Patten on a cookery programme in 2012, image from YouTube

The cookery writer and original ‘celebrity chef’ Marguerite Patten has died at the age of 99.

Patten rose to fame during World War II when she worked for the Ministry of Food, advising British people on how to stay healthy and nourished during rationing. Her popular BBC radio programme Kitchen Front gave practical suggestions for how to ensure food still tasted good even when there wasn’t much of it around (including ‘imaginative uses of dried egg’) and her voice was well-known to many growing up in post-war Britain.

At the end of the 1940s, Patten became one of the first TV chefs, when she migrated from radio to the television programme Designed for Women, and continued to appear on the popular food programmes Masterchef and Ready Steady Cook throughout her career.

As a young girl, Patten had hoped to become an actress and, as her obituary in The Guardian notes, she found a way to combine cookery and performance:

As well as television appearances, there were large-scale demonstrations across Britain, which took on a surreal character as the 50s wore on. A flour manufacturer, Frenlite, saw possibilities in combining variety acts and cookery and Marguerite was soon baking sponges and whisking meringue to the musical accompaniment of Geraldo and his Show Band, the wisecracks of Cyril Fletcher, and the warbled tunes of the husband-and-wife act Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson. Her apogee was to appear at the London Palladium…

As well as paving the way for TV cookery as we know it today, Patten was also influential in cookery book publishing. Together with her publisher Paul Hamlyn, she revolutionised the presentation of food books, publishing the bright and colourful Cookery in Colour in 1960, when all other cookery books were in black and white. It sold 2 million copies, and according to Patten’s daughter, readers would “regularly write appreciative letters to Mrs Patten some 55 years after its publication.”

In her long career, Patten published 170 cookery titles which together sold over 17 million copies. According to The Guardian:

Marguerite’s success was cemented by a series of mass-market books of 500 recipes – of sweet dishes, hors d’oeuvres, meat courses and so forth. These must have entered the kitchens of every modern home during this expansive and socially mobile decade. Marguerite explained and simplified for the insecure and the novice: another great success was Classic Dishes Made Simple (1969). She also introduced them to new foods, from pimentos to lemongrass (though rarely pursuing exhausting authenticity).

Although she inspired TV cooks and celebrity chefs such as Prue Leith, Nigel Slater and Jamie Oliver, Patten vehemently resisted the label ‘celebrity chef’, telling The Telegraph in one of her final interviews, “I am not. To the day I die I will be a home economist.”

Patten’s daughter was pleased to report that Patten had enjoyed a final meal of her favourite baked custard, with pureed raspberry and baked apple.