Cookery writer Marguerite Patten, the author of more than 170 books, has died aged 99, her family said.
Patten was famed for her no-nonsense approach to home economics, and was employed by the Ministry of Food during the second world war to advise Britons on how to make the most of their rations.
She was the host of the BBC’s Kitchen Front, offering up recipes using powdered egg and spam for Britain during the blitz.
She made her first television appearance in 1947 and was a regular guest on both Masterchef and Ready Steady Cook in later years.
Despite being given a CBE for services to cookery, and having sold 17 million copies of her books, Patten always refused to call herself a “celebrity chef”.
“I am not,” she told the Telegraph, in one of her last interviews. “To the day I die I will be a home economist.”
Her family said she died on Thursday 4 June “from an illness stoically borne”. Patten had suffered a stroke in 2011 which had left her unable to speak.
Her daughter Judith told Olive magazine she had brought her mother her favourite baked custard almost every day in the four years since the stroke. “Only trouble is that I didn’t inherit the genes, and they went from fantastically good to pretty awful,” she said.
“Thankfully just a few hours before she died she had enjoyed one of my better ones with pureed raspberry and pureed baked apple, two other favourites. She is sadly missed, but I am delighted for her, for she really did hate the past four years!”
Born Hilda Elsie Marguerite Brown in Bath, Somerset, in 1915, she initially had ambitions to be an actor. But her father died when she was 12, and she developed an interest in cooking to help out at home, as her mother returned to work as a teacher.
She stressed later in life it was not true that she had been the family’s main chef. “I remember making a rabbit pie. And there was always lots to do in the garden – pick and bottle and jam. But otherwise … homework came first.”
The queen of “make do and mend” during the war years, Patten began to allow herself a little luxury in her cooking after rationing ended. But she recalled in an article in the Guardian how a new rich style of Christmas cake had drawn a complaint to the BBC, after her show was broadcast in 1954.
“One person did not approve of the recipes, contacted the BBC and demanded it no longer employed me,” she said. “Her reason was that I and Winston Churchill were leading the youth of Britain astray: he because he drank alcohol, and I because I used alcohol in my Christmas cooking.”
Prue Leith, the chef and founder of the renowned Leiths School of Food and Wine, was a long time friend of Patten, describing her as a woman of “such kindness, who was never an egoist, but always knew exactly who she was”.
“She was a tiny person; I once remember seeing her on crutches as she arrived to do a broadcast with me, and she’d actually fallen down the gap between the train and the platform, the ‘Mind the Gap’ space,” Leith recalled.
“It had been horribly painful for her, but they’d pulled her out, and then she carried on with her work for the day. It was the wartime spirit.”
The modern trend for flavoursome, local and organic food was something Patten admired, Leith said. “She very much approved of all that, because she kept up to date with trends in cooking,” Leith said. “We need many more of her kind.”
Shaun Hill, the Michelin-starred chef of the Walnut Tree, said Patten’s influence had been “undervalued”.
“Her books were immensely authentic and eminently practical, and I don’t think she gets the credit for the influence she had,” he said.
Hill said Patten had the aura of coming from “a more courteous era”, adding: “She was genteel, without any of the negative associations of that word, an unfailing polite and charming woman.”
Among those to pay tribute to Patten were two hosts of BBC Woman’s Hour, a programme where the chef had been a regular guest. A tribute will be broadcast on Thursday, presenter Jenni Murray said.
Before everyone else there was Marguerite Patten. Really fond memories of @BBCWomansHour programme with her in 2009. RIP #cookerylegend
— Jane Garvey (@janegarvey1) June 10, 2015
Sad to hear of death of Marguerite Patten. We remember her tomorrow on #WomansHour. I was raised on her recipes.
— Jenni Murray (@whjm) June 10, 2015
Patten is also survived by her sister Elizabeth who lives in Oslo, and her great-grandson Luke. Her husband, Bob, died in 1997.