FOOD WRITING

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Mrs Beeton

Location: 24 Milk Street, c.EC2V 7PG. Mrs Beeton's birthplace. (orange, pink)

Robert Carrier

Robert Carrier (1923-2006) was born into a wealthy New York State family. After serving in the U.S. Army in Italy, he opted to live in France. He spent a period cooking in a bistro in Saint-Tropez. In 1953 he moved to London where he became a public relations man. He developed a practice of persuading rival food companies to work with one another to finance campaigns promote their particular sector. One of the ways in which he networked was to use his culinary skills to host dinner parties. At one of these was attended by the editor of Harper's Bazaar magazine. She invited him to write for the publication. He moved to Vogue and then to The Sunday Times newspaper s new colour magazine. Recipes that he wrote for the newspaper formed the basis of his first book Great Dishes of The World (1963). He ran two restaurants that won Michelin stars but his style of cuisine had passed out of style before his death.

Location: 2-4 Camden Passage, N1 8DY (orange, red)

Derek Cooper

Derek Cooper (1925-2014) was a mellifluously- voiced radio broadcaster was concerned about the social, political, and cultural consequences of peoples eating habits. He despaired both at the pretensions of restauranteurs and cook and at the gullibility of their customers.

Patience Gray

Patience Gray was the first woman's editor of The Observer newspaper. With Primrose she wrote Plats du Jour (1957) was the first mass-market cookery book for working women. Elizabeth David assessed the manuscript for the publisher. After leaving Britain she wrote Honey From A Weed (1986) about Mediterranean cookery.

The Guild of Food Writers

In 2022 it was the case that amongst the Guild of Food Writers annual awards there was not one for ghost writing.

Website: www.gfw.co.uk

Simon Hopkinson

Simon Hopkinson was the head chef at Hilaire. In 1987 he moved to Terence Conran's Bibendum. The food critic Fay Maschler asked him to act as a locum for her column in the Evening Standard newspaper. His writing drew the attention of a commissioning editor at Penguin. With the write Lindsey Bareham he wrote Roast Chicken and Other Stories (1994), a short book about French bistro food. Initially, the book sold modestly. It became a bestseller eleven years later after Waitrose Food Illustrated conducted an informal poll of cooks and food writers. It even replaced Harry Potter at the top of Amazon's charts

Location: Hilaire, 68 Old Brompton Road, SW7 3LQ (red, pink)

Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson was a successful journalist. She was the deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times newspaper and had a general column in the newspaper. She had an interest in food and was also the Spectator magazine's restaurant critic for twelve years. Her first husband John Diamond, a fellow journalist, repeatedly encouraged her to write a book about food, however, her own ambitions were towards literary fiction. To further them she had a meeting with her agent. At its end, she made a quip that if she did not write a novel she could always write a cookbook. He responded immediately and asked him to send a proposal as soon as she could. Chatto & Windus took on the project. The imprint primarily publisher literary fiction but did also issue the occasional cookbook. While writing what became How To Eat (1998), Lawson fell pregnant. As a result, the smell of food made her feel sick. Following the completion of the manuscript, it proved that her high quality, joyous, reflective prose made it fit in with the publishing house's list.

Marguerite Patten

Marguerite Patten (née Hilda Brown) (1915-2014) grew up in a family that had been rendered poor by the premature death of her father. She managed to win a place at Rada but did not have the financial means to be able to take it up. She became an assistant demonstrator with the Northern Metropolitan Electricity Supply Company. This involved preparing utensils and ingredients for cooking demonstrations. She worked for a season as an actress in a provincial rep; the experience gave her a taste for commanding an audience. Frigidaire hired as a home economist. Her job was to demonstrate meals for which people would wish to store the ingredients in a fridge.

During the Second World War she was employed by the Ministry of Food. For a while she ran Harrods's Ministry of Food advice bureau. After the war she did some food-related presentation on radio and television. In 1948 the London Evening News hired her a cookery columnist. As food types came off ration so the public's interest in food media grew. In 1951 Patten left Harrods. She appeared in live shows that were sponsored by the flour company Frenlite. These combined cookery and variety acts.

With Fanny Craddock and Philip Harben, Patten became a national known figure. It was she who coined the phrase and here s one I did earlier. She wrote 170 books. Paul Hamlyn published her book Cookery In Colour. It sold over two million copies. By the time of her death her books had sold seventeen million copies.

Location: 87-135 Brompton Road, SW1X 7XL (orange, yellow)

David Backhouse 2024