Corinne Marler

My only option was to hare off to my new school and try to make 70 pints of soup. But first, I went to a deli and bought them out of cream cheese plus tins of mussel, cream of artichoke, Vichyssoise and cream of onion soup. Then the teachers fanned out to the shops with instructions to buy more. At last, I was blindingly sure of what I wanted to do: I was going to become a cook. Easier said than done: at 20, one of the few things I'd ever made was a Christmas cake with concrete icing that had shattered Dad's bone-handled carving knife when he tried to use it as a chisel. I must have had plenty of triumphs or my business would never have grown, but it's still the horrors I remember. One of the worst was when I went to cook at Lord Verulam's mighty house near St Albans, Herts. microwave dinner Before breakfast, we went to buy the bread: baguettes in one bakery, croissants in another and gateau in a third. ‘But why do we go to all those shops? They all sell everything,' I said. She rolled her eyes at my stupidity. A toddler lunch ideas for daycare (no reheat) is a child from age 1 to 3. That disaster came from not washing things, but I also got into trouble because I did wash things. At a lunch for shipping brokers, the senior partner peered intently at his salad, then reached into it with his fingers. Today, the restaurant and school are still going strong, and the catering side, owned by Compass, has continued to expand. Now aged 72, I'm planning a trilogy of novels, I'm on the board of Orient Express and I'm a judge on the TV series The Great British Menu, which involves eating food prepared by our finest chefs. Next, I badgered my long-suffering parents to let me go to France. I spent a month working as an au pair in the Basque country, which is where my interest in food became serious. Madame von Bochstael, the mistress of the house, gave me two seminal lessons in my first 24 hours. That wasn't my only mistake. Once, I sent in a handwritten recipe for my Oxford orange marmalade, which required two tablespoons of black treacle. As I'd forgotten to cross a ‘t', this appeared in the paper not as 2 tbs, but 2 lbs. And two pounds of black treacle is rather a lot for a couple of pounds of oranges. As well as running the restaurant, I began writing a cookery column for the Daily Mail. All went well until I wrote a recipe for a ginger peach brulée that called for an ounce of ginger. Tragically, I'd failed to specify that it was stem ginger — and, of course, an ounce of ground ginger is enough to blow your head off. Just one day later, I found a letter bomb on my desk. I knew what it was because we were in the middle of the IRA letter-bomb campaign, and we'd all been told it was bad news if you could feel something squishy (Semtex) with wires.  Thankfully, the tap water was extremely hot, so I used it to poach two 10lb salmons. Then I searched the warren of kitchens and stores and found an electric tea urn, which I commandeered for boiling the potatoes. The beef had to go into the lukewarm Aga. Very slowly, they placed napkins on each guest's lap. Very slowly, they removed the decorative service plates. Very slowly, they filled the water glasses. By the time they'd milked every delaying tactic, I was ready. No one guessed anything was wrong. Of course, I was tempted to rat on the Verulams' chef, but then I thought: ‘Hell, how would I feel if my boss didn't consider my cooking good enough for an important dinner?' By the time I went to university in 1958, I was changing my mind every two minutes about what I wanted to do. I tried drama, then art (‘You can't draw — you have no talent for it,' I was told), then architecture (the maths defeated me), philosophy and finally French. And that was in my first year.  We didn't cook a thing — just strained out the lumps and whisked it all together. It worked: a few days later, I received a letter from the Tate organiser, singling out the soup as ‘unctuous and delicious'. Whether I really deserve to be sitting in judgment on great chefs is debatable. I was never the chef at Leith's restaurant; I've never been a fanatical foodie; and I've always been perfectly happy to nick ideas from other chefs. But it's extraordinary what you get used to. In 1969, when I opened my restaurant in an unfashionable part of Notting Hill, I'd be up at 4am to buy ingredients at various markets, grab some sleep in the afternoons and then work until after midnight. So I cleared the office and a copper arrived to take away the envelope. After a couple of hours, the police told me to collect it. The contents? A dental brace with two teeth, embedded in a lump of marmalade toffee. And a large orthodontist's bill. My most stressful near-disaster was when we got the contract for a Tate Gallery dinner for grandees, sponsors and potential donors. On the night, I arrived and my nose detected an unmistakable stink. The chef I'd employed had somehow allowed the mussel velouté (soup) to ferment.