Marguerite Patten
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 January 2001
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is the cookery writer Marguerite Patten. Known as the 'doyenne of British cookery', Marguerite Patten has written 167 cookery books and given thousands of demonstrations - including several at the London Palladium. In conversation with Sue Lawley, she talks about her life and work and chooses eight records to take to the mythical island.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Nous Avons En Tete Une Affaire from Act 2 by Bizet Book: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen Luxury: A trowel for digging
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My costaway this week is a cook. She's been a straightforward and reliable friend to millions of British women |
| 0:35.8 | since before the outbreak of the Second World War, when she gave up her acting career to help market |
| 0:40.9 | the wonders of the newly invented domestic refrigerator. |
| 0:44.0 | She was the first cook to appear on the television, |
| 0:47.0 | that was back in 1947, and she believed she invented that immortal one-liner. |
| 0:52.0 | Here's one I prepared earlier. Her books |
| 0:55.5 | have sold 17 million copies, her most groundbreaking being cookery in color, |
| 1:00.3 | published in the 60s which not only included brilliant illustrations, but more than a |
| 1:04.4 | thousand of her recipes. Now 85, she still broadcasts lectures and writes and sums up her |
| 1:10.6 | career in typical no-nonsense style as cooking sensible food in an |
| 1:15.4 | appetizing manner. She is Marguerite Patton. What a long way we've come |
| 1:19.8 | Marguerite since you were advocating what 26 interesting things to do with |
| 1:23.1 | spam and dried egg. We're a nation of food is. Are you impressed with us? Yes I'm |
| 1:28.5 | impressed and pleased that people now think about food more because once upon the time you know it was |
| 1:34.5 | almost in for a dig if you've been invited out you had a lovely evening but you |
| 1:38.9 | wouldn't have said oh I did enjoy that soup or something like that. |
| 1:43.0 | Well, it just wasn't polite. |
| 1:44.0 | Oh, no, it just wasn't the thing. |
| 1:47.0 | I'm not so pleased with certain other things, |
| 1:50.0 | the fact that many people are not cooking as much as I would like them to. |
... |
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