Ella Scott
Dame Prue Leith once had her office evacuated after receiving what she believed was a letter bomb, delivered by a fan who followed a fudged condiment recipe.
The 86-year-old, who announced earlier this year that she’d be stepping back from The Great British Bake Off, has published a plethora of cookbooks, memoirs, and even historical fiction novels.
In her 2012 effort, Relish: My Life on a Plate, the grande dame of British cooking discussed how she royally messed up while working as the Daily Mail’s Femail cookery writer in the 1970s.
According to an extract shared by SheerLuxe, Leith had some ‘terrible boo-boos’ during her time at the publication, including publishing a botched Oxford orange marmalade recipe, which was supposed to include a couple of tablespoons of black treacle.
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“In those days I wrote by hand and didn’t cross the ‘t’ in ‘2 tbs’ so it became ‘2 lbs’ of black treacle,” she wrote. “You wouldn’t believe how many readers do exactly what they’re told.”
The South African native claimed the Mail’s telephone switchboard went ‘white hot’ with readers complaining that they had ruined two pounds of black treacle.
As a punishment, she had to sit by the phone and take the calls.
“One sensible woman said she realised there had been a mistake and asked how many oranges and how much sugar she needed to get the proportions right – I worked out it would make 185 jars, literally industrial quantities.”
The Great British Menu alumnus said that her marmalade mistake also caused further chaos in the newspaper’s offices.
The result was a major evacuation and a bomb scare.
“It was during the IRA letter bomb attacks, and we’d all been given very specific training as to what to do if we saw a suspicious parcel – we were told that if there’s something squashy it’s probably Semtex and if you can feel wires it’s bad news,” she typed.
“One morning, I found a parcel on my desk which I thought was unmistakably a bomb; it had a squashy bit in the middle, and I thought I could feel bits of wire too.”
Leith, believing at the time that her life and those of her colleagues were in immediate danger, rang the post room to report the so-called explosive device.
“The entire building was evacuated.”
She soon met face-to-face with the police, whose purpose was to remove the so-called letter bomb.
Thankfully, the mail bomb was a false alarm; the mother of two discovered it was a relatively inedible morsel created by someone who followed her fluffed marmalade recipe.
“When I opened the parcel, inside was a piece of marmalade toffee with a dental brace embedded in it and two teeth, as well as a very angry letter and a bill for this chap’s orthodontist!”
Despite the major mistake, Leith confessed she managed to ‘survive’ as the outlet’s designated cookery writer for another four years.
Recently, Leith opened up about how it felt to be replaced by Nigella Lawson on Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off.
“She is going to be absolutely brilliant. She’ll be very different, but she’s a class act, she really knows what she’s doing,” the icon confessed.
“She knows her onions – people will expect her to know about cake, which she certainly does, but what they won’t expect is how clever she is, how sharp, witty – she’s really erudite. She’s a fantastically clever woman.”