Patience Gray: A Life Through Food
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 976 Ratings
🗓️ 6 August 2017
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"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.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the |
| 0:03.8 | podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC. |
| 0:08.6 | It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world. |
| 0:15.3 | What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism |
| 0:19.8 | and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines. |
| 0:23.7 | And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject |
| 0:28.4 | you might not even have thought you were interested in. |
| 0:30.2 | Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment, |
| 0:36.1 | you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:40.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:49.0 | Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Programme. Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:55.0 | I feel that I'm not really a real cook because I don't want to astonish and surprise I only want to |
| 1:06.8 | satisfy people that perhaps means you are a real cook |
| 1:11.4 | by my definition you would be. |
| 1:14.0 | Anyway I've got a very I'd like to keep a very low profile because I'm really more concerned with people than with the food. |
| 1:24.0 | Patience Gray talking to Derek Cooper in Apulia in 1988. |
| 1:29.0 | She's a writer who in 1986 produced a book that will be read hundreds of years from now. |
| 1:36.0 | The Ring of Hammer and Chisl on Marble on Stone on Wood is the daily background of the book. |
| 1:42.0 | Morning, noon, and night, |
| 1:43.0 | one is phased with the workman's appetite. |
| 1:45.0 | The dishes I describe are the many ways |
| 1:47.0 | in which it has and is being satisfied. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.