Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
Something Prue!
Something old, something new, something Bake Off...
My first serious cookery writing job was a weekly column for the Daily Mail in the Seventies. I learned a lot in the process, mostly by making mistakes – chocolate mouse instead of mousse, mince the children instead of chicken – that sort of thing.
When, in the Nineties, I gave up writing food columns and cookbooks to concentrate on novels ( I’ve written eight in the last 20 years), I found to my surprise that food kept creeping into my fiction. Characters would turn out to be chefs or cooks or restaurateurs, and somehow a great deal of cooking went on. In my first novel the male protagonist is a restaurateur who has an affair with a food critic. The heroine of my second novel was a caterer like me, and my most recent trilogy, The Food Of Love, has a background of the changes in the way we eat, from rationing in the Second World War to health fads today, and the two families all earn their living in the food chain.
Until last year I had no thoughts of returning to cookery writing. I’m 78 now, and it is 25 years since I last wrote a cookbook. I’d written 12 of them, ranging from my first All Party Cookbook to a Cookery Bible, which I co-authored with Caroline Waldegrave. It wasn’t just that I hadn’t the time to write both cookbooks and novels, it was also that I felt stale. I knew I could knock out another reliable, solid cookbook, but I didn’t feel inspired. Somehow, with all the years of cookery writing, catering, teaching and restaurants, I’d lost that deep interest that makes a great cookery writer. And anyway, there were wonderful younger cookery writers appearing, with new ideas, new interests, new ingredients, and new, imaginative takes on the art, necessity and science that is cooking. I was content with leaving the field to others doing a brilliant job. My time had come and gone – or so I thought.
Then I joined The Great British Bake Off. And discovered that I couldn’t spend three months in a tent full of totally committed bakers and NOT want to get back into food writing. It started with me asking for the occasional recipe from a contestant or from my fellow judge Paul Hol-
lywood, and swiftly led to my doing far more baking in those three months than I’d done in 20 years. It wasn’t just the bakes on the show that set me off experimenting, testing, writing. Paul has made baking his own, and his image absolutely reflects his personality: a macho man who likes fast cars, football – and fairy cakes. Sandi Toksvig is a keen cook as well. Only her fellow presenter Noel Fielding doesn’t bake. But I bet he will.
I began to feel again that long-forgotten thrill of inventing recipes. By Christmas last year I had my new book, Prue, mapped out and had got the brilliant young cook Georgina Fuggle to help. Georgina, who trained at Leiths School Of Food And Wine, has written three cookbooks and sets up pop-up restaurants. Then the struggle started to keep the book down to 100 recipes or so. We both kept on having more ideas, and I was reluctant to make room by ditching old favourites.
I have to admit this book doesn’t have a theme. It’s not all about health, or cakes, or a national cuisine, or speedy cooking, or economy, or posh showing off. It’s not all about anything. At one point, I thought it might be all about leftovers because my new (ish – we married in 2016) husband John, when asked if he eats like a king because he’s married to a Bake Off queen, says, ‘No, it’s mostly leftovers. I’ve hardly eaten the same thing twice in all the time we’ve been together. She just opens the fridge and 15 minutes later we have something amazing for supper.’
He exaggerates, of course. There would be no leftovers if I hadn’t done some primary cooking the day before. And it’s not always amazing. I once thought combining mashed parsnips and pomegranate seeds might be interesting – ugh! It was too sweet and looked horrible.
But it is true I love leftovers. Most good cooks do. It allows one to be creative and save money and make something delicious all at the same time. John’s favourite ‘telly supper’ is a plate of handheld bits made from leftovers, suitably disguised. We call it Clockwork Plate because you start at the top and eat right round.
There are other dishes in the book inspired by leftovers. But mostly the recipes are for the tastiest things I’ve encountered over 50 years of working in the food world and the best recipes
Bake Off judge Prue Leith reveals why she’s publishing her first cookbook in 25 years, the stories behind the mouthwatering recipes she’s sharing here – and how it was inspired by her role on Britain’s most popular show
I’ve cooked at home for family and friends. There are recipes from my childhood in South Africa (I left for Paris when I was 19), such as Bobotie – a sort of cross between shepherd’s pie and moussaka – dishes that my catering company excelled in, signature dishes from my restaurant, and dishes from the school of food and wine, such as Normandy Tart. There’s also the food my children loved 30 years ago, and ideas I’ve blatantly stolen from other cooks (with permission and a credit, I promise).
I’ve always been greedy and am probably even more so now, with a thickening waistline and little chance of seeing 11 stone ever again. But the food we eat has changed hugely in my lifetime. Certainly the classic French cream-and-butter-laden dishes of my youth appear less often now on my table, though a few of the best of them are in my new book.
When I opened my restaurant in Notting Hill Gate in 1969, it was the first posh restaurant with its menus in English. It infuriated me that in the French-dominated restaurant world of the time, the fact that neither customers nor kitchen staff had a clue what faisan à la souvaroff or noisettes d’agneau meant was neither here nor there (they are pheasant in a Madeira sauce and medallions of lamb respectively). I’m old enough, I’m sorry to say, to remember when chefs would say, ‘If it’s not in Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire, it’s not cuisine.’ So it wasn’t surprising people welcomed a comprehensible menu, and were delighted that we served English cheeses and New World wines.
Gradually the rigidity of haute cuisine gave way to the nouvelle cuisine revolution of the Seventies, when top chefs at last threw off the shackles of the great Escoffier and dared to invent, to use newly available ingredients, to produce colourful, balanced, individual plates instead of sauce-covered brown food in silver serving dishes. Of course, this fash-
‘My husband says I only feed him leftovers’ ‘Bake Off made me rediscover the thrill of inventing recipes’
ion was often abused, with customers complaining of ‘a little bit of nothing on a big white plate’, but the good chefs gave diners an astonishing experience, an explosion of flavours, contrasting textures and surprising combinations arrived at by a constant search for perfection.
The inspiration for some of my recipes does come from those great chefs, like Roger Vergé and Paul Bocuse in France, and the Roux brothers (Michel and Albert) and Anton Mosimann in London, albeit simplified. All good cooks like to show off occasionally – having a tableful of dinner guests saying ‘Wow!’ is a very good feeling.
Food is a matter of fashion as well as feeding, so eventually, as the British public travelled more and became less insular, nouvelle cuisine gave way first to a blast of Asian flavours, followed by Middle Eastern dishes, Spanish tapas, and more recently street food from every continent. The internet has made a difference too, with entrepreneurs delivering recipe boxes of ingredi-
ents ready to assemble or cook in minutes. And the top restaurants are no longer too grand to have their gastronomy delivered by scooter.
For all my 50-plus years of experience and my classical training, the general, casual tone of Prue and its informal, easy cooking is more influ- enced by today’s young cooks, by modern restaurants and gastro pubs, by street food, and by internet bloggers. The way we eat has changed so much, with almost all adults working, with long commutes and more working hours, and ever less time for cooking. But on the upside, we now have wonderful new ingredients, with farmers’ markets and speciality food stores, with home delivery and with almost anything available at a click. It’s an exciting time to be a home cook. Or a food writer.
Really simple family food is what I mostly cook today. ‘Comfort food’, such as bangers and mash, has always been with us because we all need a bit of comfort occasionally. I think of it as Sunday night supper, when you are exhausted from too good a weekend or slightly dreading the return to work tomorrow. My English Summer Pasta Al Pesto, with a good glass of red, fits the bill beautifully.
Even during my professional catering years, not much fancy restaurant food would be dished up by me at home. I was running my business, which consisted of the school of food and wine, my restaurant and catering for parties and events like Glyndebourne. I would be in our London flat in the week, while Rayne, my writer husband, who sadly died in 2002, stayed in our house in the Cotswolds, joining me for one night to eat in my restaurant. On Fridays I’d scamper back to be home before the children returned from weekly boarding school.
So, if you asked my children, LiDa and Daniel, now in their 40s, what they ate as children, they’d probably remember the Sunday roast, spag bol, shepherd’s pie, and veg out of the garden. I used to make my own sausages, fish fingers, yoghurt, ice cream, patés and jams. It would not have occurred to me to buy these things. I do remember Daniel, at about seven, saying ‘ Mum, it’s my birthday. Can’t I have sausages like at school? And white sliced bread?’
If I had my way, we’d all eat less meat, but of much better quality. Nothing factory- farmed, but freerange, grass-fed animals. We’d also eat heaps more veg. Indeed, I was tempted to make this book a mission about sustainable, healthy food. But since this is a tour of my life in food, I could hardly leave out all the creamy, booze- laden, absolutely delicious dishes from the past, which I still love. On occasion, anything is forgivable.
Because I eat everything, I am very bad at remembering who is veggie, who is gluten-free, who is diabetic, etc. Over the years my sisters-in-law ( one vegetarian and one diabetic), and recently my new stepdaughter, Kirsty, who comes out in an itchy rash if she has anything with gluten in it, have trained me to be more careful. These days I keep a stock of glutenfree ingredients to hand. But here is a confession. I have never been able to produce decent pastry with gluten-free flour. Has anyone?
For all that I champion fresh, minimally processed food, you won’t find anything about a clean gut and superfood in my book. I’ve included some good gluten-free and vegan recipes, but I’m the boring old granny who says there are no bad foods, though anything in excess can kill you. A balanced diet, unless you have a serious problem, will keep you well without any need for expensive supplements, unpleasant purges and miracle diets.
Cooking is not a religion. Friends are occasionally shocked that I will reach for the custard powder or stock cubes, frozen mash or puff pastry. But I’m often in a hurry, so I’m for anything that works, however arrived at. For me, perfection means it smells wonderful, looks wonderful and feels like heaven in the mouth.
And, of course, it must be worth the calories!
‘I couldn’t leave out all the creamy, boozy dishes’