in Surrey and Sussex. Her father, the son of a Polish rabbi who had fled the pogroms of 1861, had married a Lincolnshire farmer's daughter, become a Unitarian minister and changed his name from Warschavski when he joined the Royal Horse Artillery during the first World War.
A parental shortness of funds meant she was taken up by an uncle and aunt in London, who put her through Queen's College, in Harley Street, a prelude to the London School of Economics.
She never settled to a "career". The onset of war and the birth of her two children, while refusing to marry or live with their father (whose name she took by deed-poll), were perhaps factors. She survived on temporary jobs. Among these was work on the 1951 Festival of Britain. Primrose Boyd was a colleague, and it was she who proposed they write Plats du Jour, experimenting in the mid-1950s with dishes as outlandish as goulash and paella. The illustrator David Gentleman designed a memorable cover and drawings.
In 1958 for three years she worked as women's editor of the Observer. She then fell in love with the artist and sculptor Norman Mommens and they embarked on a Mediterranean odyssey that would take them to Carrara, Catalonia, the Greek island of Naxos and, finally, to southern Italy, where they settled, in 1970, in Apulia. Gray described this journey with passion and eloquence in Honey from a Weed. Although it looked as if she would never marry, in the end she did tie the knot with Mommens in 1995. He died in 2000.
Patience Gray: born October 31st, 1917; died March 10th, 2005