{"id":115258,"date":"2017-09-12T11:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-09-12T15:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115258"},"modified":"2017-09-12T11:23:45","modified_gmt":"2017-09-12T15:23:45","slug":"patience-grays-illustrated-letter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/12\/patience-grays-illustrated-letter\/","title":{"rendered":"A Friend with a Heart-Shaped Leaf"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Patience<\/a>

Courtesy of Nicolas Gray.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patience Gray, the most important food writer you\u2019ve never heard of, spent more than thirty\u00a0years living in a remote corner of Southern Italy\u2014without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone. Her 1986 cookbook,\u00a0Honey from a Weed<\/em>,\u00a0is one of the most beloved of the twentieth century, yet little was known of her reclusive life until now.\u00a0This illustrated letter, sent by Gray from Carrara, Italy, in 1966, is excerpted from Adam Federman\u2019s new biography, Fasting<\/span> and Feasting<\/span>: The Life of Visionary Food Writer\u00a0Patience Gray<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and is reprinted with permission from the publisher, Chelsea Green. As Federman writes in the introduction,<\/p>\n

Although she enjoyed the attention, Patience was rather guarded about her own life. This applied not only to visiting journalists and food writers but to friends and family as well. There was an \u201caura of secrecy about her,\u201d a sense that her past was somehow shuttered, which Patience did little to dispel. \u201cPatience loved secrets, secret rooms, dark corners, mysteries and so on,\u201d her friend Ulrik Voswinckel recalled. This aura of secrecy was enhanced by her interest in astrology, mysticism, and her vast folkloric knowledge of edible plants and mushrooms. She shared her workspace in Puglia\u2014to which others were rarely admitted\u2014with a large black snake and often ruminated on the symbolic meaning of the scorpion, which happened to be Patience\u2019s astrological sign. She was born on Halloween. It is perhaps not surprising then that several people, including Paul Levy in his profile for the\u00a0Observer<\/em> and the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>, described Patience as a modern-day witch.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Patience Gray, the most important food writer you\u2019ve never heard of, spent more than thirty\u00a0years living in a remote corner of Southern Italy\u2014without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone. Her 1986 cookbook,\u00a0Honey from a Weed,\u00a0is one of the most beloved of the twentieth century, yet little was known of her reclusive life until now.\u00a0This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1245,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1900],"tags":[30540,64,5733,30539,30537,182,30536,30538,9888],"class_list":["post-115258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-correspondence","tag-adam-federman","tag-cookbooks","tag-correspondence-2","tag-fasting-and-feasting-the-life-of-visionary-food-writer-patience-gray","tag-honey-from-a-weed","tag-letters","tag-patience-gray","tag-paul-levy","tag-tuscany"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Friend with a Heart-Shaped Leaf<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"An illustrated letter from Patience Gray, the most important food writer you\u2019ve never heard of.\" 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