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Patience Gray followed her partner, the sculptor Norman Mommens, to wherever there was stone to carve: Catalonia, the marble village of Apollona on Naxos, Carrara in Tuscany, and finally a farmhouse called Spigolizzi in the Salento of Apulia. For about twenty years she lived without electricity, and in places without running water.
The poor rural cooking of the Mediterranean is not a degraded form of rich cuisine. It is a sophisticated body of knowledge built because people had to extract nourishment and pleasure from what cost nothing: weeds, pulses, stale bread and scraps of oil. Necessity forced a close, exact attention to plants, seasons and technique that abundance never requires, so the knowledge lives with the people who had least.
Edible wild plants such as chicory, wild asparagus, rocket, sow-thistle and purslane are foraged from field margins and cooked as a staple. The Greeks call them horta, and in Italy they are erbe selvatiche. The knowledge of which plant, at what stage, and prepared how is held mostly by women and passed on orally while gathering. It turns land that looks barren into a free, seasonal food supply.
Gray holds that good cooking comes from a balance struck between frugality and liberality. You economize ruthlessly on what is scarce, then spend generously on the few things that make a dish sing, such as good oil, fresh herbs, time and hospitality. Seen this way, a meal is judged by how intelligently it allocates limited means, not by how rich its ingredients are.
When emigration, cash wages, electricity and shop-bought food reach a village, the reasons to gather weeds, dry pulses, or preserve by sun and salt disappear. With those reasons goes the living transmission of the skills. Gray's record is written as salvage, because this know-how survives only as long as the scarcity that sustains it.