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But she persisted and convinced them to put aside their reservations about continental foods.
M&S’S then chairman Marcus Sieff was told the dish was called chicken kiev.
He recalled: “I said, You’ll never sell it up there, in the North, with a name like that.’ I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
It is true that the TV dinner, as it was first called, came from the US in 1953. The firm Swanson hit on a way to use huge amounts of surplus turkey after Thanksgiving.
The meat was added to all the other components of the traditional American dinner.
But the stroke of genius was packing it all into the aluminium trays used to serve food by airlines. The containers acted as both baking tray to cook the frozen meal and a plate to eat it off.
With television taking a grip across the US, the company named its new product the TV dinner – one you could eat while you watched. The new meals were a staggering success, with ten million reportedly sold in the first year.
But it was Britain that made the dish its own and, crucially, converted it from a cheap frozen meal into a product for people who were going places.
Other chains have followed M&S and now they all have their own ranges of ready meals sold in anything from ceramic ramekins to plastic dishes.
None of this would have been possible without supermarkets investing large sums in centralised chilled warehouses.
Cathy, who started working at M&S in her early 20s in 1975, said: “The only real convenience food that was out there at the time was in the freezer. Most of it was boil-in-the-bag, so pretty grim. A restaurateur called John Docker had contacted the company with the idea of introducing restaurant-quality food to consumers. “Marks & Spencer had already been the first retailer to introduce chilled, skinless chicken breasts and the first to do a whole roast chicken.” It was the dawning of the age of the celebrity chef, with names such Albert Roux coming to the fore and a time when more women began going out to work. After the £1.99 kiev, Cathy went on to launch the country’s first IN 1985 Marks and Spencer launched the first vegetarian ready meal followed by this range for slimmers – with dishes containing no more than 300 calories – reflecting changing attitudes. ready-made lasagne, chilli con carne, Chinese spring rolls and chicken tikka masala. But the recipes weren’t a success with everyone.
Now in her 60s, Cathy recalls a phone call from a customer who vowed she could improve on Marks & Spencer’s Indian dishes. “She told me, ‘I don’t think much of yo I think I can do better.’ S had learnt to cook from generations in her famil
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