I am currently writing a book about how I started teaching cookery in London schools in the 1970s.
It’s called I taught them to cook.
Having left university with a science degree, I knew a lot about nutrition and the chemistry of food, but I had no idea how to run a cookery room, manage a boisterous class and cook things. My first lessons were a disaster. Bread rolls baked hard as bullets, cakes that sunk, pressure cookers squirting tomato soup all over us.
The 1970s was a time of great change in our food culture, but I had to teach boys and girls really daft things in order to get them through the CSE and O level Cookery. Lessons included