Joyce Molyneux, the winner of OFM’s Lifetime Achievement award and one of the first British women to be awarded a Michelin star, began her remarkable life in food almost by accident. “I enjoyed cooking as a child,” she says. “I used to make apple and sultana turnovers, things like that. There was a cherry flan I made for a picnic once that I remember very much pleased Father. But I didn’t think of it as a career. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me.” Uncertain what to do after leaving school in Birmingham, she spent two years at domestic science college, studying a leftover pre-war syllabus that was effectively designed to teach young women how to run a home, after which, thanks to a little help from her chemist father, she landed a job working in the canteen at Canning and Co, a manufacturer of polishing and electroplating machines. She smiles. “The executives got special things like roast chicken, and the workers had fish and chips and pies.” Did she enjoy the job? “Not really. I was a bit bored. But I wasn’t sure what I could do about it.” The expectation was that in the fullness of time, she would marry, and that this would signal the end of her working life.
Salvation came in the form of a friend from college, now working for the gas board demonstrating ovens, who happened to visit a flat above the Mulberry Tree, a restaurant in Stratford-upon-Avon. “The chef came out and asked her if she knew of anyone who would work for him. She thought of me, I went for an interview, and I got the job.” The restaurant, owned by a wine merchant, was small – only 30 covers – and when she began the kitchen still had a coal-fired gas range (this, remember, was the 50s). But the chef, Douglas Sutherland, had trained in London before the war, and she realised immediately how much she would be able to learn from him: “I remember doing puff pastry. We made some vol-au-vents. I was so delighted by these little things that went in the oven so tiny, and came out so large.” It goes without saying that she was the only woman in the kitchen. She wonders now if it wasn’t simply that she came cheaper than a man.
She stayed at the Mulberry Tree for eight years, until Sutherland departed, at which point, not wanting to work for the new regime, she went home to Birmingham for a rest. What to do next? Her mother took The Lady, and it was in its pages that she saw the ad placed by George Perry-Smith, the chef-proprietor of what was then one of the most well-known restaurants in England, the Hole in the Wall in Bath. Perry-Smith, a big, kindly, bearded man who liked to mention his MA in correspondence the better that people would take him seriously, would be the making of her. She and he would form a long and lasting association: first at the Hole in the Wall, where she would cook for the next eight years, and then at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, Devon, which Perry-Smith at first owned and where she would be head chef (it opened in 1972).
It was at the Carved Angel that she received her Michelin star. Can she remember that day? It’s a symptom of her extraordinary modesty that she can’t – and that her first instinct is also to remind me: “Don’t forget, we did lose it as well.” It’s best, she thinks, to keep these things in perspective. It was certainly marvellous to receive such recognition. But there are chefs who worked under her who, mystifyingly in her view, were awarded no stars when they went on to open their own places (Nick Coiley, who ran Agaric in Ashburton, being one). Did that mean their cooking wasn’t fabulous? It did not.
Molyneux, who is 85, lives alone in the elegant Bath house she has owned for three decades – from her sitting room, you can see virtually the whole city – and when I visit her there, every moment is a pleasure. First, there’s the lunch she has prepared: local cheeses with homemade bread and radishes, followed by a deliciously tart summer pudding, served simply in the metal tin in which it was made (and, naturally, with thick cream). Then there is the trove of her small archive: a collection of beautiful hand-written menus going back all the way to the early 60s. What strikes you immediately about these is how amazingly modern, even modish, everything sounds. Nothing dates them, save perhaps for the occasional mention of a slice of fried banana, or the fact that avocados are still described as pears.
“Our menus were long,” says Molyneux, poring over one. “That’s because we moved [elements of] dishes from hot to cold as the days went on. Also, in George’s kitchens, everyone did everything. My first job at the Hole in the Wall was to do the laundry; the cleaner made, under instruction, the soups; waiters prepared the cold table, the smoked salmon and so on.” This was a practice she continued at the Carved Angel. She and Perry-Smith wrote the menus together, inspired by, among others, Elizabeth David: “When French Provincial Cooking came out [in 1960], he bought two copies: one for himself, and the other for me.”
Piperade, turbot with lobster sauce, charcoal-grilled brochettes of lamb; iced lime souffle, brown sugar meringues with chantilly cream, honey cake with poached pears. It all sounds so effortlessly and unpretentiously delicious. What was her favourite thing? She thinks for a minute. “We used to look forward to the Dart salmon. We would cook it in pastry with currants and ginger, an adaptation by George of a medieval recipe.”
At the Carved Angel, Perry-Smith decided to have a fully open kitchen – another innovation. “The other staff got used to it, and I liked it. It was good to make eye contact with customers when they came in, and it gave us a lovely view of the harbour. George was never a shouter, and nor was I, but I do think it made people behave better.” What kind of boss was she? A sought-after one, ultimately. “People would write and ask to come; quite a lot of them were women, which was nice. I insisted on people working. It was fine for them to talk, but their hands had to be going all the time, too. ‘Don’t forget,’ I would say, ‘we’ve got people coming in at twelve.’” God forbid that anyone might have been afraid of her. Listening to The Food Programme on Radio 4 the other day, she shuddered at some chefs’ accounts of the way they are treated. “Some of them said they had to buy their own food. How awful. We all ate together, and though we told customers we did not want tips, if they did leave one, everyone had an equal share.”
What a lot has changed. She finds it irredeemably daft when people photograph food on their phones: “Eat it while it’s hot on your plate!” How odd it is, too, that people seem to watch cookery shows for entertainment rather than because there is any prospect they might try the same things at home – “Though I always enjoy seeing Jamie Oliver: he’s just got this knack for making something stunning from five ingredients.” (It’s worth noting that The Carved Angel Cookery Book, which came out in 1990, sold 50,000 copies in spite of the fact that Molyneux had neither a TV show nor a newspaper column.) In general, though, she thinks the revolution in food that has taken place during her lifetime has been a wonderful thing, even if many butchers haven’t yet developed a proper respect for brains (offal is her passion; chicken livers remain her favourite supper).
Predictably enough, people often ask Molyneux if, as a woman chef, she feels she had to make sacrifices. “You probably do,” she says. “It’s not easy to have everything. But to be perfectly honest, I never wanted children. I didn’t get married, but I had a very happy time with Stephen [a Spanish waiter with whom she lived for 30 years, until his untimely death shortly before her retirement in 1999]. I liked my freedom, you see. I’ve still got visions of my mother coming down the garden path with two carrier bags, and me and my two brothers lolling around and reading books and doing nothing much to help her.” Besides, she loved the work – which is why, even at the age of 68, she was still putting in three shifts a week. “It was hard. On Sundays, you didn’t really feel human until about four o’clock in the afternoon. But it was so satisfying. I liked it very much indeed.”
