Cake for breakfast

I confess to being mildly star struck when I met Dame Prue Leith for breakfast on a recent morning at The Patisserie in Illovo.

OK fine, it was not a mild case of stars in my eyes, it was a fully fledged, 100%  gaga with delight, star-spangled efflorescence, which I tried very, very hard to keep in check.

I am a professional after all, I cannot allow my fan girl feels to spill over into my actual interview. I am almost certain I succeeded in curbing the gush as she came ambling into the loveliest cake shop in town with her bright glasses and cut-glass accent before sitting down for her second breakfast of the morning.

She is on tour promoting her book Bliss on Toast, which is self-explanatory and born of the comfort-food toasted sandwiches provided during the pandemic. 

If I did not know she is firmly ensconced in her eighth decade, I would not believe it. She has the kind of vibrant, grab-the-world-by-its-horns energy that would put many a 20-year-old to shame. I chose the Patisserie for obvious reasons, all of them cake.

Glenda Lederle, the lovely owner (and Le Cordon Bleu chef, no less) and I both felt the frisson of nervous anticipation as Prue took her first bite of the granadilla cake she chose. You would think we were both on The Great British Bake-Off.

Prue approved and the breakfast could continue on a much more relaxed footing.

She is blessed not only with a talent for food; she also has a way with a story, which, along with her many accolades — a Michelin star, the damehood, the multiple boards and honours, and a TV career that took off in her late 70s — has resulted in many books. Besides cookbooks, she has written several novels and she has put on a one-woman show in the UK in which she regales her audience with tales.

Like the one about the banana.

She sets the scene: her mother was due to give birth to her baby brother and she had to have an operation on her ear.

“The doctor’s idea was that my mother should go to the hospital to give birth and I should go to some other hospital. My mother wanted to be with me. So she said ‘No, I’ll have the baby at home.’ So the doctor came and she persuaded the doctor to do my ear on the kitchen table and she had the baby upstairs. So that worked fine.

When I came around from the anaesthetic they said to me, ‘Do you want to see your little baby brother?’ And I said ‘No, I want a banana.’

“When I came around from the anaesthetic they said to me, ‘Do you want to see your little baby brother?’ And I said ‘No, I want a banana.’ So I’ve always been interested in food.”

A packet of Marie biscuits on the beach in Hermanus, spread with butter and sprinkled with hundreds & thousands and shared among siblings, with the anxiety of who would get the last one, also features in her food memories.

It’s a very South African story of what she calls her “incredibly privileged childhood”, which still engenders feelings of guilt. 

Her mother was active in the Black Sash and Prue remembers her standing on the steps of parliament protesting against segregation in plays and theatres.  Her mother was an actor and Prue thought she might follow her but a stint at the University of Cape Town after high school at St Mary’s in Johannesburg convinced her otherwise.

A fine arts lecturer also put a stop to any such ideas and without clear direction, Prue decamped to the Sorbonne in Paris, perhaps to become a translator.

This part of her story sounds like an Audrey Hepburn film. It was the ’60s after all: she discovers the joys of food in Paris but could not afford the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school. So she went to London to study cooking and set up a catering company in her fourth-floor bedsit. 

“I will forever be grateful to my landlady because she had no sense of smell and she never came upstairs. The communal bath was always full of lettuces or crab or mussels. I would be slicing smoked salmon on my dressing table. I had an old door that I pulled out from underneath my bed and it would be my workbench on my bed.

“There was no health and safety in those days and I started accumulating customers.”  

She ended up employing 500 people and serving tea to Queen Elizabeth —  rather poorly, she adds, because the queen liked her tea black and strong without lemon, and Prue made it weak and had to fish out the lemon with the sugar tongs.  

What does she attribute her success to?

“I think a lot of my success was due to the fact that I’m a South African. We are quite energetic and confident. But I also didn’t have family who wanted me to go to the country at weekends. I worked nights and weekends and I didn’t have any family obligations.

“My work friends became my family. I opened the restaurant [Leith’s] in 1969. At first it didn’t make money, but by then I had some friends in the restaurant trade.

“One came and told me I wasn’t making a profit because I was giving people huge portions. And another friend came and looked at my books and said your chef is robbing you blind. I said he can’t be, he’s English. He was a good chef but a hell of a thief.” 

We chat about what her last meal will be before she leaves for a Desert Island with the BBC (bangers and mash);  her unusual living arrangements with her second husband (they have finally moved in together); the amazing popularity of food programming; her warm relationship with her children; and the Prue Leith Culinary Institutes (especially the one in Pretoria that managed to retain all staff and students throughout the pandemic).

Before she heads for another book tour stop, I ask what’s her secret to life.

“I am naturally forward-thinking so if things go wrong, my attitude is never ‘Oh my God, I’m a total failure.’ I think, ‘That was a good idea, I’ll have another go.’ I’m always thinking about the future. I am very glass-half-full. I’m very optimistic.”