This book is perhaps the jewel in Prospect s crown. Within a few months of its first appearance in 1986 it was hailed as a modern classic. Fiona MacCarthy wrote in The Times that, the book is a large and grandiose life history, a passionate narrative of extremes of experience. Jeremy Round called Patience Gray the high priestess of cooking, whose book pushes the form of the cookery book as far as it can go. Angela Carter remarked that it was less a cookery book that a summing-up of the genre of the late-modern British cookery book. The work has attracted a cult following in the United States,...