Feedback with Prue Leith: October 2024

Feedback with Prue Leith

Prue joins us this month to talk about food, ingredients, cooking and restaurants.

Her list of achievements is exhausting, as well as the founder of Leith's School of Food and Wine, and proprietor of Leith's Restaurant, she also adds caterer, teacher, TV cook, food journalist, novelist, cookery book author, campaigner, TV presenter and judge to her ever increasing CV! Not one to let the grass grow, her latest book Life's Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom is published this month, and it's the perfect book for any busy cook. 80 recipes as well as time saving kitchen shortcuts and hacks to make life easier - each recipe has a handy tip or video to help you get ahead. Prue says ‘It’s taken me a long life to know for sure that life is for living, and that hard graft has to be worth it. So, if you are whacked, short of time or just don’t like cooking, cheating is fine. I cheat all the time, and I LOVE cooking'. 

Win one of 5 copies of Prue's book in our competition.

What food always reminds you of your childhood?
I was brought up in South Africa and my best food memories are Corn on the cob cooked over coals and eaten at a “braai”; My uncle catching fish which we’d braai on the beach; lemons eaten like oranges straight off the tree in our garden; and the Full English Christmas Dinner (plum pudding and all) eaten in the middle of a blazing summer in Johannesburg.  

Do you have a current favourite restaurant or type of restaurant?
Yes as I get older I get less keen on great chunks of meat and keener on interesting vegetables, roasted or chopped in salads, a la Ottolenghi, with great dressings and salsas and dips, maybe served in Tacos or on flatbreads. I’m all for freshness and flavour, colour and variety. 

What food or ingredient could you not do without?
Lemons, garlic, miso, anchovy essence and good bread.

What was the most memorable meal you can remember eating?
When I was a student in Paris in 1960 I stood in a queue in the student cafeteria and looked at a wide plate of just 5 radishes, leaves still on, with a blob of butter and a screw of salt. I didn’t regard this as food, but the student next to me persuaded me to scrape the radishes through the butter, dip them in the salt and eat them. It was a revelation – that food could be so simple and so good. 

You were born in Cape Town – is there any food or ingredients you really miss that you can’t get in the UK?  
I miss meilie bread. It’s cornbread, soft and slightly sweet. An Afrikaans speciality. We used to bake it in old food tins, in the embers of the braai.

If you have had a long day of filming, what is your go to supper when you get home, and do you flop in front of the tv with your feet up?
Yes, as often as not I flop in front of the TV, eating Yogurt topped with honey and almonds, and watching reruns of series watched years ago: Kenneth Clark on Civilisation. Michael Wood on Alexander the Great, Jacon Bronofski on The Ascent of Man,

You and Delia have been friends for many years, do you have a favourite restaurant you both go to when you meet up?
No, we only meet very rarely, when she and Michael have come to visit us in the Cotwolds, or I am with her at the Canaries football stadium. Where, by the way, the food is always absolutely delicious. 

Is there something particular you always keep in the fridge
Yes, I belong to the charity The Lions Club and they provide you with a little canister you keep in your fridge, containing your instructions in case you are dying or incapacitated and cannot say how you want to be treated. Paramedics are trained to look for the Lions symbol by your front door and if they find one, to find the canister in the fridge and follow your instructions: Do not Resusitate, for example.  

What would be your last supper if literally anything was available to you and where would you eat it?
I guess if I knew it was my last supper I wouldn’t have the appetite for it. But if you are asking what would I most like to eat and where, I think it would be unlimited Oysters, (no toppings, no bread, no frills) on a terrace by the sea somewhere, say the South of France or Cape Town. On the day John and I married I had oysters for my first course, oysters for my second course, then Treacle Tart. That’s hard to beat. 

WIN A COPY OF LIFE'S TOO SHORT TO STUFF A MUSHROOM IN OUR COMPETITION