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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
[8] Many foodies (a term coined by her friend Paul Levy, who wrote her entry in the ODNB)[9] visited her Italian home, including Derek Cooper, who interviewed her for BBC Radio Four's The Food Programme[10] The book has been championed by writers and chefs from Jeremy Lee to Clarissa Dickson Wright.
[11] Patience Gray's other books include Ring Doves And Snakes (1989), a darker account of the couple's year on Naxos and why they were forced to leave;[1] The Centaur's Kitchen (1964, published only posthumously in 2005 by Tom Jaine of Prospect Books), a set of recipes for the Chinese cooks of the Blue Funnel Shipping Line aboard the newly launched cargo liner, the Centaur, plying from western Australia to Singapore; and Work Adventures, Childhood Dreams (self-published, 1999), a collection of autobiographical essays.
"There's something strictly otherworldly about the recipes in Honey From a Weed, despite their simple ingredients and clear directions," wrote Laura Shapiro in The New York Times.