A long career as a restaurateur, caterer, television presenter, journalist and cookery writer has provided Great British Bake Off judge Prue Leith plenty of material for her novels.
She tells Scottish Field of her life in kitchens, as a writer, and her favourite place to eat in Scotland.
I grew up in Johannesburg in a very privileged background. We had a terrific Zulu cook, but I never noticed really – we ate well, but it didn’t seem unusual because I’d never known anything else. It was only when I went to Paris to university that I realised how much hard work, intelligence, training and skill goes into good cooking.
I was in Paris to study French but instead I fell in love with food, partly because of the woman I worked for as an au pair. Whatever we ate, the children would have the same food. She’d do these perfect little plates. If we had steak and salad, the salad would have French dressing on it, the potatoes would be turned over in butter with chopped herbs, and the steak would be seared very rare, sealed on each side. It would be cut into tiny bits for the 18-month-old, and the baby would have his whizzed up – French dressing, steak, salad, everything – and we’d all sit round the table and talk. And I learned that what you need for good food is fresh ingredients, cooked at the last moment, very simply, with a lot of care, and then you all eat it together, sitting down.
I decided I wanted to be a cook and got a job in a restaurant in Paris washing dishes so I could see what they were doing, before doing a course at the Cordon Bleu in London. I then took a job as a cook for a fi rm of solicitors, armed with the Cordon Bleu cookery book, which had about a thousand pages. I started on page one and just cooked my way through it. When I got to chicken, the biggest chapter, those long-suffering solicitors got chicken every day for weeks.
I’m not a great cook. I’m a good cook and I love food, but I’m also very good at employing people who are better than me. I’ve always tried to have people who could teach me – Fiona Burrell, of the Edinburgh New Town Cookery School, for example, was my deputy principal at Leith’s School. In turn, I always want people to learn. It’s a bit like my novels – I think the background’s just as important as the story and characters. One reason
I love books about obsessions is that you learn all about that subject. My novel, The Food of Love, is a good example of that. It is the first part of a trilogy and has been optioned for television, so I’m hoping one day it will be our Sunday-night viewing, like Downton Abbey.
The first TV I ever did was a joke. I’d been asked to do a cookery slot on a daytime TV show, but a week before we started filming, the producers phoned me and said, ‘the presenter has left – can you take over the whole show?’ I said of course, but didn’t tell them I’d never done it before. I was so bad when it came to fi lming. I wish I still had those tapes. I’d look at them when I feel I’m bad now and think, I used to be really, really bad.
I’ve been very lucky in my life. Over the years I’ve had businesses that haven’t worked or restaurants that have been panned, or lost money, but I’m not easily depressed, and never for long. I’m just naturally optimistic.
My greatest achievement has nothing to do with the obvious things – the Michelin star, my OBE, CBE or Business Woman of the Year award. What I’m proudest of is that I personally thought up, led and achieved – with a committee – filling the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. People said it could never happen because nobody would agree what should go on it. Well, that was like a red rag to me. In the end we decided on modern, temporary sculptures by great people, but they’d only be up for a year. All the objections fell away and it has been a terrific success.
My favourite place in Scotland is the River Naver in Sutherland. It’s a beautiful little river and I love to fish there.
My favourite place to eat is Tom Kitchin’s in Leith, Edinburgh, and I love the Cafe Royal. And I think the food at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre is amazing. It is sometimes as good as you’ll get in a Michelin-starred restaurant and they’re doing it for 500 people. That’s Leith’s catering at its best.
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