Patience Gray

Patience discovered late in life that her father, at various times a surgeon, a pig farmer, and finally a photographer, was the son of a Polish rabbi called Warschavski, who had arrived in England in 1861 and become a Unitarian minister.

During her childhood at Mitchen Hall, "a grand but rather isolated house of peach-coloured brick", her father's moods dominated family life: "I have listened to other people's accounts of their happy childhoods with sadness mingled with disbelief," Patience wrote.

"I recognised mine as a snuffing out of every spontaneous impulse, to the point where one might have been said to be walking on tiptoe to avoid the detonations."

Her father's poor business sense (his pig farm failed) put strain on the family finances and her parents' marriage.

Patience was sent to live with an aunt and uncle in London, where she and a cousin of hers attended Queen's College, a noted independent girls' school.

She was an excellent student and passed her university entrance exams at the age of 16.

However, her father thought she was too young to start university.

Patience Jean Gray (née Stanham; 31 October 1917 – 10 March 2005) was an English cookery and travel writer of the mid-20th century.

In 1938, after graduating, Patience travelled with her sister Tania to Eastern Europe under a grant from the Quakers, who wanted to promote friendships with the Romanians.

The sisters were there when Queen Marie, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, died in July.

The lavishness of the funeral rites prompted Patience to write her first piece of journalism, which appeared in a Bucharest paper.

Its editor became infatuated by Patience, filling her hotel room with bunches of tuberose, whose scent, she said, always filled her with remembered horror.

Tania and Patience escaped his attentions by fleeing to the Black Sea in a monoplane piloted by a Romanian prince.

Patience returned to London in 1939 and took up a job at the Foreign Office.

When the Second World War broke out, she was dismissed, she claimed, for "having too many foreign contacts".

She went instead to the Arts Council, where she began an affair with Thomas Gray, although he was already married with two children.

He was the brother of the industrial designer Milner Gray, founder of the London Design Institute.

Patience and Thomas had two children, a son Nicholas and a daughter Miranda.

She took his name by deed poll in the London Gazette of 17 January 1941.

During the war, Patience moved to a cottage on the South Downs which had no electricity or running water.

Thomas was conscripted.

Patience's career then followed a peripatetic course, through "temporary jobs for literary and artistic folk" that fitted in with single motherhood.

In the mid-1950s, she was one of a group of translators who worked on a new edition of Larousse Gastronomique.

Her first bestseller was Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food, a collaboration written with her business partner Boyd and illustrated by David Gentleman, then at the beginning of his illustrious career.

She worked with the designer FHK Henrion, responsible for the displays inside the Country Pavilion at the 1951 Festival of Britain.

There she met Primrose Boyd, with whom she later set up a freelance research partnership.

Gray's first book was as an editor and was not food-related: Indoor Plants and Gardens, published in 1952, is a practical guide to growing, maintaining and using them as decoration in the modernistic interiors of 1950s homes.

Her two most popular books were Plats Du Jour (1957) – written with Primrose Boyd, about French cooking – and Honey From A Weed (1986), an account of the Mediterranean way of life.

Born Patience Jean Stanham at Shackleford, near Godalming, Surrey, she was the second of three daughters of Hermann Stanham, a major in the Royal Field Artillery and his wife Olive Florence, née Colgate, daughter of a Lincolnshire farmer.

In 1958 Patience Gray beat over a thousand applicants to become the first editor of The Observer women's page.

With little agreement over what should be on it, Patience had free rein.

Women, she felt, did not want to acquire, but to learn.

In the early 1960s her life changed again when she fell in love with the Belgian artist and sculptor Norman Mommens, who was married at the time to potter Ursula Mommens.

She supplied them with articles on European art, design, thought and habits up to 1961, when a new superior, George Seddon, decided women were interested in more down-to-earth subjects such as shopping and cooking.

Gray and Norman Mommens embarked on a journey round the Mediterranean following a vein of stone from Provence, Carrara, Catalonia, the Greek island of Naxos, and finally southern Italy, where in 1970 they settled in a farmhouse in Apulia.

She refused to have such modern conveniences as a refrigerator, telephone or electric light.

She wrote of this life in Honey From a Weed, a book about rural life, folklore and cookery, full of recipes featuring peasant food.

It sold 50,000 copies in its first year, initially far outstripping Elizabeth David's books, and was reprinted by Persephone Books in 2006.

She spent a year in Bonn, Germany, studying first economics, then switching to history of art, living in what she called a "kind of prison": a 17th-century observatory in the Poppelsdorfer Allee, with a professor of astronomy and his wife and child.

A desire to escape the oppressive atmosphere of her lodgings led her out walking in the city, where she discovered a love of Baroque architecture." At the London School of Economics she studied under the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, for instance.