Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Prue Leith
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a South African novelist Prue Leith.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
I've baked more cakes since I've been on 'Bake Off' than I have in my life.
We had two children, who are still adored, they adore me and we're very close. Rayne was 20 years older than me. He died when he was 80, so he had a really good life.
All I need for a perfect holiday is sun and some peace and quiet. Those make for perfect book-writing conditions.
If you eat good ingredients, and moderately, it should not be a problem. If you look at the bakers over the years, how many obese bakers have there been? There have been a few - nobody's saying you can't join 'Bake Off' if you're obese - but by and large bakers, just like cooks, are not particularly overweight.
I'm an optimist - very glass half-full.
The most important thing is to teach children to cook at schools. And not only to cook but to understand about where their food comes from.
I can't resist temptation of any kind.
I think the most important thing in the whole world is love and relationships, and if you don't have them it's quite bad.
My husband John's and my breaks are often very culture heavy. He cannot pass a museum without venturing inside, so we tend to see a lot of architecture and so-called places of interest.
Aged six, I sailed from South Africa to England by steam ship with my family. It was a three-week journey. I remember crying on my birthday when I didn't get the enormous teddy bear that was for sale in the ship's shop but, aside from that, I had a wonderful time.
I just hate television that's out to make people cry because other people like to see people cry.
The most followed chef is Delia Smith. She is my age and doesn't try to be entertaining, she encourages people to learn the basics.
An awful lot of older women do have love affairs or wish they were having love affairs.
I used to always employ South Africans and Aussies and Kiwis - I can't admit this, well I can now, but I couldn't admit it at the time - but I didn't want wet English lads who didn't want to work in the catering trade anyway.
For me the best food in the world is New British. It's quite classical cooking with really simple but good-quality ingredients. I also like top-end restaurants and pub grub done well.
My worst habit is opening the fridge and thinking: 'I'd like to eat something.'
I was intending not do any more telly and then I got talked into 'My Kitchen Rules,' which I did with Michael Caines.
I'd been brought up in a society which didn't talk about sex, food, money, religion or politics. Those things were all deemed slightly rude.
I think that allowing the nation to become so ignorant about food has been such a backward step - and to be honest I don't think there should be a School Food Trust. It shouldn't be necessary.
One summer I was made housekeeper to my own family, making menus and shopping lists. It was my mother's idea of teaching me to be a grown-up. The main thing I remember is my father being so delighted to get roast duck.
I've been an entrepreneur, a writer, a food correspondent. I might have been an architect - but I'm bad at maths.
I've never been much of a cake-maker.
People say I'm a celebrity chef, and I am on telly a lot but that's because I judge contests. Perhaps I'm more of a celebrity eater than a cook.
I believe passionately that the notion of having to work at a marriage is baloney. Making sacrifices and being a martyr makes one hell of a bad marriage.
If you've got children it's a hell of an everyday job. From a business point of view, children and husbands slow you down.
What I want to do is produce really delicious food. I want it to look nice, because when you see food you should want to eat it. You shouldn't be saying, 'Oh my goodness, isn't the chef clever, he can weave the Eiffel Tower out of carrot sticks.'
I didn't actually know what a treasure 'The Great British Bake Off' was, so I just thought, 'oh it'll be fun to do that, I'd like to do that.' Then when I went and had to have an audition and meet Paul Hollywood, I suddenly thought, 'this is really important.'
Nobody thought a white girl should learn to cook in South Africa. I went to drama school. My mother was an actress, so I thought I'd be an actress.
I probably eat yogurt more than anything else.
I do think it is the responsibility of parents to feed their children properly.
Bake Off' has been a renaissance for me. I turn up, taste something and get paid rather well. What could be nicer?
I adored the celebrity 'Bake Offs.' They have a more relaxed atmosphere. They all come on thinking they're not competitive so there's a lot of larking around, then of course they get the 'Bake Off' bug and want to win and it's funny.
I grew up in a very white, privileged, old-fashioned society in South Africa and went to a boarding school run by nuns.
I get cross with foodies who think hospital food should be Michelin-star and caterers can fall into this trap.
Nobody should eat too much cake.
Children aren't being taught to cook or encouraged to try things or told why food is important.
Very few parents give out healthy lunchboxes due to pressure from their children.
People don't always behave the same way on different programmes. If you go to church you don't behave the same way you do at a party in the middle of the night.
I get more questions about my necklaces and specs than I do about food.
I came through the Sixties so I was perfectly aware of drug-taking but I came from South Africa and we were brought up in quite an old-fashioned way. If I went to a rave or a party, I'd be behind the barbecue flipping the burgers. I wasn't out there partying.
It was hugely helpful to me, being South African. I have never felt uncomfortable in posh society because I don't see what it is that I'm meant to be bowing the knee about.
The obesity problem among children is very serious. When advertising budgets are big and business can corrupt the way we live so that it becomes the norm to snack all day - and if you are never hungry you are never going to feel like eating a healthy meal - that can't be right.
I think women write more fully and honestly than men about heart and home.
I was an intellectual groupie. Still am.
I'm not clever. But I am level-headed, hard-working, dogged.
I'm completely addicted to Radio 4, even 100-year-old things like 'Just a Minute.' I even arrange my weekends around the Sunday edition of 'The Archers.'
Food shouldn't do you any harm, obviously you don't want a bad diet, but it should be one of life's great pleasures.
I went to drama school but soon realised I was terrible at acting, so I ditched drama school for art school.
What makes me laugh is 'Masterchef,' with that ridiculous thing they always say, 'cooking doesn't get any tougher than this!.'
People often ask what my favourite food is, but the answer depends on what I last ate. I love sausages and mash. But if I'd already eaten them for lunch, then you asked me at tea-time, I'd probably answer 'crab salad.'
With contemporary writers, I often buy books and then realise I've bought them before.
It's surprising how you can behave like a 16-year-old in your 60s, or a 17-year-old in your 70s. You know, it's exactly the same. You fall in love with somebody, you start worrying why the phone is not ringing and thinking, 'Can I ring him?'
I'm nicknamed the 'food tsar' by the press. I'm always giving my opinion on things like; 'Don't nanny children,' although children sometimes do need a nanny. Being a judge on 'Great British Menu' reinforces this image of me.
You can serve good food on a budget provided you don't waste it.
I fall for all those lists of 100 books you must read, and go out and buy most of them.
I opened Leith's in Notting Hill in 1969 and it eventually worked its way into being awarded a Michelin star. At the time, there were a few women running small bistros - but I was the first woman to have a 'serious,' expensive restaurant.
My first taste memory is of our nanny in South Africa making white bread sandwiches with salad cream, which was potato mashed with a cheap mayonnaise thing with bits in it of - I suppose - pickled cucumber. I absolutely loved them.
Why don't women say what they want, why wait to be asked? Do women intuit that it is unacceptable to appear ambitious?
Before 'Bake Off,' frankly, if you'd asked most people on the bus if they'd ever heard of me, it would probably only have been those aged over 55. But if they were 15, they wouldn't have, and that's the difference with 'Bake Off' - it's loved across the generations.
Now the look of the book dictates the sale. In my day you could still buy a good cookbook in paperback with no pictures at all. I doubt if that would sell today. But those books were much used: they lived in the kitchen and got splattered with custard and gravy.
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