Popular chef fed warriors cake
Zena Skinner TV cook BORN FEBRUARY 27, 1927 - DIED MARCH 7, 2018, AGED 91
WITH her boisterous laugh and no-nonsense approach Zena Skinner became one of the most popular chefs on British TV during the 1960s and 1970s. Having made her first appearance on the BBC’s Cookery Club in 1959, where she made brandy snaps and was paid 10 guineas, she was later pitched as the more down-to-earth, accessible alternative to Fanny Cradock.
“It was made out there was great rivalry between us but it wasn’t true,” she said in 2001. “We were just totally different. Fanny was the up-market lady wearing an evening dress to cook exotic things and I was the typical housewife making plain British food. The first time I met her I said ‘Hello’ and she looked at me like I was some sort of unpleasant smell under her nose. The next couple of times she ignored me totally, so I gave up.”
As well as writing several recipe books she also fronted a number of shows for the BBC such as Town And Around and the gardening, DIY and cooking show Indoors Outdoors. It turned out to be her last for the Beeb but in 1982 Channel Four invited her to make a programme called Years Ahead, which was based on a role reversal that saw Skinner fitting windows, mending locks and showing men how to operate washing machines.
Born in Luton, Bedfordshire, she joined the Wrens at the age of 17 after responding to the recruitment slogan of “Join the Wrens and free a man for the fleet”. After completing her initial training period of four weeks, which included polishing floors and learning to type, she found herself being trained as a coder, despite her early requests to work as a driver or dispatch rider, and spent four years based in Portsmouth decoding signals.
After being demobbed at the end of the war she trained as a demonstrator at the London School of Electrical Domestic Science and later took up a job at the Eastern Electricity Board showroom in Royston. Four years later she moved to food appliance manufacturer GEC, again giving demonstrations and servicing appliances.
This led to an offer to spend six months in Jamaica training demonstrators and subsequently three months doing a similar job in East Africa. She recalled: “Some of their ingredients I had never seen before, things like breadfruit, plantains, mangoes, okra, salt fish. Grapefruit and lemons were hanging by the roadside. I was concentrating on showing them British desserts because they didn’t do much in the way of puddings – they just loved our jellies and trifles.
“While I was in East Africa the Queen was there and they brought some warriors out of the bush to meet her. They came to my stand where I’d been left on my own and I was absolutely terrified – they were all over six foot and carrying spears and I thought I was for the pot.
“In sheer self defence I offered them all cakes. Someone took a photo and it appeared in the national press and when I got back to England the producer of Cookery Club phoned me to go and see her.”
Throughout her career she wrote in the Radio Times and published several recipe books, including 100 More Town & Around Recipes, Zena Skinner’s Cookbook, Recipes For Every Occasion and was an author of the Reader’s Digest publication The Cookery Year.
She also founded the Keech Hospice Care in Luton and raised £100,000 for the charity over 26 years. After retiring from TV in 1989 she spent her time giving talks and raising funds for medical charities.
She died after a long illness.