Prue Leith: 'Clever chefs? They've lost the plot'

Prue Leith in her kitchen
Prue Leith in her Cotswolds kitchen, which has 'barely changed' in the 39 years she's lived there Credit: Andrew Crowley

The taxi driver fancied himself as a celebrity-spotter, as taxi drivers do. “Oooh, are you that lady off the telly?” he inquired of Prue Leith, judge and cool-headed arbiter of BBC2’s Great British Menu (GBM). Prue fluffed up her considerable plumage. She likes being a household name. “Yes, I am,” she said, flattered. “Well, I’m telling you, Norwich City’s rubbish,” he said. She had to break the news to him that she wasn’t Delia Smith, owner of Norwich FC.

I like this anecdote for what it says about Leith. How prettily she sticks the fork into her own ego. How secure she is in her place at the heart of the kitchen revolution. Apart from her love of food and flattery, she admits that one reason she’s still doing GBM (now in its 10th series) is that being on television helps sales of her novels and it’s nice being recognised in the supermarket.

"I think the BBC likes to have Mary Berry and me around to rebut the charge of ageism.”
Prue Leith

“What’s not to like?” she asks. “There’s a lot of attention and fussing. Someone puts your face on and does your hair. It makes me roar with laughter when they call me 'the talent’. The best chefs in the country bring you food and you eat it. Of course, one of these fine days it will come to an end … I’m a lot older than my fellow judges [Matthew Fort and Oliver Peyton]. In fact I could be Oliver’s mother. I think the BBC likes to have Mary Berry and me around to rebut the charge of ageism.”

Today, Leith is a sunburst in a saffron jacket, cream trousers and iridescent multicoloured silk scarf. A striped top clashes confidently with lashings of funky jewellery.

Prue Leith
Modern cookbooks are marketing tools for chefs, says Prue Leith, 75 Credit: Andrew Crowley

Caterer, restaurateur, cookery school founder, journalist, campaigner, novelist and champion of geriatric love, Leith has packed several lives into one. Her ability to go on creating a stir is delicious. Only recently, in Radio Times, she dismissed modern cookbooks as glossy “food porn” by celebrity chefs (mostly male) with an obligatory television series behind them.

Gone are the useful, splattered manuals of her own day written by (mostly female) cooks and writers. It’s all about cooking as entertainment.

It can fairly be said of Prue Leith that she taught Britain to cook
Elizabeth Grice

“Today, if we cook we Google it. New cookbooks lie on the coffee table and we drool over Tuscan landscapes and rustic bread ovens. Before ordering in a pizza.” Though Leith has fed our culinary cravings with a dozen cookbooks herself, they are instructive rather than seductive. It can fairly be said of her that she taught Britain to cook. Leith’s Cookery Bible (2003) has 1,400 recipes and only 64 pictures. My battered copy of Leith’s Complete Christmas (1992) has conversion tables, catering quantities and cooking charts. Even food safety is covered.

“What I want to do is produce really delicious food,” she says. “I want it to look nice, because when you see food you should want to eat it. You shouldn’t be saying, 'Oh my goodness, isn’t the chef clever, he can weave the Eiffel Tower out of carrot sticks.’ I think they lose the plot sometimes.”

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She is unrepentant. “Modern cookbooks are marketing tools for chefs. They’re in the bestseller lists but no one cooks from them. I mean, how many do you actually use? And yet, these are terrific chefs who do the campaign for good food a lot of good and make cooking cool. British kitchens are full of British chefs now – they used to be French and Italian – catering colleges are full, and there are young boys and girls in all our best kitchens. That’s good.”

Leith is miffed that in the wake of her Radio Times musings the media has tried to encourage her to be rude about chefs, which is not her style at all.

She likens the cooking craze to a spectator sport like football. “I regret to say it’s mostly the middle classes who are fascinated by it. If you live on a council estate and your mother didn’t cook and the supermarket doesn’t stock decent food, why would you waste your benefits on food your children won’t eat?”

We meet to talk about her sixth and latest novel, a family saga in which food drives the plot and nourishes the love story. The Food of Love is the first in a trilogy spanning the cooking revolution from wartime rationing through to nouvelle cuisine, the boom in British chefs and the cult of eating out today.

Prue with Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise in her restaurant in 1971
Prue entertaining Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise in the kitchen of her restaurant in 1971 Credit: Rex Features

“Almost everything in my books is lifted from my life,” she says. “I’m quite lazy. I don’t want to learn a new subject like shipbuilding.”

Leith started writing novels after the death of her husband, the South African writer Rayne Kruger, in 2003, and now, it seems, cannot stop. Foregoing a social life, she gets up at dawn and works for six or seven hours. Why?

“I wish I knew,” she exclaims. “It’s crazy. I’m 75. I’ve earned more than enough money to live on. I have three young grandchildren and a lovely house in the Cotswolds. I have a partner and we go travelling a lot… but you wake up with an idea and have to do something about it.”

Ambition still nags away at her. Her novels tend to stick at what she calls a “perfectly respectable” 30,000 – a sales figure most writers of fiction would give their eye teeth for – but she wants more.

Leith is stung by the memory of a screenwriting course she attended, hoping to work up an idea for a television series about young cooks. “Anyone who has had a happy childhood should leave now,” announced the lecturer. Her childhood in South Africa had been enviably happy and she had published two novels. She confronted him with these facts in the lunch break.

Prue with GBM judges Oliver Peyton and Matthew Fort
Prue with GBM judges Oliver Peyton (l) and Matthew Fort Credit: BBC/Optomen Television

“Well, either you’re in denial about your childhood,” he told her, “or you’re a terrible writer.”

Prudence Margaret Leith does not put up with that kind of tosh. She quit the course. “It still riles me.”

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It is sweet revenge that the Food of Love saga has just been optioned by two television companies. “We all know an option doesn’t mean a thing,” she says brightly. “But it would make a good Sunday night drama. I’d love something like this at this great age in my life.”

Leith’s life in food began when she was studying at the Sorbonne and became fascinated by the daily quest of les mesdames for the freshest bread and the best brioches in different bakeries. She moved to London and enrolled in the Cordon Bleu cookery school. In 1960, aged 20, she started supplying high-quality business lunches and this evolved into her catering business, Leith’s Good Food. By 29 she had her own Michelin-starred restaurant, Leith’s in Kensington. In 1975 she founded Leith’s School of Food and Wine to train amateur cooks and professional chefs. In 1990 she was named Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year.

Some of this was possible because, as all the world now knows, her lover was a married man, a situation that left her with time to concentrate on building the business. “Oh, my love life,” she groans, long fingers raking through her blonde highlights. The clandestine 13-year affair with Kruger, her mother’s best friend whom she later married, began when Prue was 21 and Rayne, an uncle figure, was 39. They went on to have one son, Daniel, and adopted a daughter, Li-Da, from Cambodia. Believing honesty was the only approach, she revealed all in her 2012 autobiography Relish.

Prue cooking
'What I want to do is produce really delicious food', says Prue Credit: Andrew Crowley

“I thought long and hard about it and at first resisted,” she says. “Yet the most important thing in my life was, and probably still is, my 35 years with Rayne. To airbrush that out would have taken the heart out of the book.”

It was a not-too-well-calculated risk and she admits she has only herself to blame for the blaze of publicity that ensued. “I’m a blabbermouth. I find it difficult not to give a straight answer.”

Daniel, her son, was particularly mortified. It caused the first “tiff” they have ever had. Later, when a beautifully gift-wrapped box arrived from him, she thought it was his way of making up. The box contained a megaphone.

Leith now shares her astonishingly ripe maturity with John Playfair, the third great love of her life
Elizabeth Grice

At 66, and four years a widow, she fell unexpectedly in love with Sir Ernest Hall, a septuagenarian pianist. But he turned out to be bipolar and the horrors of his condition brought her “second chance at love” to an end. That, too, was chronicled in Relish and elsewhere, making her something of an ambassador for the joys of late-flowering romance. Leith now shares her astonishingly ripe maturity with John Playfair, the third great love of her life who, as we speak, is channelling his chainsaw instincts into building an adventure playground for the grandchildren in the garden of her much-loved house in Chastleton, Moreton-in Marsh.

“He’s known as The Dark Destroyer,” she says. “He likes projects. I like maintenance.”

You sense her delight at the settledness of it, but also her continuing greed for life with all its surprises.

“I’ve had a lovely marriage, a great career, happy children. I’ve had such a great life – and I’d like to have more of it. That’s why I don’t want to die.”

Prue's cookbooks
Prue's old faithful cookbooks Credit: Andrew Crowley

Prue's favourite cookbooks

- My most thumbed cookery books are three ancient paperbacks published by Fontana when we opened Leith’s School in 1975, with beginners, intermediate and advanced recipes. They were the basis for the recipes that made up the Leith’s Cookery Bible, which was a huge great glossy thing with thousands of recipes and a few pictures. The Bible is updated all the time – it’s currently on its third publishing edition, which gives us a chance to keep it modern. We got rid of things that nobody ate anymore because they were too creamy, such as camembert fritters.

- My favourite meat cookery book is Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s The River Cottage Meat Book, which is brilliant.

- The Good Housekeeping Complete Book of Home Preserving is almost 100 years old but it will tell you how to do anything – dried fruit, dried vegetables, things put in salt – using the old fashioned ways of preserving. I like the whole idea of it. I’m a great one for leftovers and I can’t bear to waste anything. If there’s a glut of plums I have to use them – I always make tonnes of marmalade.

- The modern cookbooks I like are the River Café cookbooks. I think Ruthie Rogers is a great cook. I often make their polenta cake and their stuffed ravioli.

The Food of Love by Prue Leith is published by Quercus priced £19.99. To order your copy for £16.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

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