Mary Berry

by A. S. Dagnell

  Time and time again, the ease with which Mary took to the job of being a cook in the public eye and also the simplicity of her recipes appears to have been what has set her apart from those who have followed her. She told the Daily Telegraph that anyone can create a wholesome meal that’s a joy to eat, even on a small budget: ‘Home-cooked food doesn’t have to be expensive. Pick a simple but delicious dish such as my shepherd’s pie with cheese-topped potatoes. Tiny bunches of flowers or foliage from the garden and tea lights on the table make an immediately impressive look.’ Reflecting on why she received her CBE, Mary acknowledged how successful this approach had been. Creating simple recipes that worked time and time again had always been her aim. If people could cook her recipes, that was all she wanted. She said: ‘I always enjoyed the teaching … I started off teaching and then you do a bit over the radio, Woman’s Hour and things like that. And then a little bit of television. It’s just like a big cookery class. And then when you write books, I like to give that extra little detail. And people seem to enjoy that … where you can go wrong, and we really test all the recipes so that when people make them they work. I think if you ask anybody, I think they would say: “I do her recipes because they work.”’

  The practicality of Mary’s recipes is what has set her apart from the crowd – and it’s something she’s always emphasised when speaking about her work over the years. In one of Mary’s books she says that it’s important to ‘be methodical and follow the recipe meticulously’. It seems that there is no room for creativity by the baker, if they want to make sure that they get the perfect outcome. During her Desert Island Discs interview, Kirsty Young asked whether Mary’s insistence that the recipe is followed to the letter was an indicator that she was ‘bossy’. Mary, it seemed, was afraid of being branded as such and replied: ‘I am quite bossy in the kitchen, just to see that everything runs smoothly. I hope I’m not bossy, I’m just giving advice to get the best results.’

  But in a roundabout way it shows that Mary’s books were always precise and detailed, as Mary tried to make cooking and baking as easy as possible for her readers. Mary’s approach in the kitchen reflects her calm demeanour. Other chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, have advocated different approaches in the kitchen. Some of Jamie’s recipes advocate using a ‘handful’ of onion or ‘a sprinkling’ of garlic, for instance. But it’s not an approach that Mary has ever taken. ‘I mean the whole thing is to give it time and not do it in a rush for the first time,’ she told Desert Island Discs. ‘And follow the recipe carefully. And with baking you do have to weigh the ingredients. So often people say, well my gran was a great cook but she never weighed anything. But that gran often had a handle-less cup and a particular spoon and a small selection of things that she baked. And so they put three cups of that, two spoons of that, and it did work every time.’

  Over the years Mary has dispensed simple tips that she has used in the kitchen to make her recipes successful. And while Mary has always maintained a slim frame herself, and been the epitome of health by regularly playing tennis, working in her garden and restricting herself to just a small slice of cake when testing the recipes on GBBO, she’s never been one to shy away from using full-fat ingredients in her cooking. If you want your cake to rise properly or the dish to come out right, ‘healthy’ alternatives just won’t do. ‘Use the right fat,’ she wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. ‘If you use margarine or butter, it must be really soft and squishy, and ready to be beaten straight away. Do not use a low-fat one, as [the] results will be disastrous. Soft butter or a spread from the fridge is fine, as long as you are using an electric beater.’ And she had a similar principle when it comes to using icing and chocolate. ‘Most cakes are best iced after freezing, unless they are filled with buttercream,’ she wrote. ‘Use the right chocolate. I like Bournville as the cocoa solids content isn’t too high (39 per cent – any more and it can separate). It has an excellent flavour, and is good value.’ Mary also advocates using ready-made filo pastry.

  Another of Mary’s favourite tips is not to use extra baking powder when making a cake as, she says, it will cause it to ‘rise up and then fall down’. Second only to the soggy bottom, a collapsed cake, it would seem, is a major faux pas in Mary’s world. But even Mary admits she could fall foul of one of her own recipes, such as her signature dish, the Victoria sponge, going wrong. She told the Daily Express: ‘I do have disasters from time to time because you go out in the garden and forget the thing!’ That makes us all feel a bit better. ‘Mary Berry’s Victoria sponge could sink if I opened the door, or used the wrong fat or something, because I mean I could almost do it in the dark, but I do measure very carefully and I make sure I use the right ingredients,’ she told Desert Island Discs. ‘Over-baking gives a dry result. Watch it in the oven during the last stage of cooking. It should be shrinking away from the side of the tin. When you press your finger in the middle, the mixture should spring back. When you’ve made a cake, put your own notes on the recipe such as “In my oven it took five minutes less” or “This cake freezes well”.’

  Correct kitchen equipment has always been important in preventing a total cake collapse, Mary says. ‘Use the right type of tin. For a Victoria sponge, if it isn’t in a 20cm (8in) tin it will not be as spongy – it will be thinner, it will cook quicker and won’t rise as well,’ Mary wrote. Other ‘kitchenalia’, as she calls it, comes in handy too. ‘My secret brilliant tool: a small hand-mixer,’ she wrote. ‘It doesn’t take up much room and saves so much time. You can buy one from about £12.’ The products that she uses in the kitchen are half the fun of baking for Mary. Over the years she’s become a big collector of kitchenware, just as she’s become a keen recipe writer. ‘I’ve always collected vintage kitchenalia because it’s beautifully made and I love to see things that have been used down the ages,’ she told the Daily Telegraph. ‘I used to display my collection over the Aga, but a kitchen gets very dirty so I had it framed instead. You’ll see everything from vegetable and herb choppers to whisks, sugar snippers and bottle openers. One of my favourite items is a nineteenth-century tin opener used to open cans of bully beef. It has a bull’s head with a spike on top. I also have a breadboard carved with the words, “Give us this day our daily bread”. I’ve been in and out of junk shops all my married life. It’s my relaxation.’ But equally, Mary says she’s cautious about modern gadgetry, which is often expensive but ultimately quite useless. ‘There is such a wide array of kitchen gadgetry available and although a lot of it looks pretty not all of it is particularly useful,’ she said. ‘I could never imagine finding much use for an onion chopper, for instance. However a good set of digital scales tends to make baking a lot easier. Until a couple of years ago I always used traditional scales with weights. Now I have a wonderful set of Escali digital scales and they do tend to be more accurate, especially when you are using very small amounts of spice or seasoning.’ For Mary the most useful items are those that have no bells and whistles. In particular, Mary says, she relies on a sharp knife to get her through most of her cooking tasks. ‘The thing I use more than anything else is a knife; a jolly sharp Victorinox,’ she told the Independent. ‘I’m often to be found sharpening them myself with my Chantry sharpener, which does a very good job … The thing I use least? An ice-cream machine. I’ve had several of them over the years, but with my latest recipe you make a meringue mix and add things straight to that, rather than remixing it in a machine. So I’ve made my own piece of kit redundant.’ While Mary has certainly proven herself able to move with the times and reinvent herself from a cook into a reality TV judge, mod cons in the kitchen don’t always seem to do it for her.

  As someone who is so excellent at cooking, it is no wonder that Mary loves to entertain with dinner parties. She has spoken at length about how she loves nothing more than to have close friends and family over for home-cooked meals at Watercroft. Company, especially around the dining table, is something Mary seems to thrive on. And for Mary, when it comes to large gatherings – e
specially family gatherings – it’s important to make sure everyone takes part in the preparation process. ‘For big gatherings, the trick is to give guests something to do,’ she told the Daily Telegraph in 2001. ‘My mother, who is 95, enjoys peeling sprouts,’ she says. ‘Sarah, my daughter-in-law, will peel grapes meticulously for fruit salad. And my daughter Annabel is wonderful at curry.’ Having family over for meals and making time to all sit down together is something that Mary still thinks should be a vitally important part of our day-to-day lives. While life becomes busier – not least for Mary – she still thinks it’s essential to clear space to bond with loved ones and spend time together. ‘My family is what I cherish most in life and over the years I’ve made sure that we’ve cemented our relationships round the dinner table,’ she said in a 2007 interview with the Scotsman. ‘Now my children are grown up and I have four grandchildren I still often welcome them home and make sure we get together to eat. I’ve always encouraged family meals round the table. My mother is 102 years old and my grandchildren are all under five but it is amazing how, when people are content and sitting having a good meal, tongues fly and you learn more about their lives.’ Mary is a great believer in food having the power to unite people – not only through learning how to cook it, but by enjoying it together too.

  With such an encyclopaedic knowledge of good food and being a judge on the Great British Bake Off, one might imagine that when it came to eating other people’s food, Mary might be quite snobbish. It would be easy to assume that she would only eat at the finest restaurants in the West End of London. However, it appears that couldn’t be further from the truth. Mary has long been a keen promoter of keeping food simple, but tasty. When asked, in an interview with the Independent, where she would dine out if she only had £10 to spend, she insisted she would pick a popular chain restaurant. ‘I’d go where I usually take my grandchildren: Pizza Express,’ she said. ‘They do very good food for comparatively little money. Their pizzas are really quite good and it’s all very efficient and comfortable.’ And it seems that, even when she does have a little more money to spend on dining out, Mary chooses not to pick lavish places, but rather a few old haunts that she and Paul frequent regularly in and around their home village. ‘We don’t get up to town that much, so I’m no connoisseur of posh London food,’ Mary told the Independent. Seasonal food and a warm welcome count for more than the latest fancy food trend or cutting-edge interior design. The bubble and squeak with egg, bacon and hollandaise sauce at the Old Queen’s Head in Penn is one of her favourites. ‘Near us in Penn, High Wycombe, there’s a lovely pub that does lots of traditional food like hotpot and slow roasted pork; I enjoy that sort of relaxed pub eating, so I’d say that’s my favourite.’ But like any foodie, Mary occasionally treats herself to eating out at high-end restaurants, telling the BBC: ‘Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons is a huge treat: Raymond Blanc makes you feel very special … We spend a lot of time in Salcombe in Devon, and there’s a place there called the South Sands Hotel. It’s overlooking the sea, with windows down to the floor so you feel like you could jump in. It has a wonderful fish menu created by Mitch Tonks.’

  But even when she’s not dining out, Mary prefers to keep her food simple. In recent years Heston Blumenthal has risen to fame for his hugely inventive and off-the-wall dishes. They have included wacky concepts such as snail porridge and bacon ice cream. The creation process of these dishes, Heston has said, is more like being a scientist experimenting in a laboratory, rather than being a cook. His creations have propelled him to stardom as a TV chef, fronting a host of programmes including one in which he replicated the feasting traditions of bygone eras. In one episode he attempted to recreate a Cockentrice, which in Tudor times was seen as a mythical beast to be eaten during huge feasts, which was really made by sewing different animals together. Heston revealed that Henry VIII apparently held a feast for Francis I of France during which a Cockentrice was served, made out of the front half of a pig sewn to the back half of a chicken. But Heston, ever the experimentalist when it comes to cooking, decided to include a lamb and a goose as well. Meanwhile, Heston’s restaurant, The Fat Duck in Bray, Berkshire, where he serves many of his most eccentric and sought-after dishes to the public in the form of lavish tasting menus, has a long waiting list; you must book months in advance to secure a table. But while Heston’s brand of creativity in cookery has become fashionable in restaurant years, Mary’s tastes have remained far simpler. She has always maintained that taste and enjoyment of food should come before trends and modern fashions in cookery. Comfort food should be embraced wholeheartedly, and this is something that Mary has referred to in interviews over the years. Just because it’s simple, doesn’t mean it’s any less worthwhile. ‘I really like boiled eggs or toast and marmalade,’ she told the Independent. ‘I’ve made loads of marmalade this year, so I’d have that. I save all my clementine and satsuma peelings and put them in the freezer and use them to bulk out my preserve – it gives it its own identity. If I have a choice of bread to have it on I always like Paul Hollywood’s seeded variety.’ And if, hypothetically, she were to become a castaway on a desert island, and faced the prospect of having one of her final meals, she insists it would still be kept simple. ‘It would be a simple pasta recipe,’ she told the Independent. ‘First boil some pasta in salted water. Then cook some broccoli or, if in season, asparagus. Now take dry cured ham, snip it into chunks and fry in a pan. Add some cream (it has to be proper dairy) and mix it all together. Drain your pasta, then add the sauce. I could live off that for quite a while.’

  In fact, this idea of becoming a desert-island castaway was a notion Mary would return to in 2012, soon after she was presented with her CBE and honorary degree. She was invited to take part in the long-running Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs. The show has a long, rich history. First broadcast on 29 January 1942, it was devised and originally presented by the legendary English radio broadcaster Roy Plomley. Since then the show has run and run, leaving it holding the record for the longest-running factual programme in the history of radio. On top of that, it has also become one of the longest-running programmes in worldwide radio history. The format has remained the same throughout, too. One guest appears on the show per episode. During the course of that episode, they will choose eight pieces of music, recordings of which they would take with them if they were to go and stay on a deserted island. As well as their music, the ‘castaways’, as they are referred to on the show, are permitted to take one book and one luxury item away with them on their imaginary trip. To tie in with the theme of the show, its theme tune is By the Sleepy Lagoon, which was composed by Eric Coates in 1930. This has remained the same since the show was first broadcast in the 1940s. Since 2006 the show has been presented by the former newsreader Kirsty Young, who guides the guests through their musical choices, interspersing them with chats about key moments in their life. Over the years a huge array of high-profile stars from the world of film, music, politics and TV has appeared in the show’s hot seat, including, in recent years, the deputy prime minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats Nick Clegg, broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough, novelist Vikram Seth, Strictly Come Dancing head judge Len Goodman, the comedian Michael McIntyre and the Hollywood actress Goldie Hawn.

  So it was an honour in itself for Mary to be asked on to the show. The songs she chose give a further insight into her personality and exactly what makes her tick, both inside and outside of the kitchen. The first piece of music was by Dame Gracie Field, called ‘Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye’. It became popular during the Second World War, when Mary was growing up in Bath, and the song itself went on to have patriotic resonances in films such as 1939’s Shipyard Sally. It was later re-recorded by the forces’ sweetheart, Vera Lynn, as well as Elsie Carlisle. For Mary, it brought back memories of growing up during the war, but also, more poignantly, of her mother Margaret, who loved the song. At the time of recording Desert Island Discs, Margaret had recently passed away –
and so the choice had extra meaning for Mary. ‘I can so remember after the war and the end of the war, her singing “Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye,”’ Mary said. ‘And my mother, who died quite recently at 105; my brothers very kindly let me do the service. And I was thinking, now what shall we end up with? And it suddenly crossed my mind; of course, Mum absolutely loved that. I’ve chosen a nice noisy version.’