Prue Leith heads to Cambridge and tells us about her embarrassing moment cooking lobster for royalty

Bake Off star Prue Leith has a ton of stories to tell - from the time a celebrity in a string vest threatened to expose himself to diners in her restaurant, to an embarrassing incident with a lobster destined for Princess Margaret’s plate.

In her first ever live show, Prue will take audiences through the ups and downs of being a successful restaurateur, novelist, businesswoman and Great British Bake Off judge – feeding the rich and famous, cooking for royalty, writing best-selling romances and growing up in South Africa.

The show, Nothing in Moderation, which is coming to Cambridge next month, will be a chance to hear her frank and funny anecdotes from a career spanning six decades. In the second half she will be joined on stage by Clive Tulloh, who will put questions to Prue from the audience that they’ve always wanted to ask.

Speaking on Zoom from her home office, which was hung with chandeliers, she revealed that the idea of doing a one woman show appealed because “I'm a terrible chatterbox and enormous egotist, daughter of an actress and a bit of a show off”.

She added: “I wrote an autobiography about 12 years ago called Relish, which I’ve just republished this year, but it’s now called “I’ll try anything once” because it’s being published in America. And Americans think the word relish means some sort of jam you put on hamburgers. So they didn’t want to call it that for the revamped version, which has the last 10 years in it as well, so that has a lot of late by geriatric flowering life in it. That autobiography is the backbone of the stories that I tell on the stage.

“The first half is me chatting for 45 minutes, and a bit of film and clips and photos and jokes pop up behind me on a huge screen behind me but mostly, it's just me telling disaster stories about catering. Or about the Royal family because it's my belief that you can't have a Royal in the room without something going really catastrophically wrong.”

Apparently many things went wrong but in her opinion the worst was the time early in her career when she was supposed to be cooking lobsters for Princess Margaret.

“It was when I left cookery school. I had never seen a lobster. I think I must have bunked off on the day that they taught us what to do with lobsters,” says Prue.

“And I was asked to cook lobsters for Princess Margaret. Of course I said yes, because I wanted to be able to say that I cooked for Princess Margaret. I was so excited to be asked but I had no idea what they looked like. I thought, it can’t be that difficult. I will get a book and I will make it up. But the book I used didn’t have any pictures, and so I’d still not seen a lobster.

“When I arrived in the kitchen, I was rather relieved to see these lobsters all had rubber bands around their claws. And so I had this booklet of instructions about how to split the lobster in half with a big heavy knife while alive. And so I set up the first lobster. A butler walked in and they said what are you doing? I said I’m killing the lobsters and he said, “You dimwit! They are dead already, they are boiled!”

“I didn’t know that live lobsters were bluey-black and only boiled lobsters are red. And these were red lobsters. Well I’ve only ever seen pictures of lobsters and they will always red so I didn’t know I was killing a dead lobster...”

Despite this early embarrassment, Prue says she enjoyed cooking for the royal family as they were “extremely unfussy” and they will eat “exactly what everybody else gets”.

However, she has noted that the royals don’t eat very much, adding “King Charles doesn’t like lunch. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever fed him at lunch. Poor fellow, he will have to eat lunch now probably but it’s a strain on the system to do breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. People never give the royals simple food because they think they’ve got to do it grandly and, of course, they get far too much grand food. I mean, I’m not royal but even I get far too much posh food. I’m always delighted if somebody gives me cheese on toast.”

For a famous cook, her own food that she eats at home with husband, retired fashion designer John Playfair, is very unfussy, as she explains, “we live on leftovers”.

Prue says: “It’s because I’m the kind of cook that can’t cook for two. I always make too much. Then we get it as leftovers and then we get it on toast, but usually sort of enlivened by something else. Last night, I turned some Turkish meatballs into stuffing for a red pepper, I just cut a red pepper in half and put half the meatball in. I chopped up the meatballs, gravy, put that in there and then put the whole lot on a piece of toast and a blob of yogurt on the top and it was absolutely delicious.”

Her restaurant, which opened in 1969, was a magnet for theatre stars because, explains Prue, they stayed open until late and didn’t have a dress code.

“We had the Beatles at the restaurant - I adored them. And the Rolling Stones and Lulu came as well as lots of royals and actors including Alec Guinness and John Gielgud.

“We were in Notting Hill Gate, which is quite far from theatre land, but we didn’t close the kitchen until 12. So it became a sort of late night place for theatre people and music people. And they also liked the fact that we had no rules. We didn’t say you had to wear a tie or a jacket.”

This did lead to one alarming incident.

Prue recalls: “I do remember once the photographer David Bailey came in. There was a heatwave. And we didn’t have any dress code so I couldn’t say very much when he turned up in one of those 70s string vests. His hair was tied behind his back in a bow and he had bare arms and chest. The table next to him complained and said they weren’t going to sit next to him. They hadn’t paid all this money to sit next to some half naked oaf! I tried to move them but they wouldn't be moved. They said he should go. So I went to David and said, Look, I’m really sorry but your neighbours are really offended by your lack of a shirt and top and jacket. And he said: ‘Offended? Offended! I will give them offended!’. Then he jumped up and started undoing his flies and taking his trousers down. I don’t think he would have gone all the way but it was quite funny. And I don’t really remember the end of that story. They must have all just sat down calmed down and eaten their dinner, I imagine.”

Born in Cape Town, Prue went to university in Paris where she discovered her love of food and cooking. She came to London to join the Cordon Bleu Cookery School and then in the 1960s and 70s, ran her own catering business and then set up Leith’s Food and Wine, which trains professional cooks and amateur chefs. She also became a food columnist for national newspapers, a novelist, a director of British Rail and finally a TV star.

She presented the Great British Menu for 11 years before joining the Great British Bake Off when it moved to Channel 4 in 2017.

Studying in Paris was a turning point for Prue, who had grown up in South Africa under the apartheid regime.

“Paris was amazing, especially for a South African. It was so free and lovely,” she says.

“If you were brought up under the iniquitous apartheid regime, you will never have shaken the hand of a black man so to find myself in Paris and a student was just wonderful. There were Moroccans, Algerians, we were allowed to be friends with anybody.

“I knew that apartheid was wrong because my mother had campaigned against it. But that was theoretical. Although we campaigned against it, we still lived under the law. I still had no black friends. Even the people who worked for us lived in separate quarters. If you got on a bus, black people had to sit in the back so that if I got on with my black nanny, I sat in the front and she sat at the back. We couldn’t sit on the same bench and so the most iniquitous thing.

“The apartheid government always always made up the script that it was God’s intention that we shouldn’t mix, and that meant that the black people could have their own tribal customs and stuff and needn’t be bothered by European infringement. It was all absolute nonsense. What they really were after was keeping black people as a servant class.”

During her time in Paris, Prue worked in a cafe and looked after children and also wrote her first play. But it was after coming to London she began her writing career. She began by penning a newsletter for a wine company, which led to food columns for national newspapers.

“I became the food correspondent for the Daily Mail. So once I was doing that then I was writing regularly, every week. I went on for about 12 years writing first for the Daily Mail then for the Sunday Express and then for the Guardian and then from The Mirror. So I read for some really heavyweight newspapers, always a weekly column and then I towards the end of that time in the 80s, I thought I really, really want to write a novel. I don’t want to write any more about food.

“So I sold my business which by then was the cookery school, and the restaurant business and the catering business. I sold all three businesses in order to write fiction. Because you can write cookery books and you can write journalism and do other things at the same time. But if you’re in the middle of a novel, it’s really hard to have to do it in the back of taxis and in little bits and pieces all over the place. So I thought if I’m going to do this seriously. I should just give up on business, which I did. And stay at home and write novels. I did that for 20 years.”

She believes the secret of her success in business and entertainment is that she has always been her own boss and so hasn’t faced as much discrimination as a woman would if she were employed.

Prue says: “When I’m doing my one-woman show that very often I’m asked about being a woman in a man’s world and I have to say that the glass ceiling only exists for people who are employed by other people. Because it’s about promotion and attitude, and if you own the little company or you do the cooking yourself, whatever it is, that doesn’t apply to you. And I think I have always had a lot of confidence. it never occurred to me that I’ve been discriminated against.”

Prue Leith: Nothing in Moderation, Friday March 24 at Cambridge Corn Exchange. Tickets, priced from £28, are available from the box office at cambridgelive.org.uk.