Personality profile
Rosemary almost didn’t make it to the small screen. Her first TV appearance was on the Manchester-based “Granada Livetime” where she cooked live before a studio audience. “I was so nervous I could barely speak,” she recalls – but worse was yet to come. “The second time, absolutely everything went wrong and I said I would never appear on TV again.” Fortunately she changed her mind
and appeared in a long, successful run alongside Jilly Goolden and Anthony Worrall Thompson on BBC’s “Good Food”. “I was always the one sent in to do the things that nobody else wanted to,” she recalls, “such as cooking for 120 people at a village fete. It was crazy, quite crazy – but great fun.” “Crazy” and “mad” are two words which crop up repeatedly in our chat. She was the first person to ever teach a group of people how to cook on TV, in her now-archived series ‘Castle Cook’, “We took them to a castle in Scotland and taught them how to cook. It was crazy!”
“I want it to be a buzz part of The
Pantiles and of Tunbridge Wells,” she says. She is already working with several local hotels, as well as a hotel in Mayfair, to offer cookery course packages to the town and hopes that visitors will come from both home and abroad to see all that this historic town has to offer – as well as to take part in her culinary classes. “It’s a great location – I’m looking
forward to hosting some fabulous parties. We’ve bought a massive Bang and Olufsen speaker,” she enthuses,
make a success of it and seems to want me to be here – or I hope they do – because I’m staying!” Assisting Rosemary is executive chef John Rogers, who has worked with her for the past 10 years at the Swinton Park Cookery School in Yorkshire. His “chef’s table” dinners, which
take place at the cookery school each Friday and Saturday evening, are already a huge hit. Cooking, like journalism, is a career in which there is rarely a dull moment
Rosemary has already fallen in love with Kent and its people. “Everyone has been amazing and so willing to help,”
“and the Corn Exchange is deserted at night so we can have music really LOUD! It could be great for hen parties! We are going to have such fun here!” And off she goes with another
idea… “We could have foods of the world
around the 10 cooking stations – Japan here, Scandinavia there…” she muses. Rosemary has already fallen in love with Kent and its people. “Everyone has been amazing and so willing to help,” she says. “I’ve been really quite humbled by it. Everyone wants us to
and Rosemary is just as much in love with her job today as she was 40 years ago. “One day it can be TV, the next a
photo shoot, then a cookery class,” she says. “No two days are the same.” Rosemary loves her food – in all
senses of the word. She particularly enjoys cooking sauces, game, meat and fish – although her latest project is a baking book “Rosemary Shrager’s Cake and Bake” due out in May. She has no hesitation in naming her
favourite food of all time – “My chicken and potato pie! It would be my last meal.”
For further details on Rosemary’s cookery school, visit
www.rosemaryshrager.com Mid Kent Living 5
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