192 pp; 175 x 260 mm; 
illustrations; hardback 

ISBN 1-903018-40-4 £20

A book of French, Italian, Greek & Catalan dishes for ships’ cooks on the Blue Funnel Line by PATIENCE GRAY with illustrations by MIRANDA GRAY.

Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed is a modern classic of the kitchen. Her Plats du Jour, published in 1957, was an important step in the re-education of British cooks after the Second World War. The Centaur’s Kitchen, however, has never before been shown to the public, except in the galleys and state-rooms of the passenger liners that once sailed under the ensign of the Blue Funnel Line. It was written in 1964, at the request of the company chairman, to better instruct the Chinese and Lascar cooks in cooking fresh and flavoursome food.
 

FOREWORD, Tom Jaine 

INTRODUCTION 

BATTERIE DE CUISINE 

HORS D’ŒUVRE AND SALADS 
Vinaigrette 
Anchovy dressing 
Cream dressing 
Mayonnaise 
Avocado sauce 
Salsa verde 
Sauce remoulade 
Aubergine salad 
Celeriac mayonnaise 
Haricot beans 
Stuffed bacon rolls 
Stuffed vine leaves 
Vegetables cooked à la grecque 
Leeks à la grecque 
White cabbage mayonnaise 
Beetroot in burgundy 
Cucumber salad 
Pimento salad 
Potato salad à la mayonnaise 
Potato salad à la vinaigrette 
Rice and tomato salad 
Salt cod salad 
Tomato salad à la catalane 
Chicken liver pâté 
Hare pâtés 
Pâté of smoked cod ’s roe 
Tunny fish pâté 

SOUPS 
Basic beef stock 
Chilled clear consommé 
Basic fish broth 
Bortsch 
Cherry soup 
Chilled creamy soups 
Greek fish soup 
Leek soup 
Minestrone alla Genovese 
Mulligatawny soup 
Prawn soup 
Spinach soup 
(Italian) Tomato soup 

POTATO AND VEGETABLE DISHES 
Italian whipped potatoes 
Potatoes à la dauphinoise 
My simplified version of pommes dauphinoises 
Potatoes à la savoyarde 
Cucumber with cream 
Egg plant 
Gratin of tomatoes alla parmigiana 
Gratin of mushrooms alla parmigiana 
Leeks alla salza bianca 
Leeks cooked in the oven 
Okra and potatoes 
Spinach à la catalane 

FISH 
How to poach fish 
Court-bouillon for poaching fish 
Greek fish soup 
Fillets of sole aux tomates 
Haddock in Madeira 
Matelote of eels 
Neapolitan method of serving poached fish 
Oysters 
Plaice 
Rainbow trout baked in foil 
Red mullet in white wine sauce 
Salmon trout 
A Venetian method of baking fish 
Salt cod à la catalane 
Tunny fish à la bonne femme 
Turbot à la crème 

MEAT, POULTRY AND GAME 
Daube of beef à la provençale 
Beef rolls 
Ox tongue with cherry sauce 
Ham cooked in cider 
Calves’ liver sauté 
Rolled loin of veal 
Veal goulash 
Le coq au vin 
Roast chicken 
Chicken sauté 
Chicken à la crème 
Chicken sauté fines herbes 
Chicken sauté au basilic 
Chicken sauté Castelpoggio 
Paprika chicken 
Civet of hare 
Roast saddle of hare à la bourguignonne 

SWEETS
Apricots cooked in the oven 
Chocolate mousse 
Fools: apricot, apple, gooseberry 
Mantuan cake 
Melon filled with fruit
Pears in red wine 
Salads of fresh fruit 
Open fruit tarts: apple, apricot, peach 
Summer pudding 
Water ices 

Patience Gray, the author of this book, died at the age of 88 in March 2005, before she was able to review its production, correct its errors or contribute an explanatory foreword that would identify the participants in its genesis. She was a woman of manifoldgifts and considerable energy and such an account would have been memorable, as was every other thing she wrote. 

Patience was much more than a writer or, less sententiously, not only a writer, but for the purposes of this foreword, it is her books that will mostly occupy us. Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food appeared as a Penguin Handbook in 1957, being actually written in 1954 – 55 in collaboration with Primrose Boyd, with whom she had first worked in the studio of the designer F. H. K. Henrion. Her second book, Honey from a Weed:Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia , was published (by Prospect Books) in 1986 and the success that it enjoyed was perhaps the spur to the rapid appearance of her third, Ring Doves and Snakes, from Macmillan, in 1989 although it was in fact composed in the 1960s, ‘when no-one wanted to print it’. Finally, there was Work Adventures Childhood Dreams, published in 1999 under her own guidance by Rolando Civilla at the Levante Arti Grafiche in Presicce, the small town in the Salento on the heel of Italy nearest to the Masseria  pigolizzi, where she had settled with her sculptor (and later husband) Norman Mommens in the early 1970s. 

There is, of course, an omission from this catalogue, the book now published. But it had never been printed at all, merely issued as a typescript to the personnel of its client-creator, the Blue Funnel Shipping Line in 1964. Its existence has never been in doubt, Patience refers to it in all her subsequent works, but I remarked when visiting her at Spigolizzi in 2004 that I had never seen the text. She produced it with a flourish from her substantial archive (which I and many another outsider might have thought muddled but which always produced the goods). It appeared then, and still today, that each page was perfect Patience: distilled, undiluted. I implored her permission to take it back to England, transcribe it, ask her daughter Miranda for allusive illustration, and then send it to the press. 

In the early 1960s Patience ran away to southern Europe with the artist and sculptor Norman Mommens. That Mills-and-Boon-like statement needs a million qualifications but it does allow us to make the jump from Patience Gray, the mother of two, a denizen of Hampstead and north London, until recently looking after the women’s page of the Observer newspaper in London, and a freelance designer and journalist, to Patience Gray, a maker of jewellery, living among sculptors, artists and quarrymen in Carrara. For those who wish to muse on those qualifications, Work Adventures Childhood Dreams is essential:it is a complex self-portrait of a remarkable woman. 

The quest of the sculptor for different sites and stones led the couple to plan the expedition to Naxos in the Greek Cyclades in 1963. They were not rich;paying commissions were not just welcome, they ensured survival. Two such, both literary, financed their year-long stay on the island. The first was this book;the second was one for children, Baldur the Car Basher, written and illustrated by Norman for a firm in Rotterdam. Patience described their situation in Ring Doves and Snakes : We went for marble. We were for another kind of life. The things were packed, what we thought we’d need, marble tools, a sheet of railway glass for monotypes, Catesby’s linoleum [for lino-cuts], engraving tools, rugs, plates, a copper pan, cups, bedrolls, paper, handmade and Japanese, ink black and ink Gestetner, candles, a peppermill, working clothes, some decent clothes, portable Olivetti, spare plugs, pen-nibs, Robert Graves and other indispensables; Racine, because on an island one might need him, and reference works for when I start to write to book of advice to Chinese cooks, plying their course between the Antipodes and Singapore, a sterling prop to underpin the letter of credit, made out and addressed to bankers of the world to honour it. 

The Holt family ’s Ocean Steam Ship Company, called the Blue Funnel Line, founded by the engineer Alfred Holt and his brother Philip in 1865, was based in Liverpool. Its two trademarks – the blue funnels and the invariably classical names of the ships themselves – seem both the product of happenstance. The blue funnels arose from barrels of paint of this colour being left on the deck of the very first vessel with which the family was involved. They had been used to paint a thin blue line round the hull of the vessel, ‘a mark of respect ’ for the lately-dead previous owner. Economy decreed they should be used in the refurbishment that followed. The classical names were sign that the brothers recognized ‘they were setting out on the greatest adventure of their lives, ’inspired, you might say, by Homer ’s Odyssey. 

Their first three ships were Agamemnon , Ajax and Achilles . Later, the fleet was to include Agapenor , Autolycus , Laertes , Polyphemus , Eurymedon , Telemachus and many others including, of course, Centaur . there were several singular characteristics to the Blue Funnel Line beyond colour and nomenclature. First, it was a family firm which insisted its members should be engaged and intelligent. It did not quite fall victim to the three-generation cycle of ‘up, down and provoked by faulty genes, although after little more than a century the original concept was fatally wounded and Blue Funnel was no more. Second, its engineering prowess was great. The founder Alfred Holt was by training a marine engineer. Blue Funnel ships, therefore, were built to the highest specification. Technical innovation allowed them to break into the China trade – their commercial bedrock. Third, many of their ships from the 1920s onwards combined passenger and cargo operations. While the China trade had been the foundation of Blue Funnel ’s fortunes, the line had expanded into many other zones:they took emigrants to Australia and pilgrims to Mecca; traded throughout south-east Asia;ran to the United States, through the Panama Canal and beyond. Centaur was herself a passenger and cargo vessel. Plying between Fremantle in Western Australia and Singapore, she took 4,500 sheep in the hold and 190 passengers above decks. It was the link between Liverpool and China at the start of Blue Funnel’s history that lay behind the arrival of the first Chinese immigrants in the Lancashire port. Sailors who had manned Alfred Holt’s initial voyages decided to settle near the docks rather than returning home. By 1871, there were 200 Chinese in the town, many living in boarding houses provided by the Ocean Steam Ship Company. Blue Funnel ’s reliance on Chinese crew continued for decades, a signal factor in Liverpool ’s Chinatown being among Britain ’s best and earliest. 

The friendly connection between the Holt company and its employees was enshrined in a rhyme that went, ‘Paint my funnels tall and blue, and make sure you look after my Chinese crew.’ Relations between the two communities were marred after the Second World War with the forcible and sudden repatriation of many Chinese sailors by the Home Office. On Blue Funnel ships, however, particularly those operating in Asian waters, the crews remained Chinese, including, of course, the cooks. 

At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Blue Funnel fleetnumbered 77 vessels, of which only 36 remained in 1945. Many new ones were commissioned to return to strength and the last under the old regime (there was to be considerable change and reorganization from 1966) was TSMV (Twin-Screw Motor Vessel) Centaur. She was built by John Brown & Co. of Clydebank in 1963, measured 481 feet and had a gross tonnage of 8,262 (these facts and more come from Ships in Focus: Blue Funnel Line by John Clarkson, Bill Harvey and Roy Fenton). As I mentioned, she carried 190 passengers and many, many sheep (or 700 cattle) from Fremantle to Singapore, presumably for the halal meat trade. She sailed out of Liverpool to commence service in January 1964. 

The name Centaur had a proud yet tragic history. Our Centaur’s predecessor, a cargo liner too, was built at Greenock in 1924 and also made the trip between Singapore and Australia. Come the war, she was requisitioned by the British, being passed to the Australians in 1943. Shortly after that, in service as a hospital ship, she was running from Sydney to Cairns and thence to New Guinea. Off Brisbane, she was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and most souls were lost. The new Centaur was a fine vessel, as can be seen from her postcard portrait, but quite why she should have been privileged with this remarkable set of culinary instructions (remarkable for the South Seas at least) cannot be precisely reconstructed. A close friend of Patience in the ’50s, and for many years after that, was Ariane Nisberg (now Castaing). They both worked as journalists, for instance on House & Garden magazine, and Mrs Castaing was to earn honourable mention in the acknowledgements to Honey from a Weed for ‘bracing criticism some years ago [which] spurred me to fresh exertions ’. Mrs Castaing was also a friend of Ronnie Swaine (later Sir Ronnie), a colleague of the Holt family, and later chairman of Overseas Containers Ltd, by which the firm of Alfred Holt &Co. was absorbed in 1967. He had been mightily impressed by Plats du Jour and asked Mrs Castaing to introduce him to Patience. They got on extremely well and it is from this connection that stemmed the commission to write a full set of recipes for the Chinese cooks of the glorious new addition to the Blue Funnel fleet. The text was called ‘A Book of French, Italian, Greek & Catalan Dishes for Blue Funnel Ships ’. I have taken a small liberty with this in the present sub-title and have had no qualms about naming it for Centaur . When first I heard of it, I had imagined it was a set of recipes distributed throughout the fleet, but a short acquaintance makes plain that it was written with Centaur in mind. If for no other reason, look at the recipe for Paprika chicken. Patience notes, ‘As I have evolved this way of cooking a chicken myself, and it has met with approval, this might well be the chicken recipe to name CHICKEN CENTAUR. A request for such a recipe came to me from the Chief Superintendent.’ She had, in fact, done quite a lot of homework before her exile on Naxos. The text is peppered with remarks on the state of play in the galley, on the normal stores available to the chefs, and most significantly, on the size of party for which everything is cooked. A note at the beginning reads, ‘the recipes in this book are calculated to serve 8 passengers’, a small but necessary detail. Although there was much of the ‘artist’ in Patience, that character with which we so irritatingly stereotype the
creative or unfamiliar, she was also devastatingly practical. 

Another misapprehension that I needed swiftly to discard was that this text was a mere abbreviated rerun of Plats du Jour. There is certainly a common tone and approach, but the recipes are not repeats. It is indeed that approach, short of hectoring but indubitably firm, that makes it so delicious. The idea of an English writer instructing Chinese cooks in the proper manner of cooking civet of hare as they steam at 20 knots through tropic seas is somehow piquant. For our part, however, as modern readers and cooks ourselves, the unabashed good taste of the recipes, the profound common sense of the recommendations, are reasons enough to rejoice in the work. 

What I present here is very nearl y an exact transcription of the original typescript. A few corrections have been made, some pettifogging editorial decisions enacted for the sake of consistency, but nothing to change Patience ’s prose and expression. The big alteration
has been to include the handsome illustrations by Miranda Gray, Patience’s daughter. These reflect the classical themes of the Blue own ships, or they bring us closer to Patience’s life with Norman on Mediterranean shores. In any event they bring lustre to an already luminous text. 

I am most grateful to Nicolas Gray and Maggie Armstrong for their hospitality and support at Spigolizzi when visiting Patience; to Miranda Gray;and to Mrs Ariane Castaing for the light she shed on the inception of the book.