Strictly sensational!

RELISH: MY LIFE ON A PLATE

(Quercus £20) THOuGH Prue tells us ‘I resented my image as the hard-driving businesswoman’, that is very much the impression she makes on a reader of these pages. She isn’t only a cook; she is also on the board of Orient Express Hotels, British Transport Hotels, the Royal Fine Art Commission, the Royal Society of Arts, the Halifax Building Society and heaps of other institutions and public bodies besides. This all in addition to running her own restaurants and her famous cookery school, writing her books, newspaper columns and making television appearances.

Prue was born in Johannesburg. ‘We lived a privileged, white-South African life’, with a three-acre garden, tennis court and swimming pool. She headed to Paris and learned about food, good ingredients and careful preparation, then to London, where she began her own catering firm. ‘If the jobs were for business grandees or movie stars, I would be very well paid. If they were royals, the money would be lousy.’

She opened her own restaurant, Leith’s, in Notting Hill in 1969, followed by a cookery academy, Leith’s School of Food & Wine, in 1975, to train the chefs whose graduation dishes were awarded marks for appearance, flavour, texture and skill.

Prue tells us several times that ‘my indignant voice’ was ‘an early indication of a bossy nature’.

She met her match in Prince Philip, with whom she clashed, and who is ticked off here for his habitual rudeness. ‘Sorry is not in his vocabulary.’

When Rayne Kruger, Prue’s husband, died, her account of the hospitals he was rushed to made me think that if only Prue Leith ran the NHS, it would be sorted out within minutes.