Chef’s table
Cook a three-course lunch for Prue Leith? No pressure…
Prue Leith is peering at me over the top of her raspberry red, thickrimmed glasses as I anxiously stir the onions sweating in a pan on the hob. “What do you think, Prue?” I turn and ask her, like a commis chef desperate for her approval. “Are they golden brown enough yet?” She raises an eyebrow and wanders out of the kitchen, refusing to take the bait. You see, Leith has – for reasons beyond my understanding – agreed to let me take over the immaculate kitchen in her Cotswolds home for the afternoon. I’m to cook her a three-course lunch while we talk about her new Channel 4 series My Kitchen Rules, which will see her and Michelin-starred chef Michael Caines judge amateur cooks at Come Dine With Me- style dinner parties held in their own homes.
I’ve arrived at Leith’s sprawling 18th-century house in Moreton-inMarsh armed with the entire contents of Waitrose and my mother’s cupboards. I’ve thought about nothing else all week. What do you cook for the Dowager Countess of cookery? This is a woman from the Mary Berry generation of serious food writers, who has had a Michelin-starred restaurant in her name and was teaching us to cook when the words “celebrity chef ” were still just a twinkle in a marketing man’s eye. She now spends her days keeping Matthew Fort and Oliver Peyton in check on BBC Two’s Great British Menu, critiquing elaborate food created by the country’s top chefs.
Being more of a bung-it-all-in-andhope-for-the-best kind of a cook than a particularly gastronomic one, I’m not feeling hugely optimistic.
Nevertheless, I’m determined to impress with a menu of Cornish crab, vermouth-spiked green herb risotto, and a mound of brown sugar meringues with roasted plums (they’re in season) and whipped vanilla cream. Such is my need to impress that I’ve even brought along a loaf of homemade soda bread to accompany the starter – though, granted, this has been made by my dad, who did a Leith’s course back in 1989 and fancies himself as a bit of a Paul Hollywood.
After a quick tour of the kitchen (which, incidentally, is fabulous – think induction hob, lines of neatly labelled jars, custom-made cherrywood island…), Leith potters away to get some work done while I begin the somewhat daunting task of preparing lunch for possibly the most experienced cook in the country. “Good luck, I’ll be back in an hour,” she says. I know from my viewing of Great British Menu that Leith does not like it when dishes are “late to the pass”, so I crack on, assembling my crab starter and blitzing an obscene amount of herbs in a Magimix.
I’ve chosen risotto so I don’t have to faff around cooking a piece of meat perfectly, forgetting that to achieve the right creaminess the rice must be stirred constantly. Soon, I’m placing tiny slices of radish on a mound of crab with one hand while manically stirring with the other, causing grains of lurid green rice to fly across the immaculate granite work surfaces.
An hour later, by some miracle, I am ready to plate up. Research has taught me that Prue Leith doesn’t go in for what she calls “foams and fizzles”, which is just as well in my case. But I do steal a drizzle of her Tuscan extra virgin olive oil, produced by a pal in Italy.
“Ah, hello, are you here to cook us lunch?” asks John Playfair, Leith’s husband-to-be, wandering into the kitchen dressed in emerald green overalls, having spent the morning tinkering with things in the garden. “Don’t worry, Prue eats anything,” he says, cheerfully. “Although, one of the first times I cooked for her, I made a slightly adventurous dish with a mango sauce which didn’t go down well…”
The couple got together five years ago – Playfair, a designer, is practically a toyboy at 69 to Leith’s 76 – and next week, will travel to Edinburgh to tie the knot. Leith, who was married for 38 years to the South African author Rayne Kruger before his death in 2002, is giddy about this second chance at love. “It’s a dream,” she says. “I’m so looking forward to it. It’s just going to be us and two witnesses. And then we’re going to have dinner at Tom Kitchin’s restaurant. Bliss!” They are like young lovers – when one of them enters a room, the other beams.
We sit down to lunch. Leith’s passion for good food has taken her from writing books to TV judging, to campaigning for healthy food in schools. So does she fancy the Great
British Bake Off job now her friend Berry is going? Not a bit. “I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, really. I was more concerned about Brangelina,” she deadpans.
In fact, she isn’t thinking about anything much at the moment other than marrying John.
There is talk about which socks John should wear with his kilt on the big day, and whether he’ll have his sgian-dubh. This Morning want them on to talk about the wedding, and John jokes he’ll only do it if he can get sponsorship from Viagra. They collapse into hysterics. I laugh along, while the question of my seasoning of the risotto hangs in the balance.
So far Leith has been suspiciously quiet about the food, but as I place a plate of “rustic” looking meringues in front of her and she takes a bite, her eyes widen and she slams her fork against the table. Truly, I now know how the Bake Off contestants feel when they give Mary Berry a coughing fit with a dry biscuit.
“Well, now, that is the most amazing toffee meringue!” she says. “And plums are such an underrated fruit, so I think you’ve done the right thing there.”
Phew. Never let it be said I’ve done wrong by a plum.
Her feedback is both crushing (not enough salt in the risotto) and exhilarating (see meringues). I learn that you should never put more than four flavours in any dish, that all chefs cheat – she admits her signature dish when cooking for the family is a spatchcocked chicken smothered in Nando’s sauce – and that simple food, cooked with stellar ingredients is almost always the best.
“Congratulations,” she says, while heading back upstairs to pack for their trip, “great lunch.” And with that, it’s all over. And I can say I cooked for a Michelin-starred chef, and not only did it not kill them, but they actually enjoyed it. My Kitchen Rules starts on Channel 4 on Monday, 5pm