Prue Leith... how she did it

INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPERS

PRUE LEITH: Its extraordinary how she has managed to fit it all in. Photo: Gill Gowans

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Relish: My life on a plate

Prue Leith

(Quercus)

Prue Leith has achieved a lot in her life: restaurants, cooking schools, cookery books, novels; it turns out we even have her to thank for the temporary installations on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

Such industry and enterprise have made her a treasure, yet when she won a Businesswoman of the Year award in the UK, her son thought there must be some mistake because she always seemed to be at home. It’s extraordinary how she’s managed to fit it all in, and it means this book is like a jolly montage from a wholesome family movie.

“The mussels are fermenting, and the luminaries of the art world are expecting mussel soup in less than an hour.

“What to do? I’d somehow make 70 pints of soup in 40 minutes and get back to the Tate by 7.45.

Twenty of Lord Verulam’s guests are expecting a three-course meal, but the Aga has been sabotaged by his lordship’s regular chef, who deeply resented not being trusted to produce the goods. Will Prue pull it off? Of course: she engineers a court bouillon from tap water and boils potatoes in an electric tea-urn.

Very occasionally, she is bested, but usually a bit of sharp thinking and her customary steely determination get her out of these scrapes. She even gets away with accidentally serving a bath plug to a senior lawyer: Fast as anything, I said: “…it proves I washed the salad”.

It’s not all crises; sometimes there’s more of a battle narrative, such as when Safeway supermarket fails to act on Leith’s suggestion that it sells a higher quality of sausage. After months of being ignored, she marches into the sausage factory, rolls up her sleeves and bustles its managing director into helping her make sausages her way. Pretty soon every other supermarket was making good quality bangers.

Leith had a happy childhood in South Africa. Her father worked for an explosives company, her mother was an actress. They were very much in love, and when her father died just before her 21st birthday, she writes that in a sense, “it ended my mother’s life… he was the irreplaceable centre of her being”.

Leith charts the many catering projects she’s taken on over the years, from organising a caveman party for Elton John to revolutionising the British Rail sandwich.

The cheerful montage effect rather drags after a while. Too many paragraphs begin with: Another of my favourite memories from that time.

She has a remarkable eye for improving things: when she’s finding it hard to recruit well-trained chefs, she starts a cooking school; when she spies an empty plinth, she embarks on a five-year battle to get it filled, despite the snide insinuations that art isn t really her domain.

Her husband, Rayne Kruger, who died in 2002, is one of the few characters drawn with more than a few brushstrokes. For the first 13 years of their relationship, he was married to her mother’s best friend. Leith gives only the briefest glimpses of the agony of such a lengthy clandestine affair, longing for a child, longing to tell her friends that she’s not a lesbian.

Kruger eventually left his wife, who behaved like a saint and remained friends with both Prue and Rayne. They were married two days before the birth of their son, Daniel. Soon afterwards, they adopted Li-Da, a Cambodian baby.

She relished family life. After years of eating catering leftovers, pots of yogurt, cans of beans, or even, shamingly, Birds Eye Roast Dinners for One, cooking domestic dinners… was a huge new pleasure.

Turning those solitary dinners into part of a joyful story rather than a self-pitying one is typical; even when she’s letting her anecdotes run out of control, Leith is always bright and enthusiastic. In a way, her prolixity is part of her charm: so few people approach the world with such public-spirited brio. – Daily Mail

* Order online from Exclusive Books and Kalahari.com

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