Gillian Riley

My first memories of Jane are of a beautiful statuesque young woman, a senior editor at Thames and Hudson, where I was a very junior designer. We all admired her from afar.

It was only many years later that she became a role model, when her writings about food were breaking new ground, with her unique combination of modest erudition and graceful easily accessible prose; her recipes were delicious, they worked well, without the dead hand of editorial pedantry, and her observations on ingredients and history were always fresh and lively.

Jane had none of the hauteur and self-regard of many of her contemporary grandes dames, she was always kind, funny and approachable. Her generosity and warmth permeated all she wrote.

I am specially grateful for the long and informative introduction she wrote for my translation of Castelvetro, she gave so much to enhance the book, and that at a time when she was far from well. I remember her with affection and gratitude.

Jill Norman

Jane Grigson was a remarkable woman, generous, witty, clever, lively and with a great sense of fun. She was an excellent person to spend time with. She was also a very fine food writer, who considered the quality of food, its origins and its preparation a subject for serious study.  Her books are full of informative commentary – regional, artistic, literary; she had a feeling for history and also for the natural world.  Jane enjoyed food, and her books convey that delight; she loved simple cooking based on seasonal, reliably sourced ingredients.  Her immensely readable style helped convince me that Penguin should publish Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery in 1967, and I was fortunate enough to remain Jane’s paperback editor for many years, sharing laughter and pleasure over many memorable meals.

Marc Millon

Though I never knew Jane personally, she was one of those rare writers able to communicate in manner so frank, direct and matter- of-fact that you almost feel as if the author were in the room with you, explaining in a firm but always friendly manner how things are, how precisely they should be done.

Her work in The Observer was simply inspirational when Kim and I were setting out on our career as a young and aspiring food, wine and travel writing and photography team in the early 80s.

The book that made the most lasting impression was Jane’s first, Charcuterie & French Pork Cookery. The scope, stature and breadth of knowledge was so vast and truly awe-inspiring; indeed, it was almost inconceivable to us that a book, written by an English author, could actually explain so clearly and matter-of-factly the wondrous mysteries of recreating, at home, those delicious porky delicacies, enjoyed, sampled, discovered on travels in France.

This was no mere cookbook in any sense: it involved butchery (and a knowledge of French cuts of pork), and domestic skills well beyond that of most of my generation, including curing, salting, air- drying, smoking. It was a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-stuck-in book. With recipes for the likes of boudin noir, andouillettes de Troyes, and pieds de porc à la Ste-Ménéehould, it was most certainly not for the squeamish.

When Jane describes, for example, le sacrifice du porc – the annual pig slaughter – she explains with intimate knowledge and even affection the various bits that tumble out from the gut, split from the anus to the snout. You know that this is something she has both witnessed and done herself many times.  You feel always, instinctively and truly, in the hands of person of infinite knowledge and skill, in both cooking and writing.

Laura Mason

Jane Grigson’s writing about food was part of the fabric of life for me in the late 1970s and the 1980s.  I wish I’d met her, though I never did, but her writing was the next best thing. Articles were there every week to be devoured through the pages of the Observer, and books – inquisitive, discursive, eminently readable and full of recipes which made one want to cook – appeared regularly. Through these she was a wise and witty counsellor whose words were a constant presence at my kitchen table, and an inspiration for me to find out more about the history and significance of all manner of foods.

Elizabeth Luard

It was the mid-1970s that I first came across the work of Jane Grigson. I was bringing up my family of four small children in a remote Andalucian valley and it was long before I wrote about food (or anything else). That Mrs. Grigson was a supremely useful recipe-writer goes without saying, but perhaps the least accessible of her books – at least to a young mother struggling with babies born in ridiculously quick succession – is Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery. To me, it was a God-send.

My neighbours, members of a self-sufficient farming community baked their own bread in wood-fired oven, kept chickens, grew vegetables and chickpeas dried as winter stores, milked goats and made cheese. Fruit – figs, bitter oranges, plums – came from abandoned  orchards, one of them providing the site for my own house, Huerto Perdido, Lost Orchard, though any productive trees were long absorbed into the cork-oak forest.

The first year – well – there was too much to learn to allow for inventiveness. Next year I decided to introduce my co-workers to Mrs. Grigson’s recipe for boudin as an alternative to morcilla. We already had the basics: blood and guts.  The boudin recipe was French, I explained to my disbelieving co-workers. And – well – if I insisted, they’d help. The result, judiciously tasted in very small pieces, was very Madrileño, Madrid being the source of all things foreign, including the French. Thereafter, as a bit of a foreigner myself – result of a diplomatic upbringing – I fell upon Mrs. Grigson’s English Food with happiness and joy (my copy, I notice, is a battered first edition). Not only did I learn about the mysterious culinary habits of the land of my birth, but the accuracy of the recipes and the elegance of the writing – Jane was a stylist without peer – became a source of inspiration for what was to become my own life’s work.  Some years later, when I finally met my heroine – second year of the Oxford Symposium, as I remember – and told her the story of the matanza and how well her recipes delivered (never mind the co-workers, the results were delicious), she looked at me and laughed.  “I’m glad,” she said. “That’s such good news. I always wondered if they worked.” Much loved, much missed, so well remembered – Jane was (and is) a wonderful writer, a model for us all.

Barbara Ketcham Wheaton

I didn’t know Jane for long, but I admired her enormously. I think the main thing I would want to say about her (beyond her being a really, really nice person) is that her food writing came out of a broad interest in the wider world.

She invited me to come for the day to their house in Wiltshire. It was a glorious day. I can’t remember anything about the food, except that there was venison that someone had sent her. I remember the warm light in the kitchen and the tidy bookshelves. I was too dazzled by the fact that I was actually there.

She and Geoffrey took me off to see the Avebury Rings. They were both so knowledgeable, and generous in sharing that knowledge. It was one of the best days of my life.

Tom Jaine

One of the more exciting evenings in the 1970s, when I was a partner with Joyce Molyneux in the Carved Angel restaurant in Dartmouth, was that graced by a visit from Jane and Geoffrey Grigson. We were, of course, apprehensive. No doubt there was some item on the menu that had come straight from one of Jane’s books. And I had read enough about post-war English literature to know that Geoffrey might be a very tricky customer indeed. But we need never have feared, for the evening went swimmingly; no one could have been nicer; and fortune smiled upon us when we had a second visit not long afterwards.

Actually, the evening went more than swimmingly because Jane and Geoffrey were so enthusiastic, informed, intelligent, engaged and friendly. A bit like their books, you might say. Years later, Joyce Molyneux would hang a grand Jane Bown portrait of Jane at the threshold of her kitchen. I have always found this apposite.

It wasn’t until a few years later, however, that the full glory of Jane’s work was borne in upon us: when we had a home and family to care for and the daily round of meals imposed its necessary and ineluctable discipline. If your shopping is reactive, not programmed in advance, then what is unloaded on the kitchen table may take you by surprise. Then is the moment that you blurt, ‘How can we possibly deal with the squash, curly kale, pig’s liver, autumn raspberries, gooseberries, loquats – or whatever it was that you found when cruising the High Street?’ The invariable response in our household has been, ‘What does Jane say?’ Such was the breadth of her writing that it was a fair bet that she would say something. And such was the depth of her two greatest books, Vegetables and Fruit, that you could guarantee that she would not only give up the culinary answer but would would educate you as well. Jane’s combination of the literary and the practical was her greatest gift – not forgetting her touches of autobiography (her readers know Trôo like the backs of their hands).

This means that for thirty years we have been largely cooking Jane Grigson. A family’s choice of culinary mentor is often like a person’s taste in music or in clothing: it all depends on when you started. But this chronological comment does not diminish Jane’s achievement for it is also true that other layers of influence are often piled on the foundation, perhaps even to hide it altogether. But with us, the bedrock that is Jane remains a constant element in our kitchen morphology.

Part of her enduring value to us is that we like her style of cookery which, to me, is home cooking to perfection. Another quality of her writing which we particularly enjoy is that she is never prescriptive, nor really ever hectoring. A friend in need is a friend indeed and, when in front of the stove on a stormy Wednesday night cudgelling the brains for something different with celeriac, my wife would rather the sweet company of Jane Grigson than myself.

Clarissa Hyman

I have only one small, fleeting memory.  I only met Jane Grigson once. It was in the 1980s when I was working as a researcher on a regional Granada TV food programme.

The far-sighted producer was determined to smuggle in ‘serious’ food guests amongst the soap and quiz show celebs who were mandatory bookings ferried in to talk about their favourite meals.

We booked Jane to  do a demonstration of the legendary Sussex Pond Pudding (well, it wasn’t quite legendary then but I hope we helped give it the status it so deserved). She was a delight. Modest, gracious, practical and eloquent in equal measure. Alas, the head of Light Entertainment was not so impressed – I think he thought she should be dressed in sequins like Fanny Craddock and drop ingredients on the floor a la Julia Child. Sadly, the deadly strain of food tv as fun-filled game show was even then in the ascendency.

However, all the production team went out for a Chinese meal afterwards with Jane where, despite my tongue-tied gaucheness, I asked her to sign my copy of ‘Good Things’. At the time, I had no idea that my future lay in food writing but that was the book that was to such a great inspiration. If I am ever asked to appear on Desert Island Discs, that will be the one I take with me.

Geraldene Holt

This is not a manual of cookery, but a book about enjoying food. From the first line of the first page of Good Things (1971),  it was plain that the author herself was a good thing.

I met Jane Grigson soon after my first book was published in 1980. ‘So what is your next book?’ Jane asked. ‘I’m not sure I know enough to write another book,’ I replied. Jane held my arm and laughed, ‘That’s not the right approach, Geraldene. You write about what you care about and research your subject on the way.’

Over the next ten years Jane and I would meet at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery, at lectures and parties, and at gatherings of the Guild of Food Writers. Jane was one of the thirty-four founder members and though, as I remember, she was not present at the inaugural meeting in Claridge’s in 1985, she supported all the worthwhile ideas such as the annual lecture and the food campaigns.

In its early years, after the Guild’s AGM and lunch, the current minister responsible for food production was invited to speak about policy and answer questions.

During the salmonella-in-eggs scandal in 1988 a junior minister felt the full force of Jane’s campaigning fervour. ‘How can you stand there and defend this appalling situation, when I can no longer give a young child or an old person a soft boiled egg?’ Jane’s cheeks glowed. ‘What are you going to do about it?’ As she sat down, the rest of us applauded our modern Boadicea. The politician struggled to reply and then, doubtless sensing the animosity of the audience, became speechless.

In a career lasting only twenty-three years, Jane produced 10 major books and contributed regularly to the Observer newspaper. She preferred to write about ‘life beyond the kitchen’, and did so by placing food in its literary and historical context. And at the same time Jane made her views of our present world crystal clear. Her eloquent writing inspires, informs and delights and her recipes are sensibly intended for the home cook. But it is her ethical stance, her defence of the common good, and her trenchant opinions that I treasure most.

The last time I saw Jane was not long after her courageous article ‘Fighting cancer with food’ appeared in the Observer in September 1989. I was driving to London that day so I picked all the ripe fruit – unsprayed and organically grown – in my Devon garden and piled the pears, plums, apples, a punnet of autumn raspberries, and a few late figs into a big basket and delivered it to Broad Town on my way. Jane was as warm and welcoming as ever and Sophie, Jane’s daughter, carried in the basket of fruit. Jane insisted I stay to lunch even though Jancis Robinson and her TV crew were there to film an interview. Sitting around the dining table in the hall, there was a cheerful, carefree atmosphere, Jane shone, and we all enjoyed roast partridge in a dark, reduced sauce enriched with chocolate.

On a grey overcast day six months later, I was back in Broad Town, for Jane’s funeral. Afterwards, as I drove home I had plenty of time to think about how best to remember Jane, how to build some memorial to this most exceptionally talented woman, who had died at the height of her powers on the eve of her 62nd birthday. By the time I reached Devon I had come to a decision: I would found an educational charity and a specialist library in Jane Grigson’s name.

Sally Holloway

In a way I owe Jane my career in publishing. Her daughter Sophie and I had been among a small group of boarders at our predominantly day school, so I had become familiar with Jane’s unmistakeable motherly figure in the boarding  house car park at the end of the week when she came to pick up Sophie.  I’d also stayed a couple of times at Broad Town, their wonderful old farmhouse in Wiltshire, and was struck by how terribly ‘modern’ the mother and daughter relationship was – rather shockingly, Sophie called Jane ‘Jane’ not ‘Mummy’; and their relationship appeared based largely on friendship (I would have died rather than tell my mother some of the things Sophie confided in Jane!)  And Jane was very happy to extend her generation-bridging warmth and friendliness to the awkward teenage girls who passed through her kitchen.

Roll on a few years and, having left university with an English degree, I  decided I wanted to work in publishing.  Having no special knowledge  or contacts in the publishing world, I wrote on spec to the only publisher I’d heard of, Penguin Books.  To my delight, they invited me to an interview – as secretary to the cookery editor, Eleo Gordon.

Although I fared fairly dismally in the typing test, Eleo must have seen something in me.  Did I have a referee?  I dimly remembered that Jane’s books were published by Penguin, so I tentatively suggested her name.  I confess I had  no idea that she was such an esteemed writer.  Eleo was on the phone to Jane  immediately. I’m not sure what she said, but they offered me the job.