Farmhouse Kitchen TV show host Mulligan died at age of 91
AN EAST Riding chef who became an unlikely television celebrity after teaching at the Women’s Institute and demonstrating at the Great Yorkshire Show has died at the age of 91.
Grace Mulligan was recruited in 1983 by the Yorkshire Television producer Graham Watts to host Farmhouse Kitchen, ITV’s long-running afternoon cookery programme, following the death of its first presenter Dorothy Sleightholme.
Mrs Mulligan remained with the show for the next decade, until it ended its run in the early 1990s. She presented more than 80 editions and welcomed guests including future TV chefs Mary Berry and Rick Stein.
She also authored a series of spin-off cookbooks including an early volume on how to use the new microwave ovens that had begun to appear in the shops.
She also contributed to newspapers and magazines, including The Yorkshire Post.
She described her programmes, which were recorded at the YTV studios in Kirkstall road in Leeds, as looking “very slow and dated now”, but added: “We showed every part of the process. We really taught people how to cook properly and we did so without using a single swear word.”
Mrs Mulligan, who lived in Howden and whose late husband Brian was a long-serving GP in East Yorkshire, was also for 40 years the president of the Goole Operatic and Dramatic Society.
Originally from Dundee, she trained in needlework, but began teaching cookery after joining the Women’s Institute in the East Riding village of Hook.
Her eldest daughter Catriona said: “Mum was also an accomplished after-lunch speaker. One of her talks was called Travels with a Wooden Spoon. No one was more surprised than her at the avenues it opened up.”
In 2005, to mark ITV’s 50th anniversary, the Michelin-starred Yorkshire chef Frances Atkins created a lunch in Mrs Mulligan’s honour in the Lord Mayor’s dining room of York Mansion House.