Prue Leith Transcript
Jessie Sheehan:
Hi peeps, you're listening to She's My Cherry Pie, the baking podcast from The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. I'm your host, Jessie Sheehan. I'm a baker, recipe developer, and the author of four baking books. Each Saturday I'm hanging out with the sweetest bakers around and taking a deep dive into their signature bakes.
On today's episode, I have a super special guest from across the pond. You may know her from a little show called “The Great British Bake Off.” Yes, it's Dame Prue Leith. Prue joined me in New York to talk all about the Beloved Baking TV series, which she's been a judge on since 2017. Her culinary journey and her latest book, “Life's Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom,” which was released earlier this fall, it's filled with so many delicious, sweet and savory recipes, as well as tips and tricks and hacks to help make her simple recipes even easier. And you might not know this, but Prue is the self-described queen of trifles. She tells me all about assembling trifles and how she can literally trifle yes, it's a verb, anything. And walks me through her recipe for dark chocolate and orange trifle from her book. We also discuss her decision to pursue cooking while living in France after a stint in drama school. Just like me. We talk about Prue's greediness in all sense of the word and what it was like replacing Mary Berry on “The Great British Bake Off.” Talking to Prue was an absolute career highlight for me, and I know you'll enjoy our conversation, so stay tuned. If you'd like to follow along, you can find today's recipe at cherrybombe.com.
Today's episode is presented by King Arthur Baking Company. Whether you're a serious baker or just a newbie, King Arthur is here to help you be the best baker you can be. King Arthur's flours are some of the most beloved in the industry, as you probably already know from listening to my guests wax poetic about them here on She's My Cherry Pie. But what you might not know is that King Arthur also has a ton of resources to help you refine your baking chops and expand your repertoire. One of my favorites is their new cookbook, “The Big Book of Bread.” If you want to level up your bread baking skills or even if you're just starting out, this gorgeous book should be your trusty guide. It's full of expert tips, techniques, and recipes from King Arthur's best bakers. It's the perfect time of year to get your bread baking game on. And this book has so many different options from flat breads and sourdough loafs to bagels and buns. “The Big Book of Bread” is 100% going to be your go-to, and mine. Order your copy today on kingarthurbaking.com. You can find the link in the show notes.
This episode is presented by Kerrygold. Let's talk for a minute about butter, which is truly one of life's simple pleasures. Beautiful butters like those from Kerrygold are as good as gold to me and all the butter lovers in my life. Kerrygold butter is the most special of them all. It's made with milk from Irish grass-fed cows and has a rich flavor and creamy texture, thanks to its naturally higher butterfat percentage. This also gives Kerrygold butter that beautiful natural gold and yellow color we all know and love. Think about how many simple, delicious moments involve butter. Making grilled cheese for a loved one. I mean, I can hear the butter sizzling in the pan right now. Can't you? Slathering butter on an amazing scone or banana bread that you spent your Saturday morning baking, even just passing butter around a lively table when you get together with friends and family for a meal. There's a whole world of Kerrygold butters for you to discover and enjoy. Learn more@kerrygoldusa.com.
Peeps, guess who's on the cover of Cherry Bombe's holiday issue? It's the one and only, Ina Garten. The issue is beautiful and features a special section dedicated to the barefoot contester with heartfelt essays, some of Ina's favorite things, and more. What else? Holiday gift guides and hosting tips, as well as recipes from the season's most exciting cookbooks, including some guests from our show, like Paola Velez and Zoë Bakes. All of you Ina fans will love this issue, and the pink cover will look great on your bookshelf or coffee table. To get a subscription for yourself or a gift subscription or to pre-order this issue, head to cherrybombe.com or click the link in our show notes. The deadline to subscribe and receive the Ina issue is Friday, November 15th. So don't delay.
Let's chat with today's guest. Prue, so excited and beyond honored to have you on She's My Cherry Pie, and to talk trifles with you and so much more.
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, it's a real pleasure to be here. I love New York to bits.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, yay.
Dame Prue Leith:
So I'm always excited when I'm here.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, good. So you grew up in South Africa, and I wondered if you could tell us perhaps about a favorite baked good from your childhood. I've read maybe about a special cornbread that you loved?
Dame Prue Leith:
We used to make cornbread on an open fire. It's an ordinary cornbread recipe, but we used to cook it in empty tins, sweet corn tins or bean tins or something, and bake them in the embers of the fire. And I always remember that. But I suppose the most famous South African bake is actually a savory thing, a little bit like a shepherd's pie, which is called bobotie, and it's a slightly curried lamb, minced mixture at the bottom. And then where you'd really normally get mashed potatoes on a shepherd's pie, you just have a top like on the top of a moussaka, like a savory custard on top. And it has a bit of apple in it, it's a bit curried, it's a lovely thing.
Jessie Sheehan:
So before moving to France to study at the Sorbonne, where you in fact discovered your love of cooking, which we will discuss. You did a brief stint in drama school in South Africa, and I in fact did a similar brief stint. So I was hoping you'd tell us a teeny bit about yours because I'm always intrigued by this intersection of food careers and acting careers.
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, when I was very little, I wanted to teach people how to ride horses. That was my ambition, I wanted to work with horses, but my dad said, "You're staying at school until you get a good matric and then you'll go to university." That was just that. And so I did go to university, but my mother was an actress. She was a very well-known actress in South Africa, Shakespearean actress, classical actress. So I loved the theater, so I just thought, oh, well my mom's an actress. I'll have a go there.
Although I enjoyed drama school, I didn't actually like the acting. I realized I loved the theater and I loved the people and I loved the plays, but I didn't want to be an actor. So I did that for a few months and then I swapped to art school. And the head of the art school stood behind me in a life class once and he said, "What are you doing in my school?" And I said, "I'm trying to learn to be an artist. I want to be a stage designer." And he said, "I would give it up now if I was you." He said, "You have no talent." So I-
Jessie Sheehan:
Very encouraging.
Dame Prue Leith:
Very encouraging, but he was probably right and he saved me two years of doing something which I was enjoying but never going to be any good at. So I should be grateful to him. And then I swapped again, I went to try and do a BA, and then I finally persuaded my father that I should go to France. I wanted to be a translator and travel all over the world for the United Nations or something. While I was there, as you said, I fell in love with food and then I realized that I really wanted to be a cook. So I said to my parents, "Can I swap yet again? And now I want to do a year's course at the Le Cordon Bleu Cookery School." And my dad said, "Look, I'm not prepared to pay for a year because you will never stick a year. You'll be gone in three months. Your record is not good. I'll pay for three months." So I did the advanced course at the Le Cordon Bleu cookery school.
At first, they said I couldn't get in because they said, "You have to have done the intermediate or the beginners in order to do the advanced. Unless," they said, "you work in a professional restaurant, then we'll take you." So I said, "Well, I have. I have, I worked in a restaurant in Paris." And so they were so impressed with this, but what I failed to tell them was that I had only ever washed up, I'd never been near the kitchen, but they let me in.
Jessie Sheehan:
And while you were living in France, in order to support yourself, you worked as an au pair and had the unbelievable good fortune of taking care of children whose maman happened to be a fantastic cook.
Dame Prue Leith:
She was a very typical French woman. She cared about the quality of ingredients, she cooked very simply, but she did it very well. And I had never seen sort of close-up cooking like I did then. The first day I was there, we were giving the children lunch. An hour before we had lunch, we cooked the children's lunch, which was exactly what we were going to eat an hour later. So they had little steaks, tiny little steaks, beautifully seared so that they were brown on the outside and still rare in the middle and a little bit of butter. And then new potatoes turned in butter, french dressing on a few lettuce leaves, all exquisite but so simple. And then dished up on two little plates and I thought, this is crazy. These are children are absolutely tiny. One of them was only six months old and I had to liquidize her plateful, and the other was a toddler, and we chopped up the food for the toddler.
But then the thing that impressed me is we then sat down, mom and me and the children, around a table, the baby on my lap. And while they ate, we talked to them and I thought, actually, I've just learned everything I need to know about cooking, which is fresh ingredients cooked as late as possible, very simply with a lot of love and eaten, sitting down, having conversation. And if that's not what food is for, it brings people together.
Jessie Sheehan:
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
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Now, back to our guest. I think perhaps there was maybe a clafoutis that maman made that you loved, that maybe inspired you? Can you tell us a little bit about it in any other baked goods that you remember?
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, I do remember the clafoutis very well because it is the simplest possible dish. I mean, basically what you do is you put plums or cherries stoned, but you put a whole lot of them on, a layer of them in the bottom of a dish or a cake tin, and then you pour a batter on it and you just combine the ingredients. It's basically a cake batter, eggs, sugar, butter or oil. And then you pour it all over the fruit and bake it. I mean, it's a very light sponge really, but it's the most delicious thing. And the remains end up as trifle. I can turn anything into trifle. I'm the trifle queen.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. I think there were other things in France that inspired your course to pursue a career.
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, I think one of the things that I remember very, very well is the standing in a queue of students on the city Universitaire, which is the sort of campus where all the students lived. And we used to have these self-service canteens, and you went along counters picking out French style. The first courses would be first, and they would be little dishes of perhaps just grated carrots with a bit of orange juice on it or something, or some really beautifully cooked beans with a few almonds on it, or very, very simple veggie starters.
And then anyhow, I saw one day that there were four radishes on a plate or three radishes on a plate, with the leaves still on, so they were obviously very fresh. And there was a bit of butter and a screw of salt, so salt, butter, and radishes. And I said to the boy next to me, the guy standing next to me, I said, "What's that? That's not proper food." I mean, I thought of radishes as something you might garnish a salad with or something. And he said, "Oh, they're delicious. Radis beurre, radish and butter. It's delicious." And so he persuaded me to buy it, and he told me how to eat it. He took the radish, he pulled it through the butter to get a sort of smear of butter on the end of the radish, and then he'd dipped that into the salt and then ate it. And it was absolute revelation, because it tasted so good. And I thought, well, that's the trick. It's really fresh ingredients and you don't have to cook anything. You just have to assemble the best ingredients and you've got gastronomy.
So it sort of started me off on the road, which I think over my long career in cooking, I got closer and closer to that ideal because of course, when I was newly out of cookery school, I was very keen to do all the most complicated and elaborate things because I was learning. But as I've got older and as I've got busier, and I think as everybody has got less and less time, I want things to be simple, but I still want them to be good food. I'm not talking about combining ready meals or buying junk. I think you still have to start with the right ingredients. But I'm not a snob about it.
I mean, for example, I don't think I've made real custard. I've made obviously baked custard, but I don't think I've stood over a pan slowly waiting for a custard to thicken, stirring all the time for 20 minutes, for 20 years, because I just buy custard in a box from the supermarket. It depends which ones you go to and which brand you go to, but once you find the custard you really love, I mean, I just have one in the fridge all the time. And I have to say, it's a great help because my husband, who loves a bit of pudding, will eat anything if it's got custard on top. So a box of custard doesn't last us very long.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. So after France, you moved to London, went to the Le Cordon Bleu in the early '60s. Not long afterwards, you opened Leith's Restaurant and by the mid '70s, you were a food columnist, had published several cookbooks, had opened Leith's School of Food and Wine. And you've described yourself as greedy in all senses of the word, and I'm thinking this greediness is about almost greedy to do everything that you love.
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I wondered if you could talk about that.
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, it's interesting because when I wrote my autobiography, the English title for it was “Relish,” which in English is all about the joy and the delight of relishing something. But when it was published in America, the publisher said, "We can't call it relish because relish is something you put on hamburgers and that's the main use of the word." So we called it, “I'll Try Anything Once,” which is quite a good title anyway. Actually, my very first thought was I'd call my autobiography “Greed,” but then everybody said, "They'll think you're a New York banker."
Jessie Sheehan:
Right, exactly.
Dame Prue Leith:
So I had to change it to Relish. Yeah, I am greedy life and I'm greedy. I'm 84 now, but I still want to do stuff. I love travel. And this year we went to Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. My husband is a great traveler, and he said, "You've got to see these mosques and these amazing buildings and museums and so on. And so we did that. And then now I'm getting excited because I'm going to Hawaii and western Australia in February, because I've never been to Hawaii and I've never been to western Australia, so of course I want to go.
Jessie Sheehan:
Greedy.
Dame Prue Leith:
Greedy, greedy. Yes, exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
I wanted to talk a little bit about “The Great British Bake Off.” You joined in 2017, replacing Mary Berry. Was that scary? Was that overwhelming? Did that feel strange?
Dame Prue Leith:
Do you know? If I had realized how popular “Great British Bake Off” was, I would have been terrified. But I had no idea because I had never watched it. Yeah I'd heard of it, but I'd never watched it. I knew Mary Berry and I knew her very well for her cake books, and I wasn't nervous of her because she was a colleague, but I didn't realize by then she'd become a national treasure. And the stepping into her shoes was the most dangerous thing I could do because half the British press had decided before I'd even got there that I was either absolutely unsuitable and nobody could replace Mary Berry, or they were lukewarm about me.
But anyhow, the wonder of “Bake Off,” I quite quickly became a treasure too, because “Bake Off” is such a wonderful program because it's so warm. I mean, there are people who don't watch it because they're not interested in it, but nobody hates it. Nobody says to me, "God, I hate that program. It should be off the air." People love it because it's warm and friendly and nobody's rude to anybody, and you know that it's a sort of safe place, that you are not going to be so stressed. So much television today is all blood and guts and thunder and scary things. It takes a lot out of the viewer. “Bake Off's” like a warm blanket, isn't it? It's just, you know you're in safe hands. The most stress you'll get is that some baker's chocolate will melt.
Jessie Sheehan:
I read a New York Times 2022 interview with you when they asked you what book most influenced your decision to become a baker, and you said, "I'm not really a baker, I'm a cook." Does that happen all the time? This assumption that you are a baker?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And is it annoying?
Dame Prue Leith:
It's not annoying at all.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, good.
Dame Prue Leith:
I'm delighted that somebody should think I'm a great baker. I'm not a great baker. In fact, my husband, I think you might've read this too, my husband often says and publicly, that our house is a cake-free zone.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, I did.
Dame Prue Leith:
And he should have married Mary Berry. I mean, he says that all the time.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, I missed the Mary Berry part. That's hilarious.
Dame Prue Leith:
Yeah, I wish I had married, I should have married Mary Berry. But the truth is that I am a very good cook, and I'm not a bad baker. I make a perfectly good cake and in fact, I do make cake quite a lot. He lies, but I don't make them all the time. My whole career has been about general cooking. So baking was not a specialty. I mean, I would do wedding cakes because my catering company did a lot of weddings. I had a restaurant, so obviously we had a dessert trolley and very old-fashioned, but we had delicious desserts on it. The things I was bestest at would be I think kind of mousse-y or pavlova-y or pudding-y things, rather than baking.
Jessie Sheehan:
You'd been a judge for 11 years on the “Great British Menu,” which was a TV competition show for top restaurant chefs in Britain. And so I assume also that contributed to you being the right person, and you had judged countless student exam dishes-
Dame Prue Leith:
Exactly.
Jessie Sheehan:
... as you've been running the Leiths School of Food and Wine.
Dame Prue Leith:
Exactly, and I think they probably hired Mary Baker because she was a great baker. They hired me because I'm a great set of taste buds. I was well-trained in eating. I mean, we had 1,000 students a year, I suppose, and they'd each cook four courses for them, exam food, and I would taste them all. And of course, with “Great British Menu,” we were judging top, top chefs and each of them cooked four dishes. And the trouble with savory cooking, restaurant cooking is on that plate. There's a whole lot of things. There'll be the main dish and then there'll be a little bit of veg and garnish, and there'll be something that is all, there'll be a little dollops of some kind of salsa or there'll be a powdered bit of something dehydrated, and then we have messes of bits and pieces, and you'll be expected to taste them all. Whereas with “Bake Off,” in a single teaspoon you can get the icing, the filling, and the cake. So actually, “Bake Off” is very easy to judge.
Jessie Sheehan:
To judge. You just said this, but I had also read that you've described yourself as this competent set of taste buds, which I adore. But in the beginning of judging, were there any roadblocks to judging Bakes, like having not devoted a career to them?
Dame Prue Leith:
No, but I have learned a lot since I've been on “Bake Off.” I mean, I do think watching Paul do anything is an absolute joy, because occasionally he demonstrates something for us or because he's trying to, for one reason or another. It's like watching some wonderful ballet by a master ballerina. He is just amazing. Did you see the recent show when he was plaiting a ring?
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Dame Prue Leith:
He had eight strands and he just plaited them. He wasn't even looking at them. He was looking at the bakers as he plaited and he was showing them how to do it.
Jessie Sheehan:
I'm just going to say that plaiting, we call it braiding.
Dame Prue Leith:
Braiding, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Dame Prue Leith:
Exactly, he was braiding eight strands of bread dough into a beautiful ring, and he did it. And I said to him after, "Paul, you went so fast. I think you went too fast because the bakers couldn't have seen it clearly." And he said," I really slowed down so that they could see it." He was slowing down.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you also are a judge of the “Great American Baking Show” too. Can you tell us about how judging that show is different from the British version?
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, it's very similar. It's funny because I thought rather rudely, and I'm sure I'm going to insult the whole American nation now, I thought, oh my God, the Americans are going to be... I'd watched a lot of American competition shows one way or another over the years. It seemed to me that the competitors were always trying to diss each other. They were not above sabotaging each other. They were terribly keen to get the camera on them, and they would be competing for camera time, and very loud and very wanting to prove that they could be a star on telly, which is not what the “Bake Off's” about. It's proving that you could bake. That's the only thing we are really interested in, is how good your bake is, not how great your smile is or how... Anyway.
So I thought we'd get a lot of bakers who were like that, but obviously they'd all watched the “Great British Bake Off.” They knew what the vibe was, and they understood immediately that once they walked into that tent that you knew you're going to be friends with all your fellow bakers who were going to help them if they need help. They are just like the British bakers. They're friendly, they're warm, and they're there because they really, really care about baking. So that's great.
I think the differences, if there are any, are that generally the bakers tend to like things a bit sweeter than we do in England. Frosting can be sometimes an inch thick, which is a bit of a worry, or the filling is already an inch thick, and then there's a great big frosting on top. And obviously the “Great American Baking Show” has American presenters, so they're very different.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. What I did love reading, because I read that you sometimes find the portions a little large and then the frosting a little thick, a little too sweet. But you do like our cream cheese frosting, which I love.
Dame Prue Leith:
I do, yes.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you do like our cinnamon buns.
Dame Prue Leith:
God. Do you know I had one for breakfast this morning.
Jessie Sheehan:
You did? Oh, good.
Dame Prue Leith:
I don't normally have breakfast because I'm not normally hungry at breakfast. And so I think, well, that's the one time I should skip a meal.
Jessie Sheehan:
Right.
Dame Prue Leith:
So I don't normally have breakfast, but I was staying in the Hotel Chelsea and they have the most divine croissant and cinnamon.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, yum.
Dame Prue Leith:
Oh, delicious. So I had a huge one.
Jessie Sheehan:
And you've said for both shows that the baked goods that the contestants make that you end up being most excited about trying, are those that the contestants make when they're encouraged to be creative, use their imaginations, pull from family recipes.
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, I think that's true. I think we do like it to be quite personal to them. And usually because when it is, they're very good at it, and that's something they're really proud of and they've been doing for years or their mom's done it for years. So yes, I like that. And they generally do manage to bring their home cooking into any challenge we give them. It's very interesting. I mean, if you look at the current lot of bakers, Dylan who has a slightly Asian take on everything, he's very keen on Japanese stuff, and somehow it gets into almost all his bakes and his designs are like that. So, it is interesting.
Jessie Sheehan:
So now I'm extremely excited to talk about your book. Not that I haven't been excited to talk about everything, but now we get to talk about books and I love books. When I mentioned to a British friend who's an avid home cook that I'd be interviewing you, she told me your cookbooks are Bibles across the country. And in fact, I've read that Leith's Cookery Bible is sort of the European equivalent of The Joy of Cooking, but you've also written a memoir. “I'll Try Anything Once,” or “Relish,” and eight novels. And maybe this is comparing your children and you can't answer, but is fiction writing or cookbook writing more challenging, more pleasurable? Do you have a favorite? Can you even compare them?
Dame Prue Leith:
Like most writers, I have a writing bug. I'm not content unless I've got something on the go. I have to be writing all the time. But all sorts of things were still at itch, just writing recipes does it, writing cookbooks, writing short journalistic pieces. I write a column for the Oldie Magazine every month, and that's only 500 words. But if I just got that itch and I've got to write, I will write another 500 words for them and stash it up for later in the year.
But if we're talking about books, I think that finishing a novel is the best buzz because in a novel you are controlling absolutely everything. You've made up the characters in the first place, you've made up the story, and you're putting them all together and you've got to have the sort of story arc. You've got to build up to some crescendo and then you've got to.. I like to pull all the threads together at the end, and I have to confess, I like a happy ending it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Me too.
Dame Prue Leith:
So you've achieved all this and you've satisfied you've done this. So I suppose, so if I had another life to come and I had to choose what I would be, would it be a cookery writer or a novelist? I would like to be a novelist. I think it's slightly more satisfying. But the joy of cookery, you see, I could be a novelist but still cook and still eat great food, but the joy of cookery writing is because I love food. I mean, I'm just sitting here talking to you and I'm dribbling because I'm looking at this picture of the dark chocolate and orange trifle. I would still be able to get the satisfaction of food by cooking it, but now I'm compelled to write books about it because I want other people to enjoy it. If I've just made a recipe, which I think is absolutely delicious, I write down what I've done because I want to. I want somebody else to do it as well.
Jessie Sheehan:
I also read, and I love this, that your novels often feature food and cooking. But not always. Is that a fun literary exercise, like writing about food, but in a fictional context?
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, I think I can't not write about food. Food does come into my life a lot, and so it always comes into my character's lives. And all the novels have food in them, but only the first few. I mean, the very first one I wrote was about a restaurateur, and of course I'm a restaurateur. And then the next one was about a caterer, and the next one was about a cookery teacher. So there were all things I'd done, but then they broadened out more, and I had brought in politicians and actors and all sorts of other characters, but they all cook. Somebody cooks.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. So I'd love to dive into “Life is Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom.” You describe the book as being about delicious food, but also simple food, and you encourage cheating in pursuit of such simplicity. Can you unpack when you say cheating, what you mean?
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, we talked about custard earlier and we want to talk about trifle. When somebody sees a beautiful trifle, they think, oh my God, I can never make all that. Because if you were going to start at the beginning and you were going to make the sponge cake, and then you're going to, in the extreme case, you could even make the jam, and then you would make the custard by hand with eggs and stand over the pan and hope it doesn't curdle. But if you want to cheat, it's the easiest thing to do and you still get a beautiful product.
With a trifle, if you start with any stale cake, let's say a stale croissant, yesterday's raisin bread, or malt loaf, or ginger bread, or any kind of cake, the first thing you do, you have to think of, well, I need a spread to go on it. Well, that could be lemon curd, it could be a marmalade. Usually it's jam, like in this recipe, it could be melted chocolate or chocolate mousse or chocolate spread straight out of the jar. And then you need a layer of custard and a layer of cream. So you can just make them all up. And in fact, in this book I've suggested not only the main one, which is dark chocolate and orange trifle, but there's a croissant and ginger trifle, there's a red fruit and brandy one, there's an apricot and amaretto fruitcake one. There's a chocolate rum and orange one. Honestly, it's endless. You just start with the cake and then build it up.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that, and those are, you call them your instant trifles. And I think you had an episode of your TV show, “Cotswold Kitchen,” is that right?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, that's right. I got my husband to do it, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, you had your husband on and you taught him to make trifle, and I think you said those were some of the most watched episodes.
Dame Prue Leith:
People have been hugely happy about it because it means that you can do something which looks spectacular, is really easy to assemble. I mean, it takes half an hour and all these ingredients are in your cupboard. Well, you have to maybe buy the box of custard if you wouldn't have it, and double cream because you've got to have whipped cream on top. But the other thing, I like to decorate the top with everything I can find in the larder. So that'll be red glassed cherries, maybe dark cherries too, black cherries, almonds and walnuts and whatever. I have Angelica, which is green sugar really, or sprinkles, if you have sprinkles in your larder because you do it for your kids' cakes, and you just pile all the stuff all over the top and then end up with chocolate truffles or Maltesers. Do you have Maltesers?
Jessie Sheehan:
No, describe them. I know I know them, but I can't-
Dame Prue Leith:
They're a little round ball.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh, we call them malt balls.
Dame Prue Leith:
Oh, are they good?
Jessie Sheehan:
They're so... Or we call them whoppers. That's the name of the brand, I love them.
Dame Prue Leith:
Okay, so then you put whoppers on top. If you've got fresh raspberries, lovely little edible flowers or anything. But honestly, you can put anything you like on the top. And people are so impressed because they think it took you hours. You just sprinkle, sprinkle, sprinkle, it takes no time at all. I'm a great believer in using what you've got and not ever wasting anything and not throwing away that. I mean, if I have stale cake, I just stick it in the freezer and a week later it turns into trifle.
Jessie Sheehan:
Well, I think that trifle is such a wonderful example of sort of what the book is about, because it is very, very delicious food done simply with some cheating. I also love throughout the book you have all of these handy hacks and culinary shortcuts and neat tricks after 65 years of cooking almost every day, which essentially have been collated into a book in which every recipe includes a handy tip. And I also thought that was particularly interesting right now, because that format feels so prescient only because social media feels right now, it is all about tips and hacks and everybody wants to learn something.
Dame Prue Leith:
And we actually have QR codes. If I was doing a hack that I realized I could best explain it by showing it rather than just saying it. I thought young people just go to YouTube and most people use their phones to look up recipes now. So I thought it's so sensible to see it, it's much easier to see if I'm telling you how to take the stone out of an avocado without ending up in the emergency room with a hacked up hand. In England, they call it an avocado hand because it happens so much. If you're going to avoid that, I can show you exactly how to take the stone out, but I can show you much more easily than if I describe it to you. If I describe it to you, you probably would never get around to doing it because it takes a long time to describe it, but so I thought if we put our QR code there and you hold your phone up and it takes you immediately to that hack.
Jessie Sheehan:
I tried it. It works.
Dame Prue Leith:
It works. It works.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, it's great. It's great.
Dame Prue Leith:
There I am giving you a lesson.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, I loved it. And it's also, I think you've described it as being a proponent of learning by seeing, which probably explains the success of cookery shows and YouTube and that if one can do that while they're looking at a cookbook, it's a game changer. I loved that.
Dame Prue Leith:
I was very proud of that because I said to the publishers, "Why can't I do that?" And they said, "What a good idea. Why don't we try it?" And then of course, I spent a year thinking somebody else will get there first, but they didn't.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's such a good idea, it's such a good idea. And would you say this kind of movement for you as a cook to move more towards shortcuts and away from, as you said, let's say making puff pastry or making custard, did it just come sort of with age and because indeed life is too short to stuff a mushroom?
Dame Prue Leith:
I think so, but also because I've never been a snob about food. I've always thought there's some absolutely delicious things that nobody would call them gastronomy, but they should be in there, like a Whopper. I mean, for goodness sake, that is delicious.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, so good.
Dame Prue Leith:
Because I'm irritated by the idea that it's somehow sinful to use packet custard or it's sinful not to make your own puff pastry. I mean, frankly, I don't think I make puff pastry as well as Jus-Rol does.
Jessie Sheehan:
Exactly.
Dame Prue Leith:
Or Pillsbury or something.
Jessie Sheehan:
Exactly. I also feel like if taking a shortcut means that you're going to cook or bake, it's 100% worth it. If it's standing in the way, then-
Dame Prue Leith:
Exactly, and also if it gives you a little bit more time to actually sit down knees under and enjoy your food with your children, instead of everybody eating. I mean, it is difficult now. I mean, I look at my grandchildren and my daughter-in-law is a kind of taxi driver taking them to endless sleepovers and endless play dates, and they're very seldom all together. But I think it's really important if families can make an effort to at least have one meal a week where all the family, sort of a sacred week, and I think we should all have that idea that you all turn up for Sunday lunch or for Monday supper or something. So you get to get your knees under, people make an effort about what you eat, and the children will remember it when they grow up and think that was home life.
Jessie Sheehan:
I agree. I want to jump into the details of the recipe, but I just wanted to mention one thing first, which is the book is just gorgeous to behold, Prue. And not just the food photography, but the photos of you at the start of each chapter and the fact that the color of the book's pages picks up on the colors that you are wearing, and fashion is clearly important to you. You have an eyewear brand and a clothes line, and your colorful style is so iconic. I know this sounds a little cheesy, but how does fashion feed you? How does that fit into it all?
Dame Prue Leith:
It is one of the pleasures of my day is when I get up in the morning. I generally start with, I have a wall of necklaces. I hang all my necklaces and my earrings up on a wall, and my husband made me the most wonderful metal trees. They look like oak trees with lots and lots of spikes all over them that I can hang everything on. And I start off by picking, I literally think I'll start, I'll wear that necklace, and then I match something to it because I'm a great coordinator. My daughter sometimes says I'm too matchy-matchy. So I start with the necklace and then I work around it, or the specs. Sometimes I start with the specs, and it gives me real pleasure.
My husband has been very influential with my color because although I've always loved color, and indeed when we got married, I was wearing a bright red dress the night before and an amazing blue jacket on the day we married. But since we've been together, I'll often say to him, "Do you think these earrings are too much?" And he'll say, "No, no, we're the bigger ones, or they should be bigger." He will always push me to go a bit further. I mean, he bought this coat, which you must wear.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's fantastic.
Dame Prue Leith:
It is a bit extreme, isn't it? I mean, it's red wool, it has a huge fur collar and a huge fur cuffs. It's definitely a look at me coat. And you know what? And first of all, I'll never wear that. I said, "I'll never wear that. It's much too much." And I absolutely love it because I really love the attention. I love it when people say, "Great coat," they say, and then you just cheer up. A total stranger says to you, "Great coat," or, "I love your coat." You can't not smile, you can't not be pleased.
Jessie Sheehan:
I agree. All right, so let's talk about this trifle and it's this dark chocolate orange trifle with a Swiss roll, it's so beautiful, the photograph. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to segment the oranges with a small sharp knife. Would that be like what we call a paring knife?
Dame Prue Leith:
Paring knife, yeah, paring knife, yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Paring knife, and we're going to keep the juice separate from the orange segments. Can you share your segmenting citrus hack?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes. Basically, you peel all the skin and pith off the orange. So what you end up with is an orange, no skin and pith, but it's still obviously held together by the pith between the segments. And then you cut between the lines of the... See how much easier this would be if I could give you a QR code.? You cut each segment out and lift it away from the pith, and you just go right the way around the orange so that what you end up is segments that have no pith on them, which is very nice. Or you can buy a tin of segmented oranges, which in this trifle would be fine.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. We're going to take our segments and we're going to add a little Cointreau or another orange liqueur. If we don't want it to be boozy, would you just add a little extra juice?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, you could. Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Okay.
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, or an orange cordial would do it. You need to sort of concentrate it.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes. So now we're going to roughly chop some dark chocolate, about 70% bittersweet. We're going to melt it in a heatproof bowl set it over a pan of simmering water. But you do have a microwave hack?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, if you are melting chocolate in microwave, which is the only other safe way to do it, one is over a bowl boiling water, the other is the microwave. But you want to do it in short bursts because the microwaves are uneven. So give it a little burst and then twist the bowl a bit and give it another little burst, and it'll work really well.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love the microwave trick. And we'll stir occasionally until the chocolate's smooth and we'll set it aside to cool. Now we're going to whip some cream, some heavy cream with super fine sugar, which I know we usually use when we do cream, often we use powdered sugar. I think you call it icing sugar. Would you ever do that? I'm interested that-
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, and I was interested in this because I hadn't realized that superfine sugar is actually quite difficult to find. So icing sugar will nearly always do. I just don't use icing sugar very much because I'm quite clumsy and it goes into clouds. You have to be very careful with it because it's so light, or you can take granulated sugar and shove it into a blender and make your own.
Jessie Sheehan:
Coffee grinder, yeah.
Dame Prue Leith:
Super fine.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I also wondered, why a little bit of sugar? Is it because the chocolate's a little bit too bitter if you don't add the sugar to the cream?
Dame Prue Leith:
I don't know. I have no idea.
Jessie Sheehan:
Great answer.
Dame Prue Leith:
I think the way I did it, it worked, so I put it in.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, I loved it. Now we're going to add a little bit of vanilla. Is there a special brand of vanilla that you like?
Dame Prue Leith:
No, but I like it to be from a pod. You can buy it. I use one which is called Little Pod, but I don't know that it's available.
Jessie Sheehan:
And it's like a paste, almost?
Dame Prue Leith:
You can get in paste form or in essence form.
Jessie Sheehan:
And we're going to add the vanilla and whip it until it just holds its shape, which is basically a soft peak. And that's the peak you like for folding in and also for serving. You have a handy trifle hack, every recipe has one, for rescuing over whipped cream?
Dame Prue Leith:
Well, if it's not too over whipped. If it's just looking a bit grainy and stiff, if you put a bit more cream in it or a bit of milk in it, you can often bring it back. Of course, if it's gone really far, it's already butter with whey. Then what you've got is butter.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes.
Dame Prue Leith:
So save the butter, chuck the whey.
Jessie Sheehan:
Perfect. So now we're going to fold our cooled melted chocolate into the whipped cream until combined, creating a chocolate mousse. I loved your folding technique. Can you share your folding technique where we're plunging in our kitchen spoon?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes. I think the main, I've often tried to explain this to students because the instinct is to just stir, and stirring is a round and round movement. Folding is you plunge the spoon right to the bottom of the bowl and lift the contents of the bowl up, and then turn the bowl a bit and then do that again. So actually, it's an up-and-down movement more than a round-and-round move.
Jessie Sheehan:
Now we're going to take our Swiss Roll or jelly roll, we're going to cut it into half inch thick slices. We'll use about two-thirds of them to sort of line the bottom and sides of our deep trifle bowl. And when I think trifle bowl, I'm thinking like a straight-
Dame Prue Leith:
Straight sided.
Jessie Sheehan:
Straight sided, with a leg?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yes, it's actually got a stand.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yes, a stand.
Dame Prue Leith:
It sort of has a stand at the bottom, flat bottom. It's like a bowl on a stand. I mean, I don't have one of those, I just have a glass bowl, so it can be anything. But it's nice if it's a glass bowl because you can see the layers of trifle. And if you are using a jelly roll, then you see the swells and it's just looks so nice.
Jessie Sheehan:
So pretty. Is that a Prue thing to use a Swiss roll in a trifle? I've never seen that.
Dame Prue Leith:
I'm sure I haven't invented it because most people make trifle out of yesterday's cake and a Swiss roll is a very, very popular British cake. This one is a chocolate one, but the most common one is the ordinary strawberry jam inside the sponge.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, yum. And you just buy them in the grocery store.
Dame Prue Leith:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
It's funny, I did a little quick Google search because I feel like I don't see them in the grocery store. And then when I searched, I found out, yes, you can totally go and purchase a Swiss roll. So I will be doing so, in case anyone's wondering.
Dame Prue Leith:
Or jelly roll, I think they call it. Yeah, jelly roll. Yeah, we sometimes say Swiss, jelly. They're kind of interchangeable for us. Now we're going to pour half of our orange juice boozy mixture over that Swiss roll layer. Then we're going to spread our chocolate mousse over the cake. And is there a special tool you like for spreading? Is it an offset spatula, is it just a spoon?
Well, I like a soft spatula because I think it does less sort of squashing and less damaging. It's quite gentle. So that's what... I'm sure you could use anything.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah. Now we're going to arrange our segmented oranges over the mousse. We'll keep a few back for the garnish. We'll add another layer of the jelly roll. We'll drizzle that layer with the remaining half of the orange juice mixture. Now we'll pour our vanilla custard all over, spreading it out evenly. What should we picture? We make pudding, let's say, but we don't really have a custard situation that you could buy in the store. Is it Bird's? Is that the brand?
Dame Prue Leith:
Bird's custard, they probably do one in a packet that's already made now. The most famous Bird's custard is a powder, which is just corn flour and vanilla flavoring, really? That works, but you'll need to make the custard and you need to cool it. But the custard I'm talking about, and I bet you can buy it, is in a box and it's already cold and thick, and you just cut the corner off the box and give the box a little squidge, a squeeze, and pour it all over the place. Delicious.
Jessie Sheehan:
Love, love, love, love. Now we're going to whip up our remaining cream. We have a little bit more heavy cream, until it just holds its shape again. Put that on top. And then using a vegetable peeler, maybe we'll shave our remaining chocolate to create chocolate curls for decoration or grate it. When you're grating it, you do that on a microplane?
Dame Prue Leith:
Yeah.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yeah, and then we'll top the trifle with this whipped cream and with these remaining orange segments and sprinkle of chocolate. We'll chill it in the fridge for two to three hours or overnight, giving it time to set. Although you said you can eat it straight away.
Dame Prue Leith:
Straight away. So delicious.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. I know. I love it, I love it. And then you mentioned those four instant trifles, the croissant ginger and the chocolate rum. And it's like the world is your trifle.
Dame Prue Leith:
I could go on because honestly, if you just start with what you've got, you'll find you're inventing your own trifles. I've never met a bad one. Honestly, I have never met one I didn't like.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love that. Is one of these instant ones a favorite of yours? The ginger or the-
Dame Prue Leith:
I do use ginger quite, I use stem ginger quite a lot instead of jam on top. Stem ginger, and the syrup from the thing. But the last one I made was on clafoutis, on a leftover clafoutis, which was a plum clafoutis. And then I had, do you know what advocaat is?
Jessie Sheehan:
I saw that somewhere and I wasn't sure what it meant. Where did I see-
Dame Prue Leith:
It's eggnog, it's a bottled eggnog made by a company called Warners.
Jessie Sheehan:
Yum.
Dame Prue Leith:
And it is tremendously rich, but it's the sort of thing that you... I once had an American friend who came for Christmas and he said, "I'm going to make it an American eggnog." I mean, he had a bottle of brandy, a bottle of rum, and home. Trays and trays of eggs and double cream. And he mixed all this booze and eggs and cream together. And then at the last minute, he dolloped lumps of ice cream into it. So rich and so delicious.
Jessie Sheehan:
Oh my gosh, delicious.
Dame Prue Leith:
I think the real thing is to just think what goes with what. If you start with raisin bread, what would be a good jammy thing to spread on it? And you think, well, marmalade would be quite good on raisins, raisin bread. And then you think, well, what booze would be good? And whiskey would be good on top of marmalade, wouldn't it? Whiskey and marmalade somehow go together. And then you'd put the custard in the cream and you're done. And all those things come out of the larder or at least they come out of my larder because I always have whiskey in the larder.
Jessie Sheehan:
I love it. And I love love, I just love the idea of a dessert that you're making with things that you have left over. They get a second life.
Dame Prue Leith:
And they're a very good way of getting rid of... you know all those little half bottles of booze that you bought back from foreign countries that you thought, oh, this is some wonderful rum, I must take some home. Or people give you a bottle of some strange liqueur and you thank them kindly and it sits in the cupboard. You never ever use them. But the trifle is a great way of using up all that booze.
Jessie Sheehan:
And I love that you have, at least with the instant ones, you're suggesting, I mean, you can make a large one, but that you suggest that you just make individual ones in little cups.
Dame Prue Leith:
That's right, or in a glass. Right? If you've got wine glasses, I often start by putting sometimes just a soaked biscuit, a barat biscuit if I haven't got cake. But any kind of starchy base, a couple of bits of that in the bottom, and then build up your layers. You've got it. I mean, John and I eat a lot of that.
Jessie Sheehan:
So delicious. Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today, Prue, and I just want to say that you are my cherry pie.
Dame Prue Leith:
Oh, you're lovely. Thank you, thank you. Well, I have hugely enjoyed it.
Jessie Sheehan:
That's it for today's show. Thank you to King Arthur Baking Company, Kerrygold, California Prunes, and Ghirardelli for supporting this episode. Don't forget to follow, She's my Cherry Pie on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen and tell your pals about us. You can find today's recipe at cherrybombe.com. She's my Cherry. Pie is a production of The Cherry Bombe Podcast Network. Thank you to CitiVox Studio in Manhattan. Our producers are Kerry Diamond, Catherine Baker, and Jenna Sadhu. Thank you so much for listening to She's My Cherry Pie, and happy baking.