Great British Bake Off’s Prue Leith has confessed she once accidentally knifed a fellow chef in her own restaurant – then paid him off.
Prue, 79, said she was pregnant and “unbalanced” when she fell preparing food in a busy kitchen, stabbing a colleague in the leg on the way down.
She revealed the incident happened in the mid-Seventies at Leith’s, the Michelin-starred restaurant she owned in London’s Notting Hill.
Prue, 79, said in an interview: “I was standing in for a chef who had fallen off a ladder and hurt his leg. I’d cooked a lot in my catering company and I’ve taught a lot, but I’ve never been a restaurant chef.
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"I was pregnant at the time and very, very unbalanced,” added the mum of two.
“I was standing by the cooker holding a very short sharp knife. While I was trying to save myself as I fell over, I stabbed the second chef in the leg.
She said that despite the man being “sympathetic”, she decided to compensate him. “He was a nice guy and we gave him quite a lot of money as he wanted to go back to Spain anyway.
"I felt compensation was due. Being stabbed in the leg by the boss was not nice. Nobody in Leith’s restaurant would ever cook with me after that.”
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Prue sold her business in 1993 to become a writer. Her son Danny Kruger, who she was carrying at the time of the incident, runs the Only Connect charity for prisoners and ex-offenders with wife Emma.
Now 44, he is dad to Prue’s three grandchildren, and they live in part of her Cotswolds house. Prue admitted last week she did not spend enough time with Danny and daughter Li-Da, now a film maker, when they were growing up.
She said: “I was a bad mother and I’m a bad grandmother, in the sense of time spent with them. I adore my grandchildren, but I’m quite tough with them.
“They know Nana won’t have toys in her side of the house. I was trying to cook with a train set underfoot and people playing with nerf guns.” She has said adopting Li-Da, orphaned at 16 months by Cambodia’s brutal Khmer Rouge, was the best decision she’s made.
The Lost Son by Prue Leith, published by Quercus, is out now. It’s the third and final book in her Angelotti Chronicles fiction series.
