My Greatest Dishes

20 of the world's most celebrated chefs

have been invited to cook the four dishes

that have made them what they are today.

Oh, so good.

From their childhood favorites,

to the food that's brought them fame and fortune.

- To think this dish was a turning point in my life.

Each of the culinary giants

will reveal the very best of their skill.

You can't rush this.

Their passion

and their incredible stories.

Let the cooking begin.

Yes.

Best known as a TV judge

on British competitive cookery shows,

Prue Leith has serious credentials as a chef

in her own right.

Age 20 she started a catering company,

followed by a restaurant and a successful cookery school.

An acclaimed author of both food and fiction,

Prue has been instrumental

in transforming the British food scene.

Anybody who's under 40

will not ever have heard of me

as a cookery writer or a cook,

they'll think I'm just a set of taste buds

'cause of the "Great British Menu"

and now "Bake Off,"

they think I just eat for a living.

I was born in Cape Town

and I spent until I was 18 living in South Africa.

It was a really happy childhood.

I had two brothers and my mother was an actress,

my father was a businessman

and they brought us up all the same

so we got a good education.

And we had a pile of love,

I mean, we were a very close family.

So the first of my favorite dishes

is Peggy's passion fruit cream.

Peggy is my mum

and she was the worst cook you have ever met.

So this dish requires no cooking whatever,

it's a combination job.

Double cream, a bit of booze and passion fruit pulp.

You just mix up the ingredients and eat them

and they're delicious.

We used to have this every single year

for Christmas pudding.

It's very light

and this was served either with the Christmas pudding

or as an alternative.

The only other ingredient is the cream.

You want it to be whipped but not solid.

My mother was more astonished than proud at my career

because she never had any interest in food.

She once tried to make marmalade and burnt the lot

and the whole house smelt of burnt marmalade for days.

And then you want to put a bit of booze in it.

Now this could be anything you like, brandy, rum,

but I like Cointreau, it's got an orangey flavor.

Whip it some more.

Right, perfect.

Course you can serve it in anything you like,

but fancy glasses make it look

as if it's a little posher than it is.

I went to the university in Cape Town

and I thought I would be an actress

because my mother was a very famous actress

and I found I was no good at it.

So I then changed to art school

and I was no good at that either.

Finally I started French

and then I persuaded my father

that I ought to go to France to learn French

so I went to live in Paris for two years

and I learned a lot about French culture,

but I learned far more about French food.

You can't live in Paris

and not get interested in food.

That's my mother's, Peggy's, passion fruit cream.

Mm, it's quite boozy.

But you can't go wrong with cream, Cointreau, passion fruit.

Lovely.

In the early '60s I started my first catering company

in bedsitter in Earl's Court.

It did have a little kitchenette in the corner of the room

and the bath at one corner.

And fortunately my landlady had no sense of smell

so she had no idea that I was sort of

running a tiny little business from her upstairs.

I remember having all these sandwiches,

they were all over my dressing table, all over the bed.

But she never came in, she never noticed.

For my next dish as a real favorite

is bicolored soups.

The two soups are pea and watercress

and roasted parsnip.

When you put the two soups together

they look really dramatic.

It dates from my catering days

when you wanted a first course

that was very simple to achieve

and yet very pretty.

With the watercress and pea one,

start sweating a bit of garlic and an onion in butter.

When you've got the onions nice and soft

put in the celery and the potato

and let all that sweat a little bit.

One day I was in a really smart house

and I heard this woman who was my client

and somebody said to her,

this is absolutely delicious,

you must give me the name and telephone number

of the girl in the kitchen.

And the woman said,

oh no, she's just there for the washing up,

she said, I do all my own cooking,

I wouldn't dream of letting anybody else cook.

And I wanted to get hold of the doors

and swing them open and say she's lying

but of course I thought that wouldn't get me anywhere.

But what I did do is I put one of my cards

into every single pocket of all the guests' coats

and one of the guests rang me up

and he was the head of a big publishing company.

And he said, did you really cook the dinner?

And I said, yes I did.

And he said, well, would you like to come

and do our directors' lunches?

And that is perfect, celery is all softened,

potatoes are soft.

Throw in the frozen peas and the stock.

You shove the watercress in.

As it cooks it'll wilt down

and I will get it all in, I promise,

but it might be a bit of a struggle.

So for the parsnip soup,

same thing, start with sweating the onion.

Now I'm going to add the spices,

so that's turmeric, that's coriander,

cumin, and the ginger.

And then we're gonna fry everything together.

Smells lovely.

Yum.

And then add the roast parsnips.

Stock goes in.

This is really quite a spicy soup

but I think it needs the spice

because parsnips are so sweet.

So I'm gonna cover that, bring it to the boil,

and then I'm gonna whiz it all up.

My business was growing.

I had a little mews cottage in Paddington

and I had four people cooking

and a cleaner and a driver.

I was in the office, making up the menus, talk to clients,

getting up early in the morning to go to the markets,

And I realized that I actually get the same buzz

out of business as I get out of cooking.

So when you've got the watercress all wilted and soft

put the cold milk in it

because if it stays hot too long

you'll lose that brilliant, bright green color.

And now for the roast parsnip.

Same procedure, I'm going to add a bit of cream to it

and give it a whiz up.

The first time that I ever got a really important job

was to cook lunch

at which Princess Margret was to be the guest of honor.

And the main dish was to be lobster.

I had never cooked a lobster

but I thought, well,

it can't be that difficult, I'll mug it out.

So I read how to do it.

And I was busy splitting them all in half

when in comes the butler and he said, what are you doing?

And I said, I'm killing the lobsters.

And said, they're boiled, they're already dead.

In the end he became my head butler as my business grew,

but you know he never lost an opportunity

to tell people that I couldn't tell cooked lobsters,

he'd always tell the story.

I now have two soups of about the same consistency.

And then, just whirl them about.