The Centaur's Kitchen: A Book of French, Italian, Greek and Catalan Dishes for Blue Funnel Ships Book

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-education 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. In a few short chapters, Patience Gray lays out a whole repertoire, drawn mainly from the Mediterranean and France, that might be cooked on board ships. Her aim was to wean the cooks off frozen, dried and packeted food and to respond to both the seasons and the supplies available at ports of call. The style of writing is eloquent and prescriptive: the author keen to impart good habits as well as good cooking. Thus, there are chapters about equipment and kitchen basics in addition to recipes. The text has been illustrated by Miranda Gray, the author's daughter. Many of the pictures, just as the title, draw on Greek mythology. The reason for this is the Blue Funnel Line's custom of naming its ships for mythological figures (Centaur, Ariadne, Neptune, etc). Other drawings evoke the author's life beside the Mediterranean in Italy and the Greek isles.