With more than 70 cookbooks to her name and countless television shows – including a six-year stint as a judge on The Great British Bake Off – Mary Berry has certainly achieved a lot in her career. And at the age of 87, having spent more than five decades doing what she loves, she still shows no signs of slowing down, quipping, “There’s plenty of time to rest in heaven.”
But while Mary is a national treasure, brilliant cook and an all-round icon to her many millions of fans, when she’s at home she tells us that she’s simply a wife, mother and grandmother, and that life is pretty run-of-the-mill. Nobody treats her like a celebrity – in fact, her husband Paul usually nods off when her shows come on.
“My family do watch my series, but my husband usually falls asleep during them. Interestingly, he doesn’t when it’s rugby or cricket,” she says, drily. “But I do have tremendous support from Paul. I’ll say, ‘I’ve got another series’ and he’ll say, ‘You enjoy what you do, so off you go and I’ll be here when you get back.’
“When I’m away, I leave things for him to eat, though, because he’s not a cook and he’ll end up just opening the cornflake packet,” she adds with a laugh. “When I come back, he’ll say ‘I’ve missed you’, which of course is very comforting, and he always has a nice glass of chilled wine ready for me.”
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The couple have been married for 56 years now and share two children, Thomas and Annabel (tragically, their middle son, William, died in a car crash aged just 19, in 1989). And three years ago, the couple moved to Henley from Buckinghamshire to be closer to their brood (Annabel now has three children and Thomas has two).
“Being closer to them has changed our lives. I’m very family oriented – they’re my world,” smiles Mary.
Living near to the children was also a godsend when Mary suffered a fall last year, while picking sweet peas in the garden.
She broke her hip and had to undergo surgery to repair it, spending 10 nights in hospital, and when she returned home she was forced to slow down and let her loved ones rally round.
“That was hard for me,” she admits. “I remember the doctor telling me that the recovery would take around
a year and a half, and I thought, ‘Not for me!’ But he’s right – I still have quite a way to go before I’m fully healed. It will be a little while longer, but I’m getting there.
“It’s quite frightening to break your hip because it’s painful and you think you’re never going to get better. You can’t do your shoelaces up, you certainly can’t get your trousers on and you think, ‘Gosh, am I going to be like this all the time?’”
Thankfully, with the help of physiotherapy, she was able to return to work a few months later, and she’s relishing being busy again, admitting that, although her family is her focus, work is also imperative to her happiness.
“I’m very privileged to still be doing the job that I love, and I really don’t think about age. I keep busy because that’s what I like to do. I’m not keen on lounging around at home and doing nothing,” she says.
Mary began her career in the 1960s, when she was appointed cookery editor of Housewife magazine and later Ideal Home, following training at The Cordon Bleu in Paris and Bath School of Home Economics.
Then, in the 70s, she launched her TV career, appearing on Afternoon Plus with Judith Chalmers. She continued writing books and filming television series for the BBC from her home in Buckinghamshire through the 80s, and in the 90s she launched her Aga Workshops, a cookery school at home, teaching 12,000 visitors over the course of 16 years.
Since leaving her role as a judge on Bake Off in 2016, when the show moved to Channel 4, she’s gone on to front her own series, such as Mary Berry Everyday, Classic Mary Berry and Mary Berry’s Simple Comforts.
This week, she returns to our screens with a new series called Mary Berry – Cook & Share, in which she’ll whip up fare that’s ideal for eating with friends and loved ones.
Over six episodes, she’ll give us fuss-free recipes that will work for big celebrations as well as intimate meals for two, and explore how food can bring communities together.
“We are much more informal than we used to be – is everybody having smart dinner parties? Not really. We’re more casual these days and it’s all about sharing platters, so I thought that focusing on food you can eat together would be perfect,” explains Mary.
Showing that she still has plenty of energy, she travels to some of her favourite UK destinations, including Scotland, where she dishes out hearty fare to the Edinburgh Marathon runners and visits Edgbaston cricket ground in Birmingham to serve a nutritious salmon dish to England and Yorkshire cricketer Jonny Bairstow.
She also has fun at Wilderness Festival in Oxfordshire, where she samples the food on offer and does some cooking of her own.
“I really had a good run around in Britain, doing all sorts of things,” she says, adding that it was such a relief to be able to travel again, post-pandemic.
“It’s wonderful to get out now, because I’m quite ancient and so is my husband and we were very much housebound during the pandemic. But I can’t complain because we’ve been very lucky.”
Mary and Paul’s only close call with Covid came last Christmas. “I hosted on Christmas Day last year and I remember my son’s family arriving at the door and saying, ‘We’ve just tested positive for Covid.’ So I quickly carved the turkey and made up a sort of picnic for them, put it in a box and they took it home. It was lucky that they had just tested, before coming over, but it was sad and there were tears from the children,” says Mary.
To make up for the letdown, Mary is hoping this Christmas will be bigger and better, and although we’re only just heading into autumn, she talks excitedly about her 2022 festive plans.
“Because Paul and I hosted last year, we’ll either be at my daughter’s or my son’s, and I’m looking forward to all of us hopefully being together,” she says.
“I’m also going to be doing another Christmas programme, because I always do one. We’re still at the stage of chatting about it, but it’ll probably be a fairly classic programme, because that’s what I know – and that’s what my own family love.”
Given her hefty workload at an age when most people would have long since retired, Mary certainly seems a driven person. But she dismisses the idea and says it’s simply that she loves what she does.
“My prime objective is to share my love of cooking and to make it accessible. My recipes aren’t complicated, they don’t have too many ingredients and they have simple methods. I want to encourage people to enjoy cooking in their own home as much as I can,” she says.
And on the subject of her being a national treasure, she laughs.
“I don’t think of myself as a celebrity or national treasure. But I always take it with goodwill and say, ‘Thank you very much,’” she says.
And as for her proudest achievement, Mary admits that it was being made a Dame last year in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours list, for her services to culinary arts, which she received from Prince Charles in a ceremony at Windsor Castle.
“You daren’t really believe it and I feel very honoured. It’s funny, because it doesn’t seem real – in my mind I feel that
I’m just a cook,” she shrugs.
That, she might be – and a brilliant one at that. But to millions out there, she is so much more.
Mary Berry – Cook & Share is on Wednesday at 8pm on BBC Two and her tie-in book (BBC Books, £26) is out now.
