Patience Gray

In the 1960s, the British food writer Patience Gray abandoned her native country with her partner, sculptor Norman Mommens, to live near a series of marble quarries in remote parts of the Mediterranean. The life they made together is the subject of Gray's greatest work, the lyrical cookbook-memoir Honey from a Weed (Prospect Books, 1986). Hauling her own water, coaxing what crops she could from the stony earth, and preparing local dishes, she came to understand the cooking of these places as she never would have from the vantage point of a London kitchen. "My ambition in drawing in the background to what is being cooked," she wrote in the book's introduction, "is to restore the meaning."