Katharine Elizabeth Allen Stewart (23 July 1934 – 13 January 2013) was a British

cookery Cooking, cookery, or culinary arts is the art, science and craft of using heat to prepare food for consumption. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely, from grilling food over an open fire to using electric stoves, to baking in vario ...

writer whose columns in ''

The Times ''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...

'' made her a household name in the 1960s and 1970s. After training at the Westminster Hotel School, she worked as nanny for a rich family in Paris, where she gained a diploma from the Cordon Bleu school, and then spent two years working in the test kitchens of the

Nestlé Nestlé S.A. (; ; ) is a Switzerland, Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other me ...

company in

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. There she learned how to record recipes accurately and how to prepare food to be photographed. On return to England in 1959 she joined the magazine company Fleetway Publications as a junior cookery writer, and in 1966 became cookery editor on the ''

Woman's Journal ''Woman's Journal'' was an American women's rights periodical published from 1870 to 1931. It was founded in 1870 in Boston, Massachusetts, by Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Browne Blackwell as a weekly newspaper. In 1917 it was purchased by ...

'', a post she held for 32 years. In 1966 she also began to contribute to ''The Times'', where until 1978 she had a column every Saturday and a whole page of recipes once a month. In 1972 she published ''The Times Cookery Book'', a classic of which her obituary in ''The Telegraph'' said:

"Unlike some recipe books from the early 1970s, Katie Stewart's book remains timelessly useful. Alongside the glossily pristine productions of
Gordon Ramsay Gordon James Ramsay (; born ) is a British chef, restaurateur, television personality and writer. His restaurant group, Gordon Ramsay Restaurants, was founded in 1997 and has been awarded 17 Michelin stars overall; it currently holds a tot ...
,
Sophie Dahl Sophie Dahl (born Sophie Holloway on 15 September 1977, later taking her mother's name for professional reasons) is an English author and former fashion model. Her first novel, ''The Man with the Dancing Eyes'', was published in 2003 followed b ...
, Ottolenghi et al, The Times Cookery Book is almost always recognizable from its broken spine and pages dog-eared and stained with the oil and gravy of many years' service. Clean replacements are hard to find."

She published a number of other books, including ''The Pooh Cook Book'' (1971) and ''The Sociable Cook'' (2001), and in the early 1970s made three series of ''Cooking with Katie'' programmes for

Grampian Television Grampian Television was the original name of the Channel 3 service for the north of Scotland founded in 1961 and now named STV. The northern region's coverage area includes the Northern Isles, Western Isles, Highlands (except Fort William and ...

References

1934 births 2013 deaths English food writers English women non-fiction writers The Times people Women cookbook writers Women food writers {{England-nonfiction-writer-stub