There’s very little modern kitchen gadgetry in Prue’s house, but plenty of gorgeous antiques
( house call )
AT HOME WITH PRUE
Prue’s garden is a natural extension of her kitchen, with a vegetable patch, orchard and alfresco dining space, complete with a dinner bell outside the back door
Must-have kitchen item: A Skyline swivel potato peeler. It’s beautiful and such a simple idea: it’s one of the great designs of all time. Go-to recipe: If I’ve got people coming to dinner one of my favourite meals is teriyaki roast lamb using lamb from my neighbour’s farm (see opposite). I love the taste of… lovage. I have just been in Romania and we had the most wonderful soup featuring it. I used to grow it all the time, and I’d forgotten about it because you never see it in the supermarket. It lifted this chicken soup from the banal to the sublime. Kitchen uniform? I cook in whatever I am in, and this is a disaster because it means most of my clothes have grease stains all over them. Midnight snack? Something sweet – so yoghurt and a dollop of one of my homemade syrups or compotes. Do you own or cook from any recipe books? I’ve just given 4,000 away to Oxford Brookes Jane Grigson library because I somehow managed to inherit another cookery writer’s collection when she died, and I had more than 2,000 myself. My kitchen is special because… of the memories. We’ve had hundreds, probably thousands of meals around this table as a family.
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Secret skill? The secret to getting the stone out of an avocado is to use a big knife and to bang it directly into the stone. The other tip is to scoop it all out in one go with a dessertspoon. To stop it going brown, slice it and then rinse with cold water. Unexpected item we might find in your kitchen cupboard? Bird’s Custard. I remember, years ago, I had to design a menu for a hugely important dinner in America. They wanted me to do an English pudding and so I did blackcurrant jelly with custard. I sent the recipe to the American chef and I included a method of how to cheat with crème Anglais, by adding Bird’s Custard or cornflour to the egg yolk mixture before adding the milk, and it will never curdle. He used corn grits instead, made the blackcurrant jelly with blueberries and he used so much gelatine you could have soled your sneakers with them. Most prized item in the kitchen: A jam kettle. I have a huge fruit cage and orchard and, because I can’t bear to waste anything, I make a tonne of jam and everything- in-the-garden chutney, which I then sell on open days for the National Garden Scheme. If my kitchen could talk, it would say… give me a break.
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