My headteacher said I’d never get a job if I studied food at school. How wrong she was!
It’s led to a busy life teaching, training and writing about food.
Learn more …
New Book for 2025
Cream Horns and Vol-au-vents
Ready November 2025
What happens next after my first year? More stories about teaching cooking in an East London comprehensive in the 1970s.
My cookers were stolen, I lived in a dingy bedsit, new food products arrived, and teaching teenagers was challenging.
Strikes, power blackouts, three day week with ever changing London fashions, new musicals and exciting eating places.
I Taught Them to Cook
I Taught Them to Cook is a memoir of the 1970s when everything was changing – our food choices and fashion. Food teaching at the time had out-of-date textbooks and stupid things like laying a tray for an invalid for their practical cookery exams. My students and I puzzled through and I was determined to change things. And it happened!
Reviews
Prue Leith
Author
‘Congratulations. An accurate, and sometimes very funny, account of the trials of a young food teacher in the 70’s. A light hearted testament to the importance of food, education, and a sizzling expose of the blindness of the powers that be.’
Orlando Murrin
President of The Guild of Food Writers
‘This is a charming book, and I love its wry, nostalgic tone. Underneath that, there is a message – that food teaching really matters, and it’s sad that the education system doesn’t seem to agree.’
Lesley Garner
Journalist and author
You don’t have to be interested in food or education to enjoy Jenny Ridgwell’s page-turning account of teaching a disruptive and unwilling class of teenagers how to cook food in the 1970s. You will absorb a lot of social food history and fascinating period detail – Angel Delight? Stuffed lamb’s hearts? How to set out a tempting tray for an invalid?
Jenny Ridgwell 