(Image: [[https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1289401874/de/foto/lB6ffel-fBCtterung-niedlichen-indischen-baby.jpg?b=1&s=170x170&k=20&c=kHDMLfqYXlBOFDbH3y7J7KaLUKRbsRl6GuNHbBuPdE8=|https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1289401874/de/foto/lB6ffel-fBCtterung-niedlichen-indischen-baby.jpg?b=1&s=170x170&k=20&c=kHDMLfqYXlBOFDbH3y7J7KaLUKRbsRl6GuNHbBuPdE8=]])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.

My first real job was cooking three days a week for the law firm McKenna and Partners in Whitehall. Intent on developing my skills, I set about cooking my way through the 1,200-plus pages of the Constance Spry cookery book. The partners were extraordinarily good about it. When I got to the chicken chapter, they ate chicken, in different guises, for weeks on end.

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.

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.

They do make cribs that can grow with a toddler.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Back home in South Africa, where I grew up, my father's idea of a treat on his birthday was a large tin of Campbell's soup. It would arrive in a large, silver tureen on the table, along with a can-opener. Then, reverentially, Dad would lift the lid to reveal the hot tin, open it and pour it out.

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.

Once, while experimenting with making cream cheese and yogurt, I left a bowl of fermenting milk behind a radiator. The next time I arrived for work, the place was full of men in white coats and surgical masks looking for the source of the smell.

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.

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.

That wasn't my only mistake. Once,  [[https://aviatorgamees.com/user/PatVennard3360/|https://aviatorgamees.com/user/PatVennard3360/]] 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.

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. 

The first was for making lunch and tea for passengers on a train called the Orient Express. For the main course, we decided on a fish terrine, for which I needed small circular moulds. However, there were none to be found.

(Image: [[https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1377046943/de/foto/sBC9Fer-kleiner-junge-shivaay-zu-hause-balkon-wA4hrend-der-sommerzeit-sBC9Fer-kleiner-junge.jpg?b=1&s=170x170&k=20&c=TEUo9TbL3yOsj5A4_tqkP1ng76FF0TKnm3x8lM4Q5_A=|https://media.istockphoto.com/id/1377046943/de/foto/sBC9Fer-kleiner-junge-shivaay-zu-hause-balkon-wA4hrend-der-sommerzeit-sBC9Fer-kleiner-junge.jpg?b=1&s=170x170&k=20&c=TEUo9TbL3yOsj5A4_tqkP1ng76FF0TKnm3x8lM4Q5_A=]])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.