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The Food Programme: Patience Gray: A Life Through Food

Patience Gray: A Life in Food

06/08/2017

Patience Gray: A Life Through Food

BBC Radio 4 - The Food Programme, Patience Gray: A Life Through Food

Jojo Tulloh, Adam Federman and Louise Gray introduce the food writing of Patience Gray.

In the year that Patience Gray would have been 100, Jojo Tulloh, Adam Federman and Louise Gray decipher the visionary food writer's life, writing and enduring appeal.

"Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance. Home-made bread rubbed with garlic and sprinkled with olive oil, shared - with a flask of wine - between working people, can be more convivial than any feast." So writes Patience Gray in the introduction to her 1986 award winning book 'Honey From A Weed: Fasting & Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, The Cyclades and Apulia'. 

To some, Patience's name evokes a masterpiece, one of the most evocative and imaginative food books written in modern times. To others, her name will mean very little; Patience Gray, by her own admission, kept a low profile, living and writing for most of her working life among rural people in Italy, Greece and Catalonia. 

Patience, who died in 2005, would have been 100 in 2017. So Sheila Dillon looks back on Patience Gray's life through food with the help of Adam Federman, author of a new biography 'Fasting and Feasting: The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray' and food writers Jojo Tulloh and Louise Gray. They hear from the Food Programme archives. From two visits to Patience's home in Puglia recorded by Derek Cooper and Simon Parkes.

Presented by Sheila Dillon
Produced in Bristol by Clare Salisbury.

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