Joyce Molyneux
Doyenne of modern, local British cooking at her Michelin-starred restaurant The Carved Angel
JOYCE MOLYNEUX, who has died aged 91, was one of the first female chefs to be awarded a Michelin star; she received the honour in 1978, four years after opening The Carved Angel restaurant in a handsome old building overlooking the River Dart at Dartmouth, where she was at the forefront of the growth in modern British cooking and one of the early champions of sourcing local produce.
She chose the name during refurbishment work, when a local carpenter presented her with a carving of a wooden angel. It was so beautiful that she placed it in a central position in the dining room.
In the kitchen her loyalty was to the Mediterranean, though most of her ingredients came from within a 20-mile radius of Dartmouth. One of her trademarks was to serve five or six different fish, vegetable or cured meat dishes as a starter.
The Carved Angel became one of the most noted restaurants in Britain and probably the first to have an open-plan kitchen where diners could see the chef and her small team preparing their food. The Good Food Guide ranked it as one of the best in the country and everyone who met its smiling proprietor came away with their enthusiasm for good food enhanced by her sheer passion and dedication to the craft of good cooking.
Drew Smith, the author of several books on cuisine, considered Joyce Molyneux to be the doyenne of a renaissance in cooking in Britain while Egon Ronay described her food as instantly attainable. “It is always light and there are no unnecessary complications,” he said. “The flair is in her feel for the materials. She lets everything taste of itself.”
Her first recipe book, The Carved Angel Cookery Book (1990, with Sophie Grigson), sold 50,000 copies, a remarkable number for a chef without a television deal or a newspaper column. One of her most famous recipes was for a traditional Christmas pudding based on a recipe created by the Victorian food writer Eliza Acton.
In 2000 she sold the Carved Angel to Peter Gorton, who also owned the Horn of Plenty in Tavistock. Today, the restaurant is known as The Angel and the head chef is Elly Wentworth, a runner up in the 2016 edition of Masterchef: The Professionals.
Reminiscing in 2011, Joyce Molyneux told The Guardian how she had enjoyed encouraging young cooks. “So many talented people passed through our kitchen,” she said. “Seeing them all go off and set up on their own, as chefs, producers or whatever, was wonderful. It made it all worthwhile.”
Joyce Molyneux was born in Handsworth, Birmingham, on April 17 1931, the second of three children of William Molyneux, a chemist with W&T Avery, the maker of weighing machines, and his wife Irene, née Wolfenden. The young Joyce’s interest in cooking was stimulated during the Second World War when she was evacuated to Worcestershire: she lived with a Yorkshire woman and her four daughters, who baked bread, cake and biscuits each week and taught her to make cocoa cakes sweetened with carrot.
While visiting a French penfriend in Alsace-lorraine, two years after VE-DAY, she discovered a range of culinary possibilities. “Times had been hard there too, but the way they used their imaginations to make the most of vegetables was wonderful: a piece of salt pork from the larder fried in the pan first, then the vegetables added with a little water,” she told The Independent. “It was very simple, but it was cooking with skill and imagination.”
After completing her O-levels at King Edward VI School for Girls in Birmingham, Joyce had no idea what to do but, having enjoyed cooking as a child, chose to offend her headmistress by electing to go to domestic science college.
It was a poor course, run, she said, by a “Scottish mafia” using a 1907 recipe book. Her father then found her a job in the works canteen of an industrial plating firm.
Eventually she moved to the Mulberry Tree restaurant in Stratfordupon-avon, which still had a coal-fired range: “I was the only woman there but that wasn’t an issue. I was just a pair of hands and a pretty raw pair of hands at that.”
It was still the era of rationing and there was little meat on the menu.
“We’d boil a fowl in the afternoon and use the stock to make a velouté and then make chicken à la king [in cream sauce] and the flavour in the sauce was mind-blowing.”
Meanwhile, a Lancastrian restaurateur called
George Perry-smith had opened the Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath and, armed with Elizabeth David’s books on French cooking, had brought light to the dark culinary world of the 1950s. Leading critics referred to the Hole in the Wall as “the birthplace of post-war British restaurants” and it had a well-deserved reputation as the most adventurous restaurant outside London.
One day Joyce Molyneux visited to see what the fuss was about and, after enjoying a meal, made it her ambition to work there. In 1959 she spotted an ad in The Lady, applied and was hired. “It was a great education,” she said, adding that she finally experienced dishes such as French onion soup, grilled Dover sole and Ricotta al caffè. Perry-smith insisted that everyone should know how the business worked, “so we all had to do stints in the kitchen and front-of-house”, Joyce Molyneux said, recalling that she first had to overcome her shyness.
During a refurbishment in the 1960s an open kitchen was installed so that customers could see what was going on, an innovation that Joyce Molyneux developed further at the Carved Angel.
During her time at the Hole in the Wall, Yehudi Menuhin reigned supreme at the Bath Festival and the restaurant became a regular haunt for the violinist, his family and entourage. On June 8 1964 Dame Margot Fonteyn was dining there during the Festival when her husband Dr Roberto Arias, the former Panamanian ambassador to Britain, was shot and critically injured in Panama City.
Perry-smith sold up in 1972, although the Hole in the Wall lived on until last year. He opened the Riverside restaurant with rooms at Helford, Cornwall, and at around the same time Joyce Molyneux opened the Carved Angel with Perry-smith’s stepson, Tom Jaine. They effectively ran the two establishments as one business, feeding off each other’s ideas, including buying fresh ingredients from local suppliers where possible.
In retirement Joyce Molyneux returned to Bath and in her eightieth year published Angel Food, a recipe book that showed how ahead of her time she had been 30 years earlier: spiced lamb patties with dukkah,
grilled chicken with yoghurt and turmeric sauce, and sole with ginger, lime and lemongrass. Each year family and friends looked forward to receiving her Christmas parcels packed with jams, pickles and preserves.
She deplored the aggressive nature of some television chefs, maintaining that shouting was unnecessary and that a kitchen should be a friendly and happy place. Despite being a Masterchef judge in 1992 and 1997 she found the BBC show embarrassing, but did enjoy The Great British Bake Off: “It’s just rather civilised.”
Joyce Molyneux met Stephen Rodriguez-garcia, a Catalonian waiter, while working in Stratford-upon-avon. Despite often being in different parts of the country they remained partners until his death in 1994. She had no children, saying that they were not compatible with life in the kitchen: “If I’d had a family, I would have had to give it up.”