Great British Bake Off judge Prue Leith reveals she nearly KILLED 30 people with food poisoning
PRUE Leith has revealed she almost killed 30 people with a dodgy chicken mayonnaise.
The Great British Bake Off judge confessed that 28 people ended up in hospital – with one man in critical care – when her company, Leith’s Good Food, was booked for a catering job.
Speaking on stage at the Rondo theatre in Bath on the first ever night of her Nothing In Moderation tour, Prue said: “You can’t be in catering for 30 years without something going disastrously wrong.
“What you don’t want to do is to poison your best customers.”
Recalling when her company worked for a city firm, Prue, 82, said they were asked to put together the creamy egg based dish for 25 people.
The following day she said five more guests were added and while making the extra food they made a grave mistake.
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Prue explained: “The cooks poached another chicken while the flesh was still warm, which is a crime, and they mixed with the chicken that was already there.
“And when it got to the offices they had no refrigeration, and it was a very hot day.
“This chicken sat there and lunch was very late and we managed to poison everybody.”
Prue added: “It haunts me that episode as everybody was ill.
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“All 30 people but two of them ended up in hospital and one of them was in critical care as he was very old and was a High Court judge.
“He could have ended up in the morgue and not in hospital. That was a wake-up call.”
Prue, who replaced Mary Berry as a Bake Off judge alongside Paul Hollywood in 2017, started her company in the Sixties and went on to have huge success – with a number of training companies and restaurants.
Despite this early error, Prue confessed the most embarrassing moment of her career to date was when she accidentally revealed the winner of the hit Channel 4 baking show in the same year she joined.
Prue, who was abroad at the time and on a different time zone, congratulated winner Sophie Faldo on taking the crown – hours before the pre-recorded show was due to air.
She said on stage of the moment: “My greatest embarrassment was tweeting thee Bake Off winner. I can’t believe I did it.”
