LEITH, Prudence (Margaret) 1940- (Prue Leith)

PERSONAL:

Born 1940, in England; married Rayne Kruger (a writer and businessman), 1974; children: Daniel, Li-Da. Education: Attended Cape Town University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Oxfordshire, England. Office—94 Kensington Park Rd., London W11 2PN, England.

CAREER:

Leith's Restaurants, owner; Leith's School of Food and Wine, founder and lecturer; author; Take Six Cooks and Tricks of the Trade television programs, producer. Whitbread, board member; Halifax Building Society, director; Argyll Group, director; Ramblers' Association, vice president; Women in Finance and Banking, vice-patron; British Railways Board, member; Department of the Environment's National Training Task Force, member; Safeway, food advisor; Kinghurst Centre for Tomorrow's Company Enterprises, chair.

MEMBER:

Royal Society of Arts (president), Restaurateurs' Association of Great Britain (chair).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Honored with Order of the British Empire, 1989; named Veuve Clicquot Business-woman of the Year, 1991; six honorary degrees and fellowships from British universities.

WRITINGS:

(As editor) Parkinson's Pie: Recipes of the Stars, Quartet Books/World Wildlife Fund (London, England), 1974.

Prue Leith's Cook, Part 2, HarperCollins (London, England), 1982.

Prue Leith's Dinner Parties, Pan MacMillan (London, England), 1987.

The Cook's Handbook, A & W Publishers (New York, NY), 1981.

(With Polly Tyrer) Entertaining with Style, W. Morrow (New York, NY), 1985.

The Sunday Times Slim Plan, Headline Publishers (London, England), 1992.

(With Caroline Waldegrave and Fiona Burrell) Leith's Complete Christmas, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1992.

(With Caroline Waldegrave) Leith's Book of Baking, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1993

Leith's Step-by-Step Cookery Recipes and Techniques, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1993.

Leith's Vegetarian Cookery Book, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1993.

Leith's Guide to Wine, Bloomsbury (London, England), 1995.

(With Caroline Waldegrave) Leith's Cookery Bible, Trafalgar Square (London, England), 2000.

Leaving Patrick (fiction), Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Sisters (fiction), Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2001.

Has also written food columns for London newspapers.

SIDELIGHTS:

Prue—short for Prudence—Leith has spent most of her life absorbed in the creation of meals. She has also established a restaurant and catering dynasty, founded a cooking school, written numerous cookbooks, authored various newspaper food columns, and advised supermarket giant Safeway on food. She has also been involved with two television shows about food: Take Six Cooks and Tricks of the Trade. When she is not thinking about food, she is serving on the boards of several business and community organizations. More recently, however, she has decided to explore another aspect of her creativity and has published two books of fiction, which, as a side feature, incorporate the topic of food.

Leith has built a great reputation in Great Britain as a food expert, according to Rachel Kelly in the London Times: "Anything that she doesn't know about food could be written on the back of a button mushroom." But Leith was not always so well known. She started on a very small scale, first opening a catering business in 1960, which served only lunches to actors. To manage this, she had to bribe doormen in order to carry her trays of sandwiches backstage. The name of this first catering business was Matinee Collations, and it closed down after the cost of bribing the doormen cut too deeply into her profits.

Leith did not give up on catering, however, and nine years later not only did she have a successful business, but she was doing so well that she opened Leith's Restaurant. This quickly pushed her into the limelight, as the restaurant gained prestige and popularity. Then in 1975, she decided that Great Britain needed a place to teach future chefs not only how to cook, but how to best serve the expanding tourism industry. So she opened a culinary school called Prue Leith College of Food and Wine. The school is built on the philosophy that students need experience in the kitchen, but also need to immediately apply that experience to the general public. A public restaurant is attached to her school where patrons can eat and then provide direct feedback to student chefs. It is upon the success of her restaurant and school that Leith has been able to build a multi-million-dollar empire. Along the way her growing celebrity has helped to spur the selling of her many cookbooks.

Leith has written about various aspects of food preparation for over three decades, sometimes, as in her Cookery Bible, concentrating on general techniques and recipes, and at other times focusing on specific topics, such as in Prue Leith's Dinner Parties and Leith's Vegetarian Cookery Book. In her cookbooks, she provides recipes and also tips on how to present meals, how to save time in their preparation, and even how to organize the kitchen. Writing these books flowed naturally from her trade. However, after selling her catering business to a French company and then turning over her restaurant business to her business partner, Carline Waldegrave, Leith decided to write something purely creative.

She completed her first book of fiction, Leaving Patrick, then sweated out the response. This "hugely efficient woman," as Emma Brockes described Leith in the London Guardian, "is not known for the frailty of her nerves." And yet Leith has been concerned about trying to carve out a new career for herself as a fiction writer. "I would be skeptical of a novelist who suddenly decided to open a restaurant," she told Brockes. Although she would have, in the end, supported the right of the novelist-turned-restaurateur to change careers midstream, she told Brockes that while she waited for the critical response to her first novel she "braced for a bad reaction." She need not have worried as her first work of fiction proved to be very well received.

In Leaving Patrick, protagonist Jane, a high-powered and well-paid London maritime attorney, decides to leave her husband, Patrick, who is in the restaurant business. The couple drifts apart, and in an attempt to find something more refreshing about life, Jane drops everything and runs away to India, where she falls in love with her tour guide. Meanwhile, back in London, Patrick falls for a female food critic. Both affairs end disastrously, prompting Jane and Patrick to reassess their relationship.

Kathy Ingels Helmond, in the Library Journal, pointed out that the overall thesis of Leaving Patrick is based on the adage: "Be careful what you wish for." Although a Publishers Weekly reviewer found the plot "fairly standard," the critic added that Leith is able to maintain "a credible tension until the final page." The same reviewer also praised Leith's "insider's view of the food service business," which helps enliven the story.

Leith spent much of her childhood in South Africa, the same place where the protagonists of her second novel Sisters were raised. Poppy and Carrie reflect somewhat opposite natures, in lifestyle and in appearance. Poppy is a successful actress who has grown a bit plump in her happy marriage and motherhood. Carrie, on the other hand, a London caterer, retains a sleek beauty but has turned to alcohol to settle her nerves and coat her disappointments in the many failed relationships she has suffered through. Although it appears that the two sisters have maintained a good relationship into their adult years, Carrie grows increasingly jealous of Poppy's seeming contentment with life. In an attempt to unsettle her sister, Carrie flirts with Poppy's husband, Eduardo, and eventually succeeds in seducing him. The rest of the story, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "is devoted to cleaning up the mess."

Although Sister was not quite as popular with readers as Leith's first book, Mark Knoblauch wrote in Booklist Leith is able "to move a story forward compellingly" and Sisters has the potential of being turned into a screenplay. Despite the betrayals and frustrations woven into this tale, a Kirkus Reviews writer, referring to the food motif in the story, summed the novel up as "a meal with a sweet ending."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, March 1, 1986, review of Entertaining with Style, p. 935; December 1, 2002, Mark Knoblauch, review of Sisters, p. 646.

Choice, June, 1982, review of The Cook's Handbook, p. 1374.

Guardian (London, England), August 3, 1999, Emma Brockes, review of Leaving Patrick, pp. T4-T5.

Independent, July 8, 1996, Paul Vallely, "If Anyone Can Do It, Prue Can Do It," pp. S2-S3.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2001, review of Leaving Patrick, p. 1317; August 15, 2002, review of Sisters, p. 1166.

Library Journal, October 15, 2001, Kathy Ingels Helmond, review of Leaving Patrick, p. 108; October 1, 2002, Kathy Ingels Helmond, review of Sisters, p. 128.

New York Review of Books, February 18, 1982, Diane Johnson, review of The Cook's Handbook, pp. 18-20.

Observer (London, England), January 19, 1997, William Leith, review of Leith's Cookery Bible, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, September 18, 1981, Sybil S. Steinberg, review of The Cook's Handbook, p. 147; October 8, 2001, review of Leaving Patrick, p. 42; October 14, 2002, review of Sisters, p. 64.

Punch, December 5, 1984, review of Prue Leith's Dinner Parties, p. 85.

Spectator, Jennifer Paterson, review of Leith's Complete Christmas, p. 51.

Times (London, England), September 6, 1995, Rachel Kelly, "'I'm Bossy and an Egoist. I'd Love to be Lady Leith'; Prue Leith," p. 15; February 11, 2000, Ann Treneman, "Art, Farce, Politics, and Pigeons," pp. 37-38.

Virginia Quarterly Review, autumn, 1986, Walker and Claudine Cowen, review of Entertaining with Style, p. 142.*