When it comes to food, Europeans have great traditions. In America, on the other hand, we make ourselves an easy target of ridicule. For example, think of drive-through windows at restaurants. Not only is fast food crappy tasting and terrible for your health, but eating a meal in your car is just downright gross. No class, no style, no elegance, no taste. People turn their vehicles into motorized garbage cans this way. I realize not every meal can be gourmet, but with a minimal amount of effort you can be a little less trashy. And its nice that we have a much broader range of ethnic options than we used to, but so many of these restaurants Americanize their food to the point where they no longer resemble the authentic dishes you get in their nations of origin. I’ve had Thai curries that were so sweet they tasted like desserts and larb without fish sauce. Ask for something spicy and they dump a ton of salt in it. Burritos, nachos, and fajitas aren’t eaten in Mexico. Hummous and falafels aren’t Greek, having their origins in Palestine. Greek people eat massive amounts of seafood but you never see fish on a Greek menu in America. The vomit they serve at The Olive Garden bears little resemblance to real Italian food. Don’t get me going on how fake our Chinese food is. Our fruits and vegetables taste like plastic, unlike the produce in other countries. Obviously not all food in America sucks, but more than half of it does. At least we have better food than British people do. What hell is marmite? Industrial sludge on bread?Axle grease in a jar? It tastes like cigarette ashes with shoe polish.
Mediterranean people, on the other hand, know all about food. So when I heard about Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed, I knew I had to read it. The author spent time living in rural Mediterranean countries during the 1960s and 1970s with her husband, an artists she calls The Sculptor rather than using his real name. She witnessed the farming lifestyle of people in Catalonia, Tuscany, the Greek island of Naxos, and Apulia, the part of Italy shaped like the heel of the boot, a place where the local language is a mixture of Italian and Greek. As she wrote down her collection of recipes, she decided to put them into context with passages about how the cooking materials were collected or harvested, and detailed all this with short passages about the culture of the people she encountered. What results is a cookbook you can read as part ethnography, part memoir, part travelogue, and part philosophical discourse examining what it means to live a good life.
The recipes cover a wide range of ingredients with chapters on farmed vegetables, wild herbs, mushrooms, seafood, and game. If you’ve ever wondered how to cook a fox, a horse, or a sea urchin you need look no further. If you want to cook everyday items like chicken, mussels, or zucchini you can find that here too. A lot of the recipes are redundant, being variations of food fried in olive oil with garlic and diverse seasonings, occasionally with anchovies or tomatoes thrown in. But here is the catch: the types of tomatoes, or other vegetables used, depends on the season since different kinds of produce naturally ripen at different times of the year depending on the season and climate. These people did not have supermarkets that have the same industrially-grown, genetically altered produce all year long the way we do in the 21st century. European farmers lived so close to nature that the seasons dictated what kind of game you had, what fruits you could pick, or what kind of wine you could drink. It may have been a harder life, but the food was of much higher quality. In the 1970s, Patience Gray realized these cultures were vanishing so she wrote all her observations down for posterity.
The author, rightly so, must have thought that not many people would be interested in a cookbook full of recipes that most people probably wouldn’t use or even couldn’t use considering that some of these food items no longer exist. Some of the cooking utensils are rare or obsolete. In my favorite chapter of all, she gives a detailed analysis of how cooking over open flames with different varieties of wood complement the flavors of all kinds of dishes. With this in mind, you begin to see why these traditions couldn’t survive. Most of us don’t have the time or the resources to find twenty different kinds of wood to cook twenty different meals.
But to get back to the main point, she made this book readable by adding in passages about the different places she lived in. There are descriptions of villages, architecture, farms, kitchens, and landscapes. She makes mention of some of the rural people and their customs along with musings on their religious and political beliefs. With a healthy contempt for the fascism of Mussolini, she points out that these rural people were mostly anarchists or communists. In our day you can criticize these ideologies all you want, but with hindsight you have to realize that when industrial capitalism is the dominant economic system and your community is famished and living at the edge of death, all those “isms” looked like desirable alternatives.
Finally, Gray iterates her own philosophy, simply put, that lacking something is what makes it pleasurable when you get it. Tomatoes taste like ecstasy when they are harvested because the farmers can’t have them for three-quarters of the year. It’s like saying Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas if you have it every day. This might be a cause of such widespred psychological dissatisfaction in our times. At least that’s what The Unabomber Ted Kaczynski said. In our age of abundance and mass conformity this might not be so clear, yet we may still know it by unconscious instinct. It is why a rare book might sell for $500 while a mass-produced Harry Potter novel will get a book dealer little more than fifty cents. The problem is that Patience Gray states her philosophical position but never explores it in depth.
In fact, she doesn’t explore many ideas at all in depth. Her writing just isn’t that good. It’s interesting that she created a cookbook you can read, but the things to be read are not always clear or even interesting. The recipes get redundant and a bit of a chore to read and some of the rest of it is just weak in its execution. I am in love with the idea of this book, but not the final product.
Patience Gray’s Honey From a Weed is not one of the most memorable books I have come across, but I don’t regret reading it. Having traveled and studied a lot, I can’t say I’m lacking in alternate perspectives on the world and the current state of our society, but I did enjoy imagining myself being in the Mediterranean places she described. It also gave me renewed inspiration for cooking; I learned the best way to cook radicchio and was reminded that I haven’t had any scungilli in a really long time. Once was enough though and I probably won’t be re-reading it this the future.
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