Mary Berry stars in trailer for Best Home Cook
The queen of baking said she never found the time before. But the pandemic cleared the 85-year-old’s schedule and the phone has become her lifeline. Dame Mary said: “Because I’m quite ancient, I’ve got a lot of girlfriends who’ve lost their husbands or their other halves.
“It’s been great having phone calls with them. What are they getting up to? How are they coping?
“I’ve made it quite a task each day to ring somebody and have a long, long chat, which I never would have thought about doing before, because there wasn’t time.”
The former Great British Bake Off judge spent early lockdown cut off from her family while shielding at home in Henley, Oxon, with her husband of 54 years, Paul Hunnings.
But Dame Mary continued her caring routine by dropping off home-cooked food parcels for her daughter Annabel and her grandchildren.
We will use your email address only for sending you newsletters. Please see our Privacy Notice for details of your data protection rights.
They are likely to have included her own favourite meal – stewed beef with pickled walnuts. However, now she is back on a professional foodie bent and returning to the studio as judge in the third series of Celebrity Best Home Cook on BBC One alongside host Claudia Winkleman.
Celebrities taking part include Ed Balls, Welsh rugby legend Gareth Thomas, former Coronation Street actress Shobna Gulati, comedian Ed Byrne and journalist Rachel Johnson.
Dame Mary and her husband have both had the Covid jab and she encouraged everyone to have it – recalling the horror of being in hospital alongside people in pain when she had polio as a 13-year-old.
She told Radio Times: “I was so pleased [to have the jab]. I would encourage everyone to definitely have the vaccine.
“I had polio, but now almost the whole world is vaccinated against it.
“If you’re in a hospital like I was, with people in calipers, people in pain, people who weren’t going to get better – I think everyone should take the vaccine, not query it, and think of others.
“I was immensely fortunate. I only had it on my left side, and I’ve got a funny left hand.
“Everybody thinks I’ve got arthritis. I look a bit funny when I’m rolling pastry, but I have no other difficulties whatsoever. I mean, I’m not as good at sport as I was, but I was let off
very lightly.”
Being a domestic goddess comes slightly less easily to Mary’s co-presenter, mother-of-three Claudia, 49.
She said: “I’m a very, very bad homeschool teacher. I can officially say that out loud. I am useless. I mean, with a 17-year-old, with a 14-year-old, and especially with a nine-year-old.
“The only thing I really say is, ‘Ask Dad’. I don’t know how I passed school. I don’t understand any of this.
“My 14-year-old, he loves baking. And in the first lockdown, you couldn’t get flour so we would make really hideous, flourless offerings.
“We baked for people in the community. I mean, the poor things probably went, ‘Not another flapjack, love. Can you come up with something else?’.”
- The latest edition of Radio Times is on sale today
Source: Read Full Article
