Aileen Hall

Food and wine authority Born: May 23, 1930; Died: December 7, 2015 AILEEN Hall, who has died aged 85, was the Edinburgh-born chief inspector of the Good Food Guide during its heyday when it was edited by the erudite, perceptive Christopher Driver, long-serving and much-admired (though not by the restaurant trade) successor to the publication’s famous left-wing founder Raymond Postgate.

Those were the days when the Good Food Guide was Britain’s annual gastronomic bible, an essential buy for everybody who cared seriously about eating, and Aileen Hall was the principal link between Driver and his readers.

Devoted readers unfailingly kept the book selling and contributed (this was the guide’s special asset and inspiration) the vital information about what restaurants were worth visiting and why.

Hall scrupulously sifted through readers’ recommendations and, like Driver, sampled restaurants in person, checking on the accuracy of a reader’s judgment and assembling the results into the mine of reliable detail that the book contained every year.

Though Driver was the Good Food Guide’s foolproof guarantee of excellence, it could not have achieved this so admirably without Hall’s insatiable help.

A pupil, like the slightly older Muriel Spark, of James Gillespie’s High School in Bruntsfield, she studied English and mathematics at Edinburgh University, gaining a diploma in education.

The daughter of a commercial traveller, she could have been a member of Spark’s “Brodie set,” adventuring from 1957 in Canada, where she taught English and mathematics, and stood twice in the federal elections as a democratic candidate, advocating planned parenthood and the sale of contraceptive devices which were at the time illegal in Canada.

Back in Britain by 1970, she joined the Good Food Guide, whose founder had been a champagne socialist and supporter of consumer activism, and she gained fame, like her editor, for her support of Indian and other, at the time, seemingly exotic cuisines, as well as for her championing of women customers in restaurants as people with their own valuable voices who were not to be constantly overshadowed by men.

As proof of her own abilities and culinary knowhow, she wrote three timely cookery books, initially under the name of Hilary Fawcett in conjunction with another food writer.

Starting with the Good Food Guide Dinner Party Book, these contained, in an accessible form, the recipes of deservedly celebrated chefs – a now widespread, indeed grossly over-widespread, practice, but something which in Hall’s day was original, interesting and even inspirational. She was, it is said, an exceptionally good cook herself, and thus knew what she was writing about.

Thereafter, she moved into the wine world as editor of the Which? Wine Guide. This, like the Good Food Guide, came under the auspices of the Consumers’ Association, in which she was increasingly active and soon became a much-liked food and wine correspondent in newspapers that welcomed the novelty value of such things.

Today the Good Food Guide, with its Waitrose associations, is a different sort of book, but memories of a Gillespie girl’s pioneering efforts at a time when food and wine were not just another aspect of popular journalism happily linger on.