Prue Leith On Her New Cookbook, ‘Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom’

American viewers might know Prue Leith best as an exacting yet encouraging judge on The Great British Baking Show (or as a style icon with a penchant for colorful eyewear). But at heart, Leith is a teacher. 

The Michelin-starred chef opened London’s Leiths School of Food and Wine in 1975, then a culinary institute in her native South Africa in 1996. Her teaching background shines in her twelfth cookbook, Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom, which is as instructional as it is inspirational (she’s also written seven novels). 

In addition to 80 recipes for breakfasts, appetizers, mains, and desserts, you’ll find “Prue’s Handy Hacks” with QR codes for accessing step-by-step online videos. Clips of techniques like poaching an egg and tricks like dicing an avocado with a cooling rack are accompanied by Leith’s crisp and calm instructions (If she ever retires from Bake Off, Leith should consider a narrator gig on a meditation app.) 

“The truth is that I’ve taught cooking all my life, and I’ve long since realized that you can teach better by showing than by speaking or by describing,” Leith says. 

She gives the example of chopping an onion. “By the time you’ve read the description, you’ve lost the will to live, and you certainly don’t feel like chopping an onion. But if I can just teach you to do it [in a video], you’ll be away, because it’s quite fun to do if your knife is sharp.” 

Leith may have created a cookbook for the 21st century, but she wants you to enjoy its impressive but accessible recipes — like grilled lamb chops with an herb and toum salad and cheddar twists using ready-made puff pastry — offline, with loved ones.

“So many people miss the pleasure of putting food on the table for somebody else that they are proud of and they enjoy,” she says. “I mean, it’s an absolute pleasure that nobody should miss. So I’d like unconfident or reluctant cooks to just give it a go.”  

We chatted with Leith about her cookbook, the dessert that convinced her to become a cook, and her dream dinner guests.

F&W: First of all, can you tell me about the name of your cookbook?

PL: It’s called Life’s Too Short to Stuff A Mushroom. In a way, the title says it all. I just think we are all these days so busy, and even if you love cooking, it’s just not possible to spend hours at it. So that’s what the title means. But I actually stole it from Shirley Conran, who was a great writer in the seventies, and she wrote a book called Superwoman. Basically her theme then was that women should stop trying to be the perfect domestic goddess and just settle and like what they did and not worry if it wasn’t perfect. She used to say things like ‘First things first, next thing’s never,’ and ‘I can do clean and I can do tidy — choose.’ It was about trying to make women feel that they didn’t have to have their husband’s slippers warming by the fire while their makeup was perfect so that they looked like they did on their wedding day, that they could wear an old jumper and feel fine. 

F&W: You wrote your first book in 1991. How has your cooking changed since then?

PL: Well, I’m glad to say it’s gotten much simpler. When I first started out, I was a young caterer, and I was really interested in absolutely everything. Of course, I wanted to do everything perfectly and it was very French-dominated cooking, so a lot of it was quite complicated. But as I’ve gotten older and busier (and probably lazier), I’ve realized that a lot of all that fancy cooking is actually snobbishness. It’s driven by foodies who want to believe that they have never used frozen puff pastry in their lives, and that they wouldn’t stoop to mashed potatoes pre-made in a freezer, and they’d never, ever take mayonnaise out of a bottle.

But you know what? We all do that. I don’t think that there’s a chef in the world who doesn’t have a jar of supermarket mayo in the fridge. It’s just that they don’t admit it. And I think they should because after all, these products are good products — often they’re as good as [what] you’ll make at home. I mean, take mayonnaise. I love to make real mayonnaise because I enjoy it, and it tastes completely different from the stuff in the bottle. But it doesn’t mean the stuff in the bottle isn’t delicious and also a very good base for an herby mayonnaise or garlicky mayonnaise. So why not use it?

F&W: What are some of your other favorite shortcuts that you rely on at home?

PL: I don’t think I’ve made puff pastry for 20 years because I don’t think I make it as well as Jus-Rol does. Well, I don’t make it as reliably well — sometimes it’s perfect and sometimes not so perfect. And I think the thing that I use most, which I’m really disappointed to hear is actually not available in America, is a box of ready-made custard. I know you have frozen custard as an ice cream sort of thing or a shake, but you don’t seem to have thick, ready-made custard that you can just pour onto a trifle and leave it for a few hours and it’ll set. We have that. And honestly, they’re all different. So you need to eat your way through the different supermarkets’ own brand of it. But the one I like most is actually made by Ambrosia and it’s delicious. I mean, it’s just eggs and sugar. 

F&W: Are there any recipes in the book that are particularly special to you? 

Lots, but some of them I feel strongly about, like the trifle ones. I show you how to make a trifle four ways. Depending on what stale cake you’ve got around — say you have a couple of croissants from yesterday — if you spread them with marmalade and break them up and stick them in a couple of glasses, add enough whiskey to soak them, and then put some pre-made custard on the top, then whipped cream on the top of that and decorate it however you like, it’s the most delicious trifle. Then equally you could do the classic trifle which is sponge cake, strawberry jam, sherry, and custard cream; and so on and so on. There are dozens of different variations. And you can make up your own, just starting with whatever cake you’ve got and thinking what would be nice on top of it. What about hazelnut chocolate spread? 

There’s [also] a fish dish which is basically like a jerk fish, Caribbean-style seasoning, not too much, it’s not as strong as most Jamaicans would do it, for example. And it’s served with a pineapple salsa. I love the combination of some sort of hot spice and cooling pineapple. It’s just delicious and it looks very pretty and it’s quick to do.

F&W: You also write about the clafoutis that convinced you to become a cook. Tell me more about that.  

Well, I used to be an au pair, and one of my first jobs was looking after two little kids belonging to a French family. Maman made clafoutis and it was absolutely delicious and very easy to make. You take some fruit or other — usually cherries or damson or green gage plums — and you plonk them in the bottom of a baking tray or cake tin, and then you pour a cake batter all over them.

Maman [also] convinced me quite unconsciously that I should be a cook. I was in France to learn French because I thought I would be a translator. I ended up saying to my dad, ‘Could I swap and go to cookery school?’, which I ultimately did. It was the way this woman cooked [that inspired me]. The children ate exactly the same food that we ate, only a little bit earlier, and we always sat down with the children to eat with them.

I remember that first meal where she made little steaks for the kids and they were brown on each side and rare in the middle. There were little new potatoes tossed in butter and chopped mint or something and a green salad with homemade French dressing. And she made it all for the children then and there. And then I whizzed up the babies and she chopped up the toddlers and we sat down with these two children and talked to them.

And I thought, that’s what food’s about. Fresh, good ingredients cooked from scratch, eaten, sitting down, talking to each other. It’s communication. Food is a chance to talk to your mates and it shouldn’t be, I don’t think, scarfed as you’re walking along to work with a phone in one hand and your burger in the other. It’s just such a waste if you are missing an opportunity to actually communicate with real people rather than with your phone.

F&W: Beautifully put. What’s the best baking lesson you’ve learned from [chef and co-judge] Paul Hollywood on The Great British Baking Show? 

Well, Paul is the most instinctive and brilliant baker. He’s particularly good on bread. And I don’t know if you saw him with this year’s plaiting [for a wreath bread technical challenge]. He’s a dream to watch because he does everything so naturally and so easily. And I watched him doing that demonstration for the bakers. And I said afterwards, ‘Paul, you went much too fast. I mean, the bakers needed you to go slower so they could see.’ He said he was slowing down so that they could, that his natural speed would’ve been twice then, and it looked pretty fast to me. And just watching him roll balls of dough, it’s a dream — it’s like watching an expert ballet dancer leap or something.

F&W: You also host the home cooking show Prue Leith’s Cotswold Kitchen on ITV. Who would be your dream guests?

At the moment, I think I’d like to see Judi Dench on there, because I think she’s a great actress. I know her very slightly, not very well, but I so admire what she does. She’s mad about trees, and she’s highly intelligent, and she’s a great Shakespearean actress. Failing her, the next I’d like to see is Dame Harriet Walter. She’s an actress, too. She’s the same sort of par as Judi Dench, but younger. And she’s just written a brilliant book, where she’s imagining that the women in Shakespeare actually get to answer back because mostly they’re fatherless, they’re oppressed by their husbands and they’re bullied, and most of them don’t have much voice. She writes in Shakespeare’s blank verse, or iambic pentameter. She writes in that rhythm, but in modern language, what they’re thinking or what they’re saying. And it’s absolutely wonderful. If you think you can’t cope with Shakespeare, you could easily cope with this book, because it’s so easy. 

F&W: What would you cook for them?

Heavens, I don’t know, probably something really simple.

F&W: Trifle?

[Laughs] Trifle. I’m [also] very keen on beans. I’m not vegetarian, but I love those sort of really spicy, rich bean stews that have chickpeas and red beans and lentils and lots of onions and peppers. I like all that sort of stuff.

Life’s Too Short to Stuff a Mushroom: Really Good Food Without the Fuss is available now wherever books are sold.