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Prue Leith is a chef, restaurateur, writer, broadcaster and since 2017 a judge on The Great British Bake Off, reaching a weekly audience of many millions with her verdicts on all kinds of cakes, breads and biscuits. She was 77 when she took on the role, the latest chapter in a long food-centred career, which has taken her from a novice caterer washing lettuces in the bath of her small flat to a wide range of businesses, including a Michelin-starred restaurant and an academy for chefs. She has also worked to improve the standards of food served in schools and hospitals.
Here’s what we learned from her Desert Island Discs:

1. She’s still hungry – for all kinds of things

“The funny thing is I think I am pretty greedy for just about anything and everything,” explains Prue. “That's really been the motivation for me doing so many different things all my life because I just can't resist. If anybody says, ‘Would you like to do that?’ I think, ‘Oh yeah, that would be interesting. I'd love to do that.’ Laughing, Prue adds: “And I am greedy. I find it really difficult not to eat the whole cake on Bake Off!”

2. Her favourite childhood food treat had nothing to do with cakes or baking

Prue remembers how her father would sometimes take her out for a meal by herself, and speaks with great affection about those special nights:
“It sounds so funny now, but there was a restaurant called the Chicken in the Basket and it was basically a grilled chicken that you pulled to bits with your fingers and ate with chips,” explains Prue slipping into a childhood reverie. “And I loved the fact that it was served in a basket. I think I was always in love with the trappings of restaurants.”

3. Her mother used to campaign against apartheid in South Africa

Prue was born in Cape Town in South Africa in 1940 and recalls: “We were quite well-off and I went to a private school and the thing that made us most privileged of all is we were white middle class.”

“Apartheid was part of life. I knew that my parents were very liberal and my mother used to campaign against apartheid. She belonged to an organisation called the Black Sash, which was a women's organisation. I remember her standing on the town hall steps and having eggs thrown at her because she was protesting about the fact that you couldn't have black actors in a play. Even Othello had to be played by a white man, and so I always thought that we were very liberal. But the truth is, it wasn't until I got to Europe that I realised how ingrained racism is.”

“The whole culture was blacks had to make way for whites. My nanny who was black was not allowed to sit in the bus with us in the front of the bus. She had to sit at the back of the bus. There were benches for black people and benches for white people and I still have a sense of guilt. I think all [white] South Africans do.”

4. One of her musical choices evokes her birthplace

“You will not be surprised to hear that I've chosen Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, which has now become the South African national anthem and it's sung by the Ladysmith Black Mambazo choir,” says Prue.

And at the end of the programme, when asked which of her eight desert island tracks she would rush to save if the waves threatened to sweep them away, this is her chosen disc because “it has so many layers to it and it's such a wonderful sound and it would be just uplifting.”

5. She has strong memories of an early attempt at baking – for all the wrong reasons

As a child Prue didn’t really cook. She says: “I once made a cake at school - a Christmas cake - but I didn't put any glycerine into the royal icing, so it set like concrete. My father tried to cut it and he couldn't get in, so he got hold of my mother's ivory handled carving knife - a really beautiful knife and he used it like a chisel.”“He held it above the cake and hit it with a hammer and it broke the knife, and he still didn't get through the icing. In the end we turned the whole cake over and scooped the cake out of the bottom. So my cooking as a child was a complete disaster really.”

6. Living in Paris after she left school changed the course of her life

It started on the first day of her job as an au pair.
“Madame took me, and the two little children off before breakfast, to get the bread. You know how the French go off and get bread early in the morning and we went to one shop for the bread, one shop for the croissants and another shop for the cake, the gateau Basque,” explains Prue.

“And after a couple of mornings of this I said, ‘Why do we do that? All the shops sell all of those things,’ and Madame looked at me as if I was completely mad. She said ‘Well, because the croissants are the best in that shop, the bread is the best in the other...'”

“It hadn't occurred to me that people took that much trouble over shopping. I mean, my mother used to just order it all on the telephone,” laughs Prue.

“Food was just taken seriously, and it was like the scales falling from my eyes: ‘What am I doing? Thinking I can be an actress or an artist or academic or… What I need to be is a cook.’”

7. A small flat and a tiny three-wheeled car didn’t restrict her early catering ambitions

Prue moved to London in her early 20s, studied on a Cordon Bleu cookery course and started her own high-end catering business – from her flat.

“Fortunately my landlady had no sense of smell, so she never came up to the 4th floor, which is where my bedsit was, so she didn't realise for a very long time that I was running a little business from there."

“But you know, I don't think she would have minded too much. On the landing where the bathroom was, I'd wash the lettuces in the bath and I'd keep the lobsters there, because they couldn't climb out. Then when I had done a tray of beautiful petit-fours or little sandwiches or canapes for a cocktail party I'd line them all up on the top of my bed.”

“I’d cart them all down four flights and deliver them in my little Isetta three-wheeler bubble car or I would deliver stuff on the tube,” explains Prue, which is how she once left a basket of lobsters on the Piccadilly line.

8. Prue had a 13-year affair with a close family friend

“I was really happy,” says Prue looking back at that time, “because I was in love with him. Nobody knew about our affair and so I was still great friends with all of his family and indeed his wife, who I adored.”

“And although this was absolutely deceitful, I could no more have walked away from him than flown to the moon. I was completely in love with him.”

Eventually Prue married the man, Rayne Kruger, following his divorce from Nan, who went on to be like a godparent to their children.

“But what we didn't tell her,” continues Prue, “was that we had been in love for 13 years. We didn't tell her that he had been cheating on her all that time. I am not at all proud of the fact that I was an adulteress for all that time. But in a sense I just didn't think I had any option. I could not have left him ever.”

9. She had never watched The Great British Bake Off before becoming a judge

"I had heard of it,” explains Prue. “I knew that Mary Berry had decided not to go with it to Channel 4 and so it did occur to me: ‘I wonder if I'd quite like that job’ and then I dismissed it, I thought ‘No, no, no, they won’t want another old lady!’”

She did ask Mary Berry about the experience of working with Paul Hollywood, the other Bake Off judge:
“[Mary] said ‘He's very strong. You have to hold your own because he's very articulate and if you don't jump in and get your opinion in, he'll have said it all and there'll be nothing left for you to say.'”

10. In 2017 she revealed the Bake Off winner hours before the broadcast

“It was absolutely awful,” says a still mortified Prue, who was away on holiday when the final programme of the series was about to air. “I was having a siesta in Bhutan and I picked up my phone and the first text I saw was one from the production company saying don't forget to congratulate the winner after 10 o'clock.”

“I looked at my watch and it was after 10 o'clock, and so I quickly tweeted ‘Bravo, Sophie!’” (Bhutan is six hours ahead of the UK.)

“And then a text came whizzing in from Emma Freud which just said: ‘Eek! Eek! It’s tonight, delete, delete!’ By then I was panicking so much I didn't know which button to press, and I couldn't find how you delete so I just rang up my secretary which I do in every moment of panic.” The tweet was deleted 89 seconds after it was sent, but by then it was too late: it went viral and the news was out.

11. She voted for Brexit in 2016

“I haven't actually regretted it because I still think long term it's a good thing,” explains Prue. “And the only thing I've been disappointed by is that we were not quick enough to realise just how difficult it would be to get staff. I think we should let people in if we need them in the [hospitality] trade.”

Her other concern is also food related. “We have very good food standards in this country and to allow a completely free trade deal which would allow importers to bring in food which is not to our standards... I've always thought that we shouldn't be allowed to make a deal that breaches our own rules.”

12. And finally - what would be her Desert Island Bake?“

I think it would be a bread of some kind, wouldn't it?” says Prue. “I mean, you couldn't eat cake every day. A sort of focaccia you know, some sort of really squashy, comforting delicious bread.”