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Before there were celebrity chefs, there was Marguerite Patten:

As we continue to be one of the Virtual World's leading supplier of Marguerite Patten's cookery books, we reprise our exclusive interview with her in which "The Doyenne of British Cookery" talks about three of the most important things in her life.

She's been hard at it for some 57 years. She was one of the first TV cooks. She popularised the one food stuff almost no one else would even try to popularise, let alone succeed in doing so (except maybe The Monty Python crew) -- SPAM..

She's Marguerite Patten, most often called, "the doyenne of British cookery" (but alternatively known as, "the doyenne of wartime cookery", "the doyenne of the tv kitchen", or "the Queen of ration book cuisine"). She's the author of more than 165 cookery books. To say she's prolific is obviously a mild understatement, sales of her books are well over 17 million and of her recipe cards more than 500 million world-wide.

She is a member of the Forum on Food at the Royal Society of Medicine, and a member of the Guild of Food Writers.

And all this from a woman, who, as a 13-year-old eldest child had to take over some of the cooking for the family while her newly-widowed mother went out to work. At that point young Marguerite Brown hadn't a clue how to cook, it is said she had no cookbooks to guide her and had had almost no cooking lessons at school.

Marguerite Patten

Fortunately her paternal grandmother was a passionate cook and was her inspiration. And so it was from her father's side that she got her passion for cooking, while her mother's side (all academics and teachers) provided the teaching genes.

Although she'd always fancied herself an actress and had hoped for a career in the theatre, upon finishing school, she took a cookery class and accepted a job as junior home economist at the Eastern Electricity Board (EEB). But her childhood dreams soon got the better of her and she quit this job to join a repertory company. There she performed as Marguerite Eve at the Hampstead's Everyman Theatre and then at the Oldham Repertory. Of course, being rep theatres, the work was seasonal, so when that nine-month season came to an end she found herself with no work and more important, no money.

But that little bit of acting experience was a key to her getting her next job, as a senior home economist for the Frigidaire (refrigerators) company. As she tells it, "At the interview, they did a terrible thing for most people, they made us give a demonstration, but without a refrigerator, or a cooker or a table. After rehearsing in rep, I was used to performing with non-existent props so I launched forth pretending I'd got the refrigerator. I really shouldn't have had that job, I wasn't experienced enough," she admits. "But it's like everything in life, if you get something you very speedily get the experience to meet the challenge."

She refers to that job as "the thankless job" of trying to persuade sceptical British housewives they needed a refrigerator to keep food fresh and hygienic for longer periods of time. "People didn't want them," she notes. Back then the British housewife was happy that food kept well enough in the pantry.

And Along Came WWII

When food rationing began early in WWII what food a family had would have to last far longer than previously. And that's when the benefits of refrigeration became obvious. But by then she'd moved on, back to the EEB. And then in 1942, she was called on to serve her country.

She joined the Ministry of Food, which, during the war years, advised families on how to manage rations and gain the maximum nutritional value from what little food there was. Mrs Patten's brief was to 'inspire people'. One such task was to persuade adults to eat raw, grated turnip, a source of vitamins. This was necessary because while children were able to get vitamins from their rations of concentrated orange juice and other food stuffs, these were unavailable to adults.

During the war, under the country's very strict rationing regime, people were constantly "without the most basic ingredients," Mrs P had said. "But it was an opportunity to introduce people to new ingredients - oatmeal to those living in the south of England, for example."
At this time there were many shortages of essential foodstuffs, not just luxuries. Some supplies were short, others were impossible to obtain, especially imported goods such as tea, bananas, oranges, and grapes (and those fruits were unavailable for another seven years). Butter, lard, sweets, cakes, flour and sugar later became hard to get too, and eventually meat and fish were unobtainable.

After the war the people were tired of years of ministerial guidance. "We had won the war, but home life had not got better," she has said. "Rationing was worse than ever and people began to grumble." Members of the Housewives League began to demonstrate for more food and less government interference.

In an exclusive interview with Books at Star Dot Star, Mrs Patten says, "during the war, it wasn't only food that was rationed, even paper was hard to get. So it was the people who came to my demonstrations who got the book done. They would constantly ask if I could write a cookbook when the war was over because they hadn't kept note of all the recipes I'd demonstrated.

"So that was my first book of the three books I did for Harrods, which came out in fairly quick succession, Harrods First Book of Recipes. The next was Harrods Second Book of Recipes. And the third, because pressure cookers were the appliance of the era at the end of the 40s, was Pressure Cooking By Harrods Including Recipes. They weren't very original titles but you have to remember there wasn't much competition then so one didn't have to be very original."
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Harrods Second Book of Recipes

Radio and TV Beckon

At about this same time Marguerite was a part of a BBC radio program called "Woman's Hour", the first of its kind. The programme was inundated with letters from listeners, asking for advice. Mrs Patten provided recipes and tips. Then, as a result of her radio work, she was invited to do a cooking demonstration in 1947 for a new television program called "Mainly for Women" (also known as "Designed for Women"). She was so successful, she continued with this programme until it ended in the early 1960's.

It was this radio success and the success of her first cookery book which resulted in her becoming one of several person's cited as the BBC's first television cook in 1947. (Other "first TV cooks" include Marcel X Boulestin, Fanny Cradock, and Moira Meighn).

According to the BBC's press office, in an attempt to clarify the confusion, "This has been a very hard query to research Bruce, but we think that although Moira Meighn was the
first cook to appear, Marcel Boulestin was the first regularly-appearing cook. It is debatable whether anybody did more to popularise the medium than Fanny Craddock however!"

Mrs Patten explains, "I was preceded by a few months by a TV Chef called Philip Harben. Philp gave me the title of television cook and he called himself the first television chef."
By the early 1950s, her work on radio and in newspapers, as well as her books, had made her a household name.

After her Harrods cookbooks were published, she was approached by a senior editor at Paul Hamlyn's publishing house, a meeting which was the beginning of a long and successful partnership, which continues to this day.

Paul Hamlyn, founder of the publishing company, had a simple recipe for the expansion of his young company. Very simply: Subject matter had to be familiar, but hitherto out of reach; they had to be exceptional value for money; they had to have immediate visual appeal and a short, sharp title; the apparent value had to be real rather than a come on; and they had to be able to be sold anywhere, rather than exclusively in bookshops.

In post-war Britain cookery books were a luxury. Hamlyn's cookery books therefore were sold at a quarter the normal price, illustrated in colour throughout and advertised "500 Recipes for 2/11"-

The result of Patten's meeting with the Hamlyn editor was the classic, Cookery in Colour, a leading-edge book in its day, with every two pages printed on different coloured paper, allegedly in order to cover up the boring grey paper underneath.

That book sold more than 30,000 copies in hardback. Mrs Patten wrote the text, obtained the photos from food manufacturers and sold the whole package to Hamlyn. And all for only £600.