The Beatles were giving us hell. Ringo Starr sent my eggs back
Prue’s husband, clothing designer John Playfair, 70, added: “You wait until you see the new Bake Off. You’ll be very pleasantly surprised. She’s wonderfully naughty.”y
The couple were ere speaking at the openingng of t he Evesham am Festival Of Words, ds, near Pr u e ’ s home i n the Cotswolds, where John also lives. Prue ran a Michelinstarred restau- rant in Notting ng Hill, West London,don, and spent 11 years ears on the BBC’s Great eat British Menu, before replacing Mary.
Prue and John, who wed last October, still live separately, and the couple are quite happy with their less than conventional set-up.
She said: “It’s brilliant because he gets up in the morning, gives me a cup of tea, feeds the dogs, takes them for a walk, and then disappears.”
John explained said: “At my age, when you get to 70 and you’ve got four children, a big house with lots of contents, what do you do?
“She’s very tidy and I’m not. My kids use it as a holiday house. It’s their home. That’s one of the main reasons – they’ve still got their own rooms.”
Prue added: “You have to walk over walls of books to get anywhere in his house. One day we might live together – when we’re in an old-age home.” John said: “We’ll be 112.” Prue also revealed one of her biggest professional disasters was when The Beatles visited her restaurant at the height of their fame. She said: “I remember them coming in and giving us hell. They wanted a fry-up.
“The chef couldn’t resist putting a bit of chopped parsley on the egg to make it look nice.
“Ringo [Starr] sent it back. [The chef] asked why, and they said it was because people kept putting green things on his eggs. Apparently, it was happening everywhere they went.”
Prue said she thinks chef Jamie Oliver has had the biggest impact on cooking today, after his attempt to improve school meals.
She said: “He really cares about what children eat. After his TV programme about the poor quality of children’s schools meals, [then prime minster] Tony Blair was forced to act.
“He said he never wanted to see another show like that.”
And she blasted Theresa May for announcing plans to end universal free school lunches and replace them with free breakfasts for kids.
She said: “Free breakfasts are good, but they’re not as good as lunch, because lunch is when you teach children to enjoy eating vegetables. I noticed the removal of free school lunches were not in the Queen’s Speech.
“If this means she has changed her mind, I’m going to love her for life.”
Writing
Prue’s starring role on Bake Off has spurred her to get back into writing recipe books, after 25 years concentrating on her novels, even though she promised herself she would never write another one. She said it has also “inspired her to want to cook more”.
Prue hinted her next recipe book could be about cocktails, in a nod to Mary’s famed love of a tipple. And she revealed that since she married John, they have hatched a plan to drain each other’s booze stocks.
She explained: “You always end up with a cabinet full of various bottles of booze, like a bizarre white spirit from Poland, a lot of creme de menthe and various other terrific things in bottles. You don’t throw them away, and you’re never going to use them.
She added: “He had about 25 bottles, and I had the same. We’ve combined what we call our green fairy cupboards, and we decided we would have a cocktail every evening and drink our way through them.
“I started keeping notes, and I realised what I was doing was writing recipes for drinks – it was great fun.”
And Prue revealed has had some extra help in getting through her alcohol supplies. She said: “I’ve been doing charity days. They sell a day where you can go to Prue’s house and learn to cook, or some sort of event.
“I started thinking, what would be great fun is them help get rid of my green fairy cupboard.
“We had three wonderful couples come, and they were all up for it. All I can say was that by lunchtime, I could have given them McDonald’s.
“We were all wonderfully plastered, and it was very good fun.”