The Centaur's Kitchen

Patience Gray's "Honey from a Weed is a modern classic of the kitchen. Her "Plats du Jour, published in 1957 by Penguin Books, was an important step in the re-eduication of British cooks after the Second World War. The book here published is the text of a full set of instructions which she provided in 1964 at the behest of the proprietors for the cooks of the Blue Funnel Line, an important Liverpool shipping line working mostly in Asian waters. The recipes which she so elegantly provides are redolent of Mediterranean and French cookery in the 1950s and 1960s and are a wonderful antidore to all the free-range fusion styles that seem current today. The whole is beautifully illustrated with 'mythical' paintings by the artist Miranda Gray: the theme is determined by Blue Funnel's custom of naming all their shops after Greek mythical figures.