log fire in the garden shelter crackles. Large cushions cover the wooden benches. Tea is poured from a white china tea pot and a freshly made carrot cake waits on the table to be sliced. The scene is idyllic and somehow not unexpected at the home of Lesley Wild, the founder of Bettys Cookery School and wife of Jonathan Wild, chairman of Bettys & Taylors of Harrogate.
But also on the table is a black folder which holds the pages of a book still not quite finished, called A Year of Family Recipes by Lesley Wild. Each turn of a page reveals the author’s passion for growing and preparing good food.
The book is about the way she cooks at home for her family and friends. She has collected and developed the recipes over many years. Some have been handed down to her by her mother and Swiss father-in-law. Others are based on food she has enjoyed whilst travelling abroad.
Every dish has been made in the kitchen of her Harrogate home from ingredients grown by her husband in their organic garden… and eaten at the end of each photography session by the photographer and cookery school helpers.
It was in spring last year that she hesitantly gave her husband a list of almost 60 different ingredients that she needed for the recipes and he enthusiastically set to work to provide her with every one. It has taken a full year to write the book as she waited for the right moment to use the fruit and vegetables that he planted and nurtured in their garden.
‘I have always wanted to write a cookery book,’ says Lesley. ‘I started with the cookery school, once that was established this seemed the next natural step,’ she adds as the fire crackles loudly and sends out a shower of white ash.
‘Most of the recipes I have always made at particular times of the year when things in the garden are ready. It took me very little time to decide what would be in the book. ‘I tried to get a good cross section of recipes and as I have gone along I have thought “I haven’t put this in, I haven’t put that in” and it has grown to, well it’s going to be 260 pages. I have had to stop myself and say, “no, I can’t do any more” because I would never finish.
‘What was quite tricky was that a lot of the recipes hadn’t ever been written down so it was getting them out of my head on to a piece of paper, to explain them well enough for other people to understand.’
It’s a very personal collection of recipes which the Wilds have not only enjoyed together as a family but which have also been the inspiration for dishes served at Bettys Cafe Tea Rooms and customers will recognise many of the them. ‘I did the menus at Bettys for a long time,’ says Lesley.
Her involvement with Bettys was very hands on, she says. What had concerned her was the training in the kitchen. It was, she says, very difficult to teach people on the job when orders were coming into the kitchen and she quickly realised that to do a good job she would have to get people away to where they could be taught properly. The idea of a Bettys Cookery School began to take shape.
Lesley started training courses at the local college of further education, renting the kitchens on Saturday when they were not in use. But it was very hard, she adds, because the kitchen equipment was different and they had to carry every bit of food over to the college.
‘I always thought wouldn’t it be fantastic to have a place where we could do this properly and at the same time put the many experts in our business who have got decades of experience baking, chocolate making and in the kitchen, together with our customers.
‘And then there was also this terribly fashionable thing that everyone is talking about now, that goes back an awful long way in our business, and that’s teaching children. We have had terrible trouble recruiting young people to work in our kitchens because they don’t know how to do anything.
‘Cooking is a spectator sport at the moment. You watch it on television and then you put something in the microwave in the interval and take it out again. It’s entertainment rather than knowledge and understanding.’
But Bettys Cookery School, which opened in 2001 on the same site as Bettys Craft Bakery in Harrogate, runs very successful courses and struggles to meet demand. Courses with schools are booked up two years in advance. The cookery school has also, not surprisingly, started growing vegetables in the garden at the back of the building.
Lesley stokes the now quiet log fire in the shelter (nicknamed the bus shelter) that resembles the hearth of a comfortable front room and looks on to what was once an ornamental garden but is now the potager, created by her husband.
She happily acknowledges that while she is perfectly happy in the kitchen, Jonathan is a natural in the garden.
They grow everything they need in their one acre and new greenhouse to be self-sufficient She adds: ‘I could not have written this book without Jonathan’s invaluable contribution.
His beautiful vegetables and fruits are the stars in this recipe book.’ A Year of Family Recipes by Lesley Wild is to be published in November.