Minestrone and women’s lives

A Culinary Palimpsest of Lives Written, Tasted, Remembered
essay by Melanie Monk

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Food is never merely sustenance; it is narrative layered with memory and meaning. In October 2025, I travelled to Rome and Oxford as part of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, culminating in a project that combined two themes: Italy in the ancient and modern imagination (with a focus on food history) and life writing (an exploration of how lives are represented across time, genre, and media). I deepened my understanding of the links between food writing, memory, and culture by studying the works of three contemporary authors. Ada Boni (1881-1973), codified Italian home cooking and idealized domesticity during Mussolini’s era; Elizabeth David (1913-1992), a wry aristocrat who sought to liberate postwar Britain from culinary blandness by introducing Mediterranean sensuality; and Patience Gray (1917-2005), an eccentric British artist who followed a vein of marble through Italy with her sculptor partner, documenting rural foodways for posterity. A palimpsest analysis of their work — one that reads texts as layered and overwritten — uncovers not only the cultural and personal subtexts shaping their lives, but also the generational threads linking my grandmother, mother, and me through food. This essay is more than a scholarly exploration of Italian food history; it engages with theories of memory while examining how culinary texts shape identity across generations. It is a form of what Diane Tye calls everyday autobiography, in which I make connections between Italian culinary texts, inter-generational memory, and the formation of identity. I also add my personal reflections, which, as a Canadian of Italian heritage, are more than anecdotes, bringing a personal dimension from a diasporic perspective that is integral to my methodology.

As journalists and keen observers of social life, the underlying messages of Boni, David, and Gray’s writing reveal how women negotiated their shifting roles in family and community during the tumultuous 20th century. Each author works against material and cultural scarcity, and for placemaking (creating a sense of belonging through food and place), in different ways. Boni exemplifies orderly, disciplined restraint, and nationhood. For her, the kitchen is the heart of Italian civilization, where civic identity and national pride are forged. David reclaims her selfhood and rapturous appetite through intellect and rebelliousness. She challenges the restrictions of postwar Britain by cultivating more cosmopolitan tastes and curating recipes from her travels that evoke sensual engagement. Gray approaches both cooking and daily life with reverence and resourcefulness. She locates herself in communion with the land and its seasonal rhythms, finding a sense of belonging by emulating the ways of the locals. Together, Boni, David, and Gray provide a prismatic lens to reflect on my own encounters with family, self, and memory from within the kitchen: a life written, tasted, and remembered.

The intensives in Rome enabled me to visit places that Boni, David, and Gray may have frequented and search for their traces in the markets, menus, and monuments. As I did so, I reflected on how meals, recipes, cookbooks, cuisines, and places can be read as edible palimpsests carrying layers of personal, cultural, and political history. When approached in this way, they also reveal how my worldview, preferences, and tastes have been shaped by Italian lineage. Like an archaeologist, I used a palimpsest approach to reveal “everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings [that] have fallen upon [my] brain softly as light.”¹  In a world where individual actions often seem inconsequential and ephemeral, following the throughline from the past to the present, and into the future through food, provides me with comfort and a sense of community.

Cooking and writing layer experience, memory, and identity — they are processes of selective preserving, in which the author determines (consciously or not) which tastes are foregrounded and those that remain hidden in the background. In this essay, I will create a palimpsest of my own, each section building upon the last, like ingredients melding in a pot of minestrone, each distinct yet contributing to a layered whole. Beginning with “Setting the Table,” I will explain the methodology of the culinary palimpsest and how lives, recipes, and histories are overwritten and evolve over generations, without erasing what came before. In “A Life Written: Making Minestrone,” I trace the lives and writings of Ada Boni, Elizabeth David, and Patience Gray using this approach to examine how their work both reflects and shapes women’s identities and food culture. In “A Life Tasted: Around the Table,” I recount my encounters with food, recipes, people, and traditions in Rome, enriching the soup I am creating with the flavours of history and place, through an annotated photo journal. Finally, in “A Life Remembered: Leftovers and Aftertastes,” I blend writing, tasting, and remembering my own heritage to consider how the culinary palimpsest continues to resonate long after a meal, trip, or life is finished.

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Setting the Table

Andiamo in casa. (Translated as “Let’s go home.” In Romagna, this is synonymous with,

“Let’s go into the kitchen.” — Montanari

As Montanari argues, the kitchen is not just a physical space but a ‘line of memory’ in Nora’s sense, where collective identity and memory are enacted through repeated daily rituals. Anyone who has spent hours cooking a special dinner, only to have it consumed within mere moments, experiences the fleeting materiality and ephemerality of food. Once the dishes are cleared away, it is only their memory that lingers, deep in our subconscious.

Of what, then, is food memory composed? The sensory experiences of taste and smell are often the first to fade, and the first to trigger a recollection of past meals, even those from childhood tied to long-buried memories of places and people. Marcel Proust captures this beautifully in his famous passage on the madeleine from Remembrance of Things Past, when he writes, “the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”² It is not taste and smell themselves that encode food memories, but the experiences to which they are tied. For Proust, the madeleine filled him “with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself… all-powerful joy.” One bite of the cake involuntarily brought him back to his childhood.

A critical element required, then, to encode food memories is the intensity of the embodied experience they provoke, whether joy or revulsion (or sometimes both). For instance, a few years ago, I received brandy beans as a Christmas gift. One bite immediately took me back to a childhood Christmas when I had unknowingly popped a liqueur-filled chocolate into my mouth. As my taste preferences have changed since then, I found myself simultaneously enjoying the taste while also recalling the horrid, burning sensation that had accompanied it as a child. That chocolate brought me right back to my grandparents’ kitchen, as I ran gagging to the sink to spit out the treasonous treat to the amused laughter of my siblings. That house was torn down decades ago, and my grandparents have long since passed, but the synesthetic qualities of that chocolate could put me right back in that time and place in my mind’s eye. Moments such as Proust’s madeleine and my chocolate exemplify David Sutton’s argument that food memories are relational and operate as a mnemonic device. Sensory experience activates layered recollections that collapse temporal distance, evoking what he calls ‘the whole’ memory of place interwoven with family and social context.³

It is not only exceptional events such as these that encode food memories, but also the daily rituals of the table, a point emphasized by Sutton and Montanari. I recall little about weeknight dinners in my youth and even less of what our kitchen looked like. However, I have vivid memories of Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ home: from who sat where in their brown pleather nook, to what we ate and in which order. I can see their kitchen with its gold velvet brocade wallpaper and circa-1970s orange pinch-pleat curtains, recall where everything was kept in the painted wood cupboards, feel the cool smoothness of their minty-green milk glass mugs in my hands, hear the oven door squeak open and close, and smell the waft of garlic-studded roast beef and potatoes that enveloped me the moment I stepped inside their door. When my grandpa was alive, he would always start passing the dishes, family-style, from his place at the head of the table to the left, and my grandma always ate at the turquoise-and-chrome step stool at the counter where she could supervise the goings-on and bring out the next course. These repeated and shared meals gave my otherwise slippery childhood memories the texture they needed to stick in my brain.

We can examine the history of taste — and of a culture — through the traces that food leaves behind, from ancient archaeological sites to cookbooks and memoirs. Food behaviour (“foodways,” how we produce and perform food) is an intimate, bodily language that transmits culture and shapes identities. Our food-related choices serve as a system of signs that communicate our positionalities: economic class, ethnicity, occupation, and social roles.⁴ This inter-generational transmission of memory aligns with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory, which illuminates how culinary practices transmit affective histories across generations. According to Hirsch, the experiences of my ancestors, like the trauma of leaving their home country and extended families, the struggle for survival, and the comfort and community they built, shaped the emotional landscape of my mother’s formative years, and in turn, mine. Their generosity at their table and over the garden fence, along with the ways they gardened, shopped, preserved, and cooked, were all responses to their immigrant experiences.

Even though I did not directly experience food insecurity, I carry its imprint in my overstuffed pantries and freezers, full of dried pasta, canned beans, and homemade soup. The older I become, the more I find myself drawn to the familiar, replicating memories I did not even realize I carried. This aligns with Nora’s notion of memory sites: kitchens, gardens, family tables, pantries, and cupboard shelves as tangible repositories of intangible histories.

Post-memory is an invisible undercurrent, a felt inheritance of earlier memories that shapes my relationship with food today. This forms a culinary palimpsest, where past, present, and future inscribe themselves over one another without erasing what came before. Thomas DeQuincey, who coined the term in the mid-1800s, described its layering process as “involuted.” He was referring to more than manuscripts here; the palimpsest is also a metaphor for how our bodies, minds, and memories work. Impressions and experiences fold into one another in ways that bind them into a shared, inseparable existence. The palimpsest metaphor deepens this understanding, as Sarah Dillon argues. While a singular experience, idea, or memory is capable of being read or understood independently, it is continually changing by the whole of what came before, is happening now, or will happen in the future.⁵ In this way, I carry my grandmother’s frugality, my mother’s generosity, and my intellectual curiosity, even as my thoughts and feelings are being overwritten and illuminated by my own and my daughter’s experiences. There is something achingly beautiful and humbling about realizing, as Dillon tells us, that nothing is ever truly lost, and even culinary practices serve as living archives. A palimpsest is a lens for capturing complexity and uncovering intricate connections among seemingly disparate people, places, and things. It serves as a lens through which to read texts and uncover their layers of meaning. In the sections that follow, I will consider how ingredients, food rituals, recipes, writers, and places serve as palimpsests of culinary histories — including my own — shaping both what is remembered and what is obscured. This approach situates food as a material text that can be read to reveal the accrual of meaning.

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A Life Written: Making Minestrone

Tutto fa brood. (Translated as everything makes broth; even scraps are useful)

Minestrone is a hearty, chunky, vegetable-rich soup with beans and a starch (usually rice or pasta, depending on the region). But the etiology of the word reveals a deeper, more culturally resonant meaning related to the act of serving (minestra) and caring for others (ministro), underscoring its social and virtuous dimensions. It is the ultimate comfort food, a meal-in-a-bowl that warms you up from the inside. More than a recipe, minestrone serves as an enduring vessel for tending, nourishing, and generosity. Capatti and Montanari’s theory of the single dish helps to explain why it carries so much personal and collective meaning across generations.⁶ It demands only what is seasonal, nutritious, inexpensive, and readily available. No advanced culinary techniques or equipment are needed; it remains accessible to everyone, everywhere, at any time. Yet, despite its infinite variations, which reveal the personal tastes, habits, and regional culinary origins of each cook, it never loses its identity as a communal dish which must be eaten around a table. Minestrone’s very flexibility secures its continuity, echoing Barthes’ view of food as a system of signs that accrues meaning through repetition and variation. It is not so much a recipe as a palimpsest form: a framework that invites revision while preserving lineage. Resonating with Dillon’s notion of the palimpsest as involuted, minestrone carries layers of meaning that remain legible despite its many variations. These layers include the material (the ingredients and recipes), cultural (the norms and traditions shaping its use), historical (events that left traces on its evolution, such as war and famine), and personal (memories, senses, tastes).

Minestrone is a modern invention with ancient origins. Its earliest form appears in Roman puls, simple porridges of barley or spelt with vegetables, herbs, and garum (an early fish condiment). Over the centuries, new ingredients were added that slowly shifted the soup’s colour and texture — beans from monastic gardens, olive oil and cheese rinds from Renaissance kitchens, and the later introduction of New World tomatoes and potatoes. The addition of regional starches, rice in the north and pasta in the south, created another defining layer. Each era left its mark on what has become a crowning symbol of cucina povera.

We have seen, then, that minestrone is a vessel for interpretation. More relevant for my purposes is to consider the role of women as interpreters and scribes. Beyond archaeological fragments and culinary manuscripts, the palimpsest-like quality of minestrone is revealed through the hands of twentieth-century writers Ada Boni, Elizabeth David, and Patience Gray. These women did more than record Italian foodways; they rewrote them with the textures of their own memories, migrations, desires, and constraints. As each inscribed her tastes onto “authentic” Italian food, cooking itself became a mode of life writing. Their narratives reveal how they understood themselves and their moment, and how their choices about what to preserve, refine, or discard shaped the evolving story of Italian cuisine. Boni, writing for a modern middle-class audience, streamlined traditional techniques to save time and labour while still retaining peasant voices. David, by contrast, subsumed these voices into her own narrative, blending them into a hybrid form that left the sources largely invisible. Gray restores them on her own terms: she aspires to their artisanal knowledge and sustenance practices but positions herself always as an outsider. As Hermione Lee reminds us, the choices of what to include — or exclude — in life writing reveal as much about the author’s identity and values as about the subject itself.⁷

Ada Boni

Only when the rich culinary tradition of the Italian regions is known by all, “avremo … realizzato la vera cucina italiana, che ci emanciper per sempre da ogni influenza straniera” (we will have […] realized the real Italian cuisine, which will free us from any foreign influence.    —  Ada Boni, preface to the 1937 edition of Il Talismano

Born into a wealthy family in Rome, Boni was the “epitome of Roman ladies of good breeding”.⁸ That she became the model for female frugality and domestic virtue illustrates how food discourse can obscure class issues under the guise of “personal preference” or “matters of taste”.⁹ Boni wrote Il talismano della felicità in response to Pellegrino Artusi’s popular 1891 bestseller La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene/ Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Artusi lacked any culinary experience, instead relying on recipes submitted by his readers and tested by his female servants — an example of how women’s culinary labour is often overwritten by men in ways that are intended to erase their authority from the gastronomic canon. Boni positioned herself in opposition to Artusi’s irreverent, reader-sourced approach, which she saw as impractical and biased. To hear the flippant Artusi lauded as “the father of Italian cooking” was an affront to her vision of culinary rigour and authenticity.

Boni took charge of unifying Italy into her own hands through the realm of home economics, positioning herself as the trusted Nonna passing culinary wisdom to housewives eager to feed their families while also serving the nation. She inspired Italy’s women to elevate their domestic skills by reframing cooking, gardening, and housekeeping as an art, where beauty and refinement mattered more than the quantity of the meal or the cost of the ingredients. This aesthetic reframing appealed to women of all classes, from those struggling with rations to the bourgeois forced to assume domestic duties. In a country renowned for expressing its passion and imagination through artistry, gesture, and style more than the written word, Boni’s domestic poetics was far more appealing than Artusi’s didactic “scientific” approach. Her instructions are technical and precise, but her voice is warm and reassuring: “pour two fingers of oil in the pan, “add a little bit of water, not too much.” Boni advanced the appeal of mastering the domestic arts as a way for women to engage in public life and to display their creativity, intelligence, and good taste.¹⁰ At a time when women had few opportunities for independence and agency outside the home, pursuing their ambitions from within the household empowered them to play a role in shaping what Italy would become.

Yet Boni’s domestic ideal was not politically neutral; it intersected with Mussolini’s Fascist project, which needed women to provide free domestic labour and literally “feed” paternal authority.¹¹¹² This alignment becomes undeniable when, in 1939, Boni wrote the following:

Fascism, among its merits, also had the merit of breaking down every parochial bond, uniting every region in a single great ideal, and completing in the most real and effective way the great unity of Italy through the unity of spirits. When this unification can be considered complete even in terms of home life, when exchanges between various regional cuisines are generalized, and this rich heritage, better known, will not only be the treasure of the housewife but will constitute the foundations of work and, at the same time, a motive for loving, vigilant national propaganda, then we will have automatically realized the true and great Italian cuisine that will emancipate us forever from any foreign influence. Even in the matter of gastronomy, we are great lords and do not need the help of anyone, nor do we bend to servile imitations of others.

This passage clearly shows how Boni’s celebration of regional interchange, domestic discipline, and thrift promoted the Fascist project for unity. By encouraging women of all classes to embrace their duty as producers of food and children, and by turning parsimony and moderation from a chore into a refined art, Boni fed into the body politic that played an integral role in bolstering Italy’s economic and geopolitical power.¹³ She urged her readers to exercise self-control, proper bearing, and sacrifice — making her an accessory to Mussolini’s “emotional regime” (a term coined by William Reddy), a form of gender politics that set norms of behaviour that benefited the state, through education, women’s associations, food festivals, cookbooks and women’s magazines.

Boni’s influence was due, in part, to her ability to promote the idea that skilled housewives were the best judges of what was authentic Italian.¹⁴ She was already a well-trusted public authority: the niece of a famous Roman chef who founded one of Italy’s most popular food magazines, she went on to launch her own women’s magazine, Preziosa, and to run a cooking school. Il Talismano became hugely popular as the domestic manual for Italian housewives, and a common wedding gift from mothers to daughters. While her book was largely ignored by scholars and professional chefs, its popularity among women made Boni more effective than Artusi in shaping the Italian culinary identity. Where Artusi aimed to homogenize regional differences and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (The Futurist Cookbook) rejected culinary tradition outright, Boni insisted on hyper-locality and seasonality as the hallmarks of Italian cuisine.¹⁵

She travelled across the country, documenting regional variations and tracing the evolution of Italian domestic cooking through continual revisions and editions of Il Talismano well into the 21st century. Boni essentially enjoyed a monopoly over writing and publishing about Italian cuisine for half a century — for women, by a woman — leaving a legacy far greater than Artusi’s.¹⁶

For Boni, perfecting the domestic arts was the key— the talisman — to happiness for women. It attracted recognition for their role in civil life, raised their social stature, and served as the foundation upon which all other ambitions could take root.¹⁷¹⁸Importantly, Boni’s project was to create an archive of family history that preserves personal, familial, and cultural histories and values for generations to come. She positions women as the caretakers of memories of place and traditions through food, and her culinary texts read like autobiographies of her Italian domestic life. Furthermore, her emphasis on thrift and seasonality resonates more than David and Gray with my grandmother’s approach to food and cooking, and her more traditional beliefs in gender roles and division of labour within the home.

Minestrone d’Asti
From Ada Boni, Il talismano della felicita

1 pound shelled white haricot beans

4 quarts water

1 small cabbage, shredded

4 medium potatoes, peeled and diced

2 carrots, diced

2-3 stalks celery, diced

½ pound ditalini noodles, or rice

½ pound fat salt pork, diced

2 cloves garlic

2-3 sprigs parsley, chopped

10-12 leaves fresh basil

1 cup grated Parmesan

White pepper

Ditalani are tiny, thimble-shaped noodles. Any other small and round pasta may be used. Put the beans into a large pan, cover with water, bring to boil, and cook them slowly for 1 hour. Add the cabbage, potatoes, carrot, celery, and salt, and continue to cook for 40 minutes. Add the noodles and cook for another 10-12 minutes over a high heat (15-20 minutes for rice). Meanwhile, pound the salt pork into a paste with the garlic, parsley, and basil. Add the grated cheese, and dilute with a few tablespoons of the stock. Pour the mixture into the soup, stir well, and season with pepper. Serve immediately. Serves 6-8.

[Author’s note: Boni uses fresh beans here instead of dried, a deviation from traditional practice which would have relied on dried beans requiring soaking overnight and a much longer cooking time. This is an example of how she made her recipes more palatable for her readers, while still maintaining a sense of authenticity in terms of the ingredients. Note that she is prescriptive about the vegetables here; there is no suggestion of substitutions, reflecting her faithfulness to regional tradition.]

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Elizabeth David

Good food is always a trouble, and its preparation should be regarded as a labour of love.  — Elizabeth David, in the 1950 preface to A Book of Mediterranean Food

Fascist propaganda vilified the donna crisi (the crisis woman) — “fashionable woman with short dresses and short hair, the very thin modern woman, nourished by coffee, tea, and cigarettes” — as a threat to social order.¹⁹ In other words, a woman very much like Elizabeth David, who embraced sensuality and freedom, both in her life and her prose.

David was English, but travelled widely before, during, and after the war and developed a passion for Mediterranean cooking and its ability to bring sunshine and light to dreary British cuisine. She was influential during the 1940s through 1970s, when the aftereffects of war, the contradictions of domestic ideology, and the rise of the feminist movement threw gender roles into upheaval. Much as Reddy had foreseen, women increasingly turned to sites of “emotional refuge” during these tumultuous decades to channel their suppressed emotions, including the emerging genre of domestic literature written by women for women.²⁰ Through these outlets, women formed what Barbara Rosenwein referred to as “emotional communities” of like-minded individuals. David helped shape these emotional communities by advocating a return to simple, honest food. Yet, unlike Boni, she infused this ideal with cosmopolitan sensuality and personal autonomy. Both her life and her prose unsettled the idea that a woman should be authoritative in the kitchen but subversive at home. She embraced her sexual and intellectual freedom through food and writing, in sharp contrast to Boni’s prim and proper style. Whereas Boni shaped Italian cuisine from within, encouraging women to deny their appetites and thereby reinforcing their domestic containment, David became its cultural and cosmopolitan ambassador abroad. Her food writing opened space for women’s desires and imagined futures.²¹

David unsettled the expectation that women should cook out of duty rather than desire, and that they should serve as national martyrs through enforced austerity.²² Her manifesto to “bring a flavour of those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees into English kitchens”²³ depended on portraying the Mediterranean as “a lost paradise of plenty and glamour.” She admitted to the fantasy, confessing in the second edition to A Book of Mediterranean Food:

This book first appeared in 1950, when almost every essential ingredient of good cooking was either rationed or unobtainable. To produce the simplest meal consisting of even two or three genuine dishes required the utmost integrity and devotion. But even if people could not very often make the dishes here described, it was stimulating to think about them; to escape from the deadly boredom of queueing and the frustration of buying the weekly rations; to read about real food cooked with wine and olive oil, eggs and butter and cream, and dishes richly flavoured with onions, garlic, herbs, and brightly coloured Southern vegetables…which go to make up what is so often lacking in English cooking; variety of flavour and colour, and the warm, rich, stimulating smells of genuine food.

 — Elizabeth David (from the Preface to the Second Edition (Revised), 2024, xi)

Her prose nourished readers during postwar scarcity, transforming rationing into imagined abundance. What she offered her readers was less of a manual of cookery and more of a literary escape route. This is where David’s food writing shifts from culinary instruction to self-expression. As one of the first women in Britain to produce gastronomy over household cookbooks, she liberated herself to write sensual prose about memory and place, expressing what Alice McLean, a food studies scholar and author who specializes in culinary literature, American food culture, and feminist food studies, calls “a decidedly undomesticated approach towards pleasure.”²⁴

Women’s recipes, as Diane Tye suggests, hold within them the imprints of relationships, shared preferences, and economic or emotional principles that shape domestic life.²⁵ Seen through this lens, David’s fixation on portraying a myth of Mediterranean authenticity can be read as a form of self-disclosure. Her childhood was marked by emotional and culinary neglect, with a distant, aristocratic mother obsessed with appearances. This led David to avoid artifice and fussiness; she craved fresh, honest food, true connection, and a sense of place. According to her biographer Artemis Cooper, later in life, after several failed relationships, she experienced a period of depression where she lost the desire for food.²⁶ David Sutton argues that eating and sharing food are forms of generosity and that restricting one’s diet can signal social and physical hunger.²⁷ Here we clearly see David’s physical hunger as a manifestation of a deeper intellectual, spiritual, and bodily longing for nourishment.

Minestrone Genovese
From Elizabeth David, Italian Cooking

125g of white haricot beans

2 large aubergines

500g of tomatoes

One cabbage

2 or 3 courgettes or a piece of pumpkin

90g of fresh mushrooms or a few dried mushrooms

3 tablespoons of olive oil

90g of pastine or vermicelli

2 tablespoons of pesto

grated Parmesan

Boil the previously soaked haricot beans until they are three quarters cooked. Strain them and put them into 1.87 litres / 3 pints of fresh water. Add the peeled aubergines cut into squares, the peeled and chopped tomatoes, all the other vegetables cut into small pieces, and the olive oil.

When the beans and the vegetables are all but cooked put in the pasta, and when it is tender stir in the pesto. The vegetables for this minestrone can naturally be varied according to the season; carrots, cauliflower, French beans, celery, and potatoes can be added. The pesto makes Genoese minestrone one of the best of all. Enough for eight.

[Author’s note: David, in her quest for authenticity, recommends dried beans, soaked overnight, which would have been the favoured traditional method. She also prefers olive oil over pork fat, reflecting her refined taste and fidelity to the Mediterranean. In addition to tomatoes, she adds eggplant, pumpkin, and mushrooms, and notes that other seasonal vegetables may be added. She also uses minimal seasoning and reduces the simmering time from Boni’s 40 minutes, resulting in a lighter, fresher soup and reflecting her emphasis on freshness and simplicity.]

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Patience Gray

Whereas Boni frames deprivation as a patriotic duty and David seeks to transcend it through sensory imagination, Patience Gray embraces it as integral to life’s sweetness. She is attuned to natural cycles of feasting and fasting, learned from close observation of wild animals and country people. Her aesthetic and moral framework is deeply pragmatic and experimental, rooted in ecological sensibility and lived experience and refusing to conform to prescriptive social or political ideology. Gray’s unconventional life, marked by a withdrawal from polite society in favour of artistic circles and scandal over her relationships, underscored her resistance to prescriptive norms. The fact that we know so much about the foibles of Gray’s personal life (as well as David’s) through their respective biographers illustrates Hermione Lee’s claim that women’s lives are scrutinized more harshly than men’s, with biography often amplifying their perceived transgressions.²⁸

Lee also suggests that the choices the author makes for the title, chapter and section headings, illustrations, footnotes and index, even length, can tell us as much or more about the author as the content itself.²⁹ Gray’s title, Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades, and Apulia, and its cover image of the Roman goddess of honey, Mellona, signal her ethos: subsistence as sacred, rooted in myth and ecology. In the introduction, she writes:

Living in the wild, it has often seemed that we were living on the margins of literacy. This led to reading the landscape and learning from people, that is to first hand experience. This experience is both real and necessarily limited. It is from this situation that I set out to write from personal observation and practice, underpinned by study, over a considerable period of time. Good cooking is the result of a balance struck between frugality and liberality…It is born out in communities where the supply of food is conditioned by the seasons…Poverty rather than wealth gives the good things of life their true significance.   —Patience Gray, Introduction, Honey from a Weed (2009, 11-12)

Her section and chapter titles, too, tell a story, such as “Fasting on Naxos: Beans, Peas and Rustic Soups,” in which she quotes from Hesiod’s The Works and Days: “Fools all! Who never learned how much better than the whole the half is, nor how much good there is in living on mallow and asphodel.”³⁰ Each recipe is prefaced by a long and personal story, making the recipes appear more symbolic of her philosophy of aesthetics, survival, and art. Contrast this with David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food, where plainly titled sections such as “SOUPS” trade personal anecdotes for quotations from her favourite writers. Boni’s Italian Regional Cooking is organized by region. Their choice of images, too, reveals something about the writers and their intent. Boni, whose agenda is to document regional traditions, introduces each section with a narrative history about the area, accompanied by pictures of dishes set against familiar backgrounds. For the Veneto, for instance, the image shows two seafood dishes set against a backdrop of a gondolier and nonnas preparing salt cod along the lagoon.³¹ David was a fan of neo-romantic artist John Milton and used his drawings of scenes of Mediterranean life to set the sensory mood she was after, instead of pictures that might serve to guide the reader. Gray’s recipes are accompanied by folkloric drawings by Corinna Sargood of rustic pottery and kitchens, plants and fish, the countryside and ancient ruins. They “evoke the underlying spirit of the book, which has to do with the landscape, people, art, imagination, as much as with fasting and feasting.”³²

Gray criticized David’s scholarly approach to food writing, arguing that it created a distance between her, the food’s production, and her readers.³³ Boni and David’s insistence on measurement and precision would have been antithetical to Gray’s belief in the importance of an embodied apprenticeship, in contrast to formal learning mediated through cookbooks and written recipes. Rather, cooking should engage the body and the mind, and the cook should use taste and smell to make subtle adjustments during the cooking process to achieve a desired vision.³⁴ Gray’s narrative and images of the spartan methods and equipment in her “kitchens,” often little more than a pot suspended over an outdoor fire, mirror her practice of mindfulness and presence. Far from presenting a picture of cleanliness and culinary authority like Boni or David, Gray revels in getting her hands dirty and making mistakes. She goes far beyond Boni and David’s often romantic elevation of cooking as an art to approach it as a craft, requiring substantial effort and apprenticeship to the land and villagers.

Montanari’s notion of “anti-cuisine” found its fullest expression in Gray’s hermetic withdrawal into foraging weeds, knowledge that requires cultural memory and ecological literacy. Gray, more than either Boni or David, embodied the Italian principle of materia prima: ingredients as the primary teachers. Her recipes are not formulas but field notes, impressions gathered from landscape and labour to document what she felt was slipping away: rural foodways and a life of communion with the environment. As her biographer Adam Federman observes, she cultivated an eccentric reclusiveness, seeking “some distant and inspirational landscape untouched by the corrosive aspects of modern life.”³⁵ This retreat was not apolitical. Although, like David, she resisted the label of feminist, a palimpsest reading reveals a woman quietly defying class and gendered expectations through her choices. In this sense, Gray’s Honey from a Weed was part of the dynamic that Neuhaus describes, where cookbooks reveal the traces of women pushing against old gender scripts.³⁶ Gray’s writing is its own kind of anti-cuisine: a counter-practice to the type of domestic ideology promulgated by most other food writers of her time.

La Zuppa di Fagioli – bean soup
From Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed

The basis of this recipe is normally the liquor saved from cooking them with the addition of some of the beans, to which are added a few diced potatoes, chopped weeds (for example, sorrel, young dock, sow thistle, dandelions, wild spinach), a chopped carrot, water if necessary, a few tomatoes, and a handful of rice or soup pasta at the end cooking, which results in a fairly dense soup.

But marbled or haricot beans, fresh or dried, reveal another order of excellence when cooked with the usual aromatics and a bone removed from a prosciutto crudo. The sumptuous taste and texture communicated to the soup is a discovery made over and over again by generation of country people, who, in the order of things, have cured with salt and lightly smoked a raw ham, then hung it in the kitchen. When the time comes to broach the ham this bone is found to be an impediment in carving it. The emergency and its removal is the inspiration of the bean soup.

Later, the cook will have her eye on the knuckle of the ham to the same end, and meanwhile will abstract a chunk of fragrant fat for the lardons. This fat is diced, and fried, providing the point of departure for the soup, the selected aromatics being fried in the rendered fat. The presence of this innocent object in the kitchen revolutionizes, while it lasts, her culinary aspirations.

[Author’s note: Patience writes of the “admirable” Artusi’s “threat of bombardment” from the explosive effect of eating beans, and how the Mediterranean practice to avoid this effect is to use a freshly harvested crop, cook them in an earthenware pot (la pignata), and add finely chopped weeds or greens during the last 15 minutes of cooking. You can see how she uses no precise measurements here: “some,” “few,” “a handful.” It is unlikely that any modern cook would be inspired to make this recipe as written, unless they happen to have weeds, an entire leg of prosciutto and a ham knuckle lying around their kitchen, or, for that matter, an earthenware pot. Gray refuses cookbook conventions, instead presenting her recipe as a palimpsest itself, conveying deeper meanings about resourcefulness and reciprocity.

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A Life Tasted: Around the Table

Il cibo gradito è meglio digerito. ( “The food that is enjoyed is better digested.”)

Boni, David, and Gray exhibit the qualities that Dianne Jacob describes as the hallmarks of good food writing, chief among them, a writer’s willingness to foreground their own voice rather than hide behind a façade of neutrality.³⁷ Their writing bears the traces of the lives that shaped them, revealing how voice is never accidental or invisible, and always carries the imprint of the writer’s hand.³⁸ Each demonstrates that food writing is most compelling when it allows the writer’s worldview to emerge, while also recognizing the complex ways in which culinary choices both reflect and shape identity, relationships, and culture.³⁹

They each played a role in giving domestic food knowledge its central place in culinary history by linking everyday practices to national identity. Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life is about how everyday practices, like walking, inscribe meaning onto spaces and transform them in the process. “The map organizes, but walking writes,” he writes. “The act of moving through the city enunciates another space.” This could be translated as: “The recipe organizes, but cooking writes. The act of preparing food enunciates another memory.” Like how footsteps overlay city streets, meals overlay histories. By modifying recipes to suit our tastes and purposes, we assert our agency over culinary traditions. In this way, cooking and eating function as living practices and political tactics that create a palimpsest, revealing how the author improvises to avoid constraints, and in doing so, inscribes their desires and goals onto their surroundings.⁴⁰

Hirsch’s concept of “post-memory” illuminates how culinary traces in urban landscapes evoke inherited memories: “I didn’t grow up on amatriciana and offal, but when I eat them here, they taste like a memory I didn’t know I had.”⁴¹ Like the hill of amphorae (olive oil jugs) in Testaccio, which archaeologists from Spain are studying to map their historical origins, cities retain visible layers of cultural, political, and social histories.

In Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen argues that accelerated change has blurred temporal boundaries between past and present, resulting in what he calls a “hypertrophy of memory,” a condition in which we lose touch with the geographical and historical roots of our traditions. Writing over 20 years ago, he argued that our current obsession with memory and fear of forgetting signals a transformative shift in society. The faster the speed of technical, scientific, and cultural innovation, he says, the smaller the gap between present and past — and the more we yearn to create some space within which we can breathe and move.⁴² Viewing cities and buildings as palimpsests is a way to reconnect with the past and alleviate this sense of compression. Walking through Rome, I found myself drawn to these physical traces where sedimented layers of history, culture, and everyday life accumulate to create material palimpsests. They mirror the process my paper explores, directly relevant to how food writing, memory, and identity are shaped through overwriting. The photographs alongside this essay are presented as documentary glimpses, in which my own gaze and presence are marked. They demonstrate the tension between the past and the future, the marketing appeal of nostalgia, and how, in the words of Goulding, “Italian cuisine is not a statue in a museum; it’s not some intractable monument to the past. It lives and breathes and bleeds like any good culture does.”⁴³

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A Life Remembered: Leftovers and Aftertastes

A day will come when the passage of time and the assiduous exploration of long centuries will bring to light what now escapes us, and our posterity will be amazed that we were ignorant of such evident things.    —Seneca

This essay began with the idea that a recipe, meal, or cookbook — even a city — is more than a material site. It is a layered narrative that can be read to uncover how culinary practices inscribe memory across places and generations. The cycles of feast and famine that shaped Boni, David, and Gray’s lives and culinary writing also marked my grandmother’s experience, my mother’s, mine, and now, my daughter’s.

Making minestrone from scratch appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with scarcity. In fact, it is expensive to make, both in cost and time, and would be far cheaper to buy ready-made. For me, it is not a way to stretch meagre ingredients into a nourishing meal. My minestrone (see below) is not a replica of my grandmother’s; it is infused with my habits, preferences, and desires, and I am not restricted by necessity, cost, and ingredients. However, its undertone traces my heritage as surely as if it were a written memoir: always cabbage and potato, rice instead of pasta, and the addition of tomato paste and a pinch of nutmeg, which reveals our Northern roots.

Elizabeth David, in her book Is There a Nutmeg in the House?, said that nutmeg was as elemental to Italian cuisine as Parmigiano Reggiano and oregano.⁴⁴ I inherited my grandma’s minestrone recipe not in written form, but as a taste memory that will continue to evolve, while always retaining its link to our past. Minestrone, then, is a palimpsest that echoes the individual, collective and cultural experiences of generations of Italian peasant women. It is a soup of infinite variations, depending on the cook’s preferences, available ingredients, the season, and regional differences in culinary traditions. No matter what form it takes, it is identifiable as minestrone and distinguishable from similar soups in other world cuisines. In this way, cooking is akin to life writing. When we revisit our recipes, we edit and rewrite them from who we are now, shaping the meals as they have shaped us.

Minestrone della Nonna Fraresso
A rustic minestrone from Treviso, Veneto (modern adaptation)

• enough olive oil to coat bottom of pot

• ¼ cup diced panetta

• 1 small onion, finely chopped

• 2 celery stalks, diced

• 2 carrots, diced

• 3 large cloves garlic, crushed

• 3-4 tablespoons concentrated tomato paste (from tube)

• 2 small potatoes, peeled and cubed

• 2 cups shredded Savoy cabbage (about 1/2 a small head)

• 1/2 cup arborio rice

• 2 bay leaves

• ¼ cup tightly packed fresh parsley leaves, chopped

• 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

• 1 14 oz can borlotti or cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

• 6 cups water

• 1 to 2 vegetable bouillon cubes

• Parmesan rind – a large hunk (2-x4x5”)

• Salt and black pepper, to taste

• Grated Parmigiano for serving

• Rustic bread or grilled polenta, to serve

Instructions

1. Sauté aromatics:
Heat olive oil in a large soup pot. Add pancetta and fry until the fat begins to melt into the oil.

2. Add onion, celery, carrot (about equal amounts of each), garlic, and a small amount of salt. Cook over medium heat until soft and fragrant, about 5–7 minutes. Don’t rush this part to build flavour. Add tomato paste and cook another minute or two.

3. Add vegetables and rice:
Stir in potatoes, cabbage, rice, bay leaves, parsley, and nutmeg. Stir for 1–2 minutes to coat.

4. Simmer:
Add the water and bring to a gentle boil. Crumble in the bouillon cubes (I usually start with one then add more to taste at the end). Add Parmesan rind. Reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 20–25 minutes, or until rice and potatoes are tender. Stir occasionally.

5. Add canned beans:
Stir in the canned beans and continue simmering for another 10 minutes. Optional: Mash a few beans and potatoes against the side of the pot for creaminess.

6. Season and rest:
Taste and season with salt and pepper, and add more tomato paste, nutmeg and bouillon if needed. Remove rind and bay leaves. Let rest 5–10 minutes before serving.

7. Serve:
Ladle into bowls. Drizzle with olive oil (optional) and top generously with Parmigiano (not optional!). Serve with rustic bread or grilled polenta.

Optional:
For a richer, deeper flavour (nice for the cold months), roast the potatoes and cabbage until carmelized before adding into the soup.

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Melanie Monk engages ecology, myth, philosophy, and lived experience to support individuals navigating midlife and other periods of transition. She explores these themes through scholarship, writing, culinary practice, and immersion in nature. Her work invites readers to slow down and attune to the rhythms and intelligence of the natural world, bridging theory and practice.

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References

1. De Quincey, T. (2003). “The palimpsest of the human brain.” In R. Morrison (Ed.), Thomas De Quincey: The prose of vision (115–130). Routledge. (Original work published 1845), pp 143-144 ↩︎
2. Proust, M. (n.d.). Swann’s Way. Retrieved November 27, 2025, from https://as.vanderbilt.edu/koepnick/AestheticNegativity_f06/materials/texts/proust_swanns%20way.htm ↩︎
3. Sutton, D. (2001). Remembrance of repasts: An anthropology of food and memory. Berg Publishers. ↩︎
4. Tye, D. (2010). Baking as biography: A life story in recipes. Montreal & Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ↩︎
5. Dillon, S. (2007). The palimpsest: Literature, criticism, theory. Continuum. ↩︎
6. Capatti, A. & Montanari, M. (2003). Italian cuisine: A cultural history (A. Sonnenfeld, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1999) ↩︎
7. Lee, H. (2009). Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
8. Ryan, G. (2024). Nessuno è come la Nonna: Italian space, time, and culinary memory [Undergraduate honours thesis, Wesleyan University]. Wesleyan University Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/_flysystem/fedora/2024-07/1239_378534.pdf ↩︎
9. Sutton, 2001, p 4 ↩︎
10. Garvin, D. (2022). “Recipes for exceptional times.” In Feeding Fascism: The politics of women’s food work (119–152). University of Toronto Press. ↩︎
11. Kashdan, H. (2021). “Local recipes in the national kitchen: The life and legacies of Ada Boni’s Il talismano della felicità.” Italian Culture, 39(2), 174–200. ↩︎
12. Sambuco, P. (2024). Food and emotions in Italian women’s writing. University of Toronto Press. ↩︎
13. Ryan, G. (2024). Nessuno è come la Nonna: Italian space, time, and culinary memory [Undergraduate honours thesis, Wesleyan University]. Wesleyan University Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.wesleyan.edu/_flysystem/fedora/2024-07/1239_378534.pdf ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Kashdan, H. (2021). “Local recipes in the national kitchen: The life and legacies of Ada Boni’s Il talismano della felicità.” Italian Culture, 39(2), 174–200. ↩︎
16. Portincasa, A. (2019). Cookbooks and the representation of Italian ways of food. In R. Sassatelli (Ed.), Italians and food, 203–235. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15681-7_9 ↩︎
17. Boni, A. (1925). Il talismano della felicità. Edizioni della rivista Preziosa. ↩︎
18. Ryan. ↩︎
19. Sambuco, p 20 ↩︎
20. Ibid. ↩︎
21. McLean, A. (2004). “Tasting language: The aesthetic pleasure of Elizabeth David.” Food, Culture & Society, 7(2), 49–62. https://doi.org/10.2752/155280104786578102 ↩︎
22. Tye, D. (2010). Baking as biography: A life story in recipes. Montreal & Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ↩︎
23. Nunn, J. (2023). “First, catch your peasant: A critical history of the peasantry in British food writing via John Berger, George Orwell, and Elizabeth David.” Critical Quarterly, 65(1), 31-43. ↩︎
24. Vytniorgu, R. (2022). Food, feminist rhetorical studies, and conservative women: The case of Elizabeth David. Rhetoric Review, 41(3), 198–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/07350198.2022.2077035 ↩︎
25. Tye, D. (2010). Baking as biography: A life story in recipes. Montreal & Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press. ↩︎
26. Cooper, A. (1999). Writing at the kitchen table: The authorized biography of Elizabeth David. Michael Joseph. ↩︎
27. Sutton, 2001 ↩︎
28. Lee, H. (2009). Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. ↩︎
29. Ibid. ↩︎
30. Ibid., p 53 ↩︎
31. Boni, A. (1982). Italian Regional Cooking. (M. Langdale and U. Whyte, Trans.). Godfrey Cave Associates. ↩︎
32. Gray, P. (2009). Honey from a weed: Fasting and feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades, and Apulia. Prospect Books., inside jacket. ↩︎
33. McLean, A. (2006). “Food, Sex, Language: The Lost Lovers and Later Words of M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David.” CEA Critic, 69(1/2), 14–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44377631 ↩︎
34. Sutton, 2001 ↩︎
35. Shapiro, L. (2017, September 20). A wild and exacting food writer gets her due. The New York Times. ↩︎
36. Tye, 2010 ↩︎
37. Jacob, D. (2010). Will write for food: The complete guide to writing cookbooks, blogs, reviews, memoir, and more (Rev. ed.). Da Capo Press. ↩︎
38. Lee, 2009 ↩︎
39. Bailey, J. (n.d.). Minestrone, Elizabeth David, Italo-British cuisine and authenticity. https://maximumjenny.neocities.org/Minestrone.pdf. ↩︎
40. de Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Rendall, Trans.). University of California Press. (Original work published 1980) ↩︎
41. Goulding, M. (2018). Pasta, pane, vino: Deep travels through Italy’s food culture. Harper Wave. p 38 ↩︎
42. Huyssen, A. (2003). Present pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford University Press. ↩︎
43. Goulding, xi ↩︎
44. David, E. (2000). Is there a nutmeg in the house?: Essays on practical cooking with more than 150 recipes. Michael Joseph. ↩︎