Television cook who made dips with powdered soup and whose jellies were not to be trifled with
ZENA SKINNER, who has died aged 91, was the Delia Smith of the prawn cocktail era and a benign rival to the famously fearsome Fanny Cradock. Her first television appearance was in 1959, when she was seen on the BBC’S Cookery Club making brandy snaps, which she recalled as “a bit risky because they can be a problem, but they turned out all right”.
She went on to present wholesome family fare on such shows as Town and Around, Indoors Outdoors and
Ask Zena Skinner. She contributed articles to Radio Times, published 13 cookery books, became the “face” of Tupperware in a series of adverts, and wrote cookery cards, which were distributed with Woman’s Realm.
Zena Skinner’s soothing contralto tones introduced viewers to such culinary delights as cheese and shrimp fritters, prawns with macaroni, Norfolk syllabub and lemon snow.
She showed how to make dips with powdered soup and soured cream and found ingenious ways of using leftovers, her boisterous laugh tiding over any glitches in programmes that were recorded live. She was sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Here’s one I made earlier” – although in her case she really had made it earlier, herself.
Those were years when the most likely place to find olive oil was the chemist (for medicinal purposes) and spinach was sold in tins. Zena Skinner’s recipes were very much of their time, probably accounting for the number of second-hand Zena Skinner recipe books now gathering dust on the shelves of charity shops. However, it is said that no one has ever bettered her Christmas cake recipe.
Zena Skinner was born on February 27 1927 in Luton, Bedfordshire, where her father ran an electroplating company. During the war, aged 17, she responded to the recruitment slogan of “Join the Wrens and free a man for the fleet”, hoping to work as a driver or dispatch rider. Instead, she was trained as a coder and spent four years based in Portsmouth decoding signals.
After being demobbed, she studied at the London School of Electrical Domestic Science and obtained employment as a demonstrator at the Eastern Electricity Board showroom in Royston, where she was also responsible for covering an area of 100 square miles, checking that people were happy with their new appliances.
After four years she moved to GEC, again giving demonstrations and servicing appliances across southern England. In the late 1950s she became an overseas demonstrator for the company, her job being, according to a Daily Telegraph profile of the time, “to introduce electric appliances to dusky ladies in sarongs, to blackhaired beauties in bright cottons and bandanas and to the modestly veiled women who wear the dusty black of purdah”.
“Some of their ingredients I had never seen before, things like breadfruit, plantains, mangos, okra, saltfish,” Zena Skinner recalled. “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.”
She was working in Kenya when the Queen came on an official visit. “They brought some warriors out of the bush to meet her,” Zena Skinner recalled. “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
[an afternoon institution on BBC Television in the 1950s] phoned and asked me to go and see her.”
Marguerite Patten was the show’s resident cook, but Zena Skinner began making guest appearances. It led to other television slots and she soon found herself boxing and coxing with Fanny Cradock. Zena Skinner did not warm to her fellow presenter: “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.”
Zena Skinner’s big break came on the current affairs programme Town and Around, which made her something of a celebrity. She was invited to open shopping malls and restaurants and the Queen asked to visit her television kitchen at the Ideal Home Exhibition.
She went on to appear on other BBC shows and, during the 1970s, had a regular slot on Radio 4 giving cookery tips on Start the Week, hosted by Richard Baker. After being dropped by the BBC, during the 1980s she worked with Robert Dougall and Raymond Baxter on Years Ahead, a Channel 4 programme aimed at the over-sixties.
After retiring from television in 1989, Zena Skinner spent much of her time giving talks. She sold handicrafts that she made herself for medical charities and helped to raise more than £100,000 for the Bedfordshire-based Keech Hospice Care.
Zena Skinner was unmarried.
Zena Skinner, born February 27 1927, died March 6 2018