MORETON Hall’s Leiths Cookery School students were in the audience this week when not one but two top chefs and cookery writers came to town.

Great British Bake Off judge Prue Leith came to the school, in Weston Rhyn, to talk about her career, which has seen her shape how people eat and think about food.

Founder of the Leiths School of Food and Wine, she has worked as a caterer, restaurateur, teacher, TV cook, food journalist, novelist and cookery book author.

She has been a leading figure in campaigns to improve food in schools and hospitals and she’s probably best known now as a judge on the nation’s favourite TV programme.

Prue is also an aunt to Peta Leith, a professional pastry chef and food writer who trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York and spent seven years as a pastry chef at The Ivy.

Now in a joint venture, Prue and Peta have pooled their passion for food to produce a cookbook. ‘The Vegetarian Kitchen’ and their Booka bookshop-hosted event at Oswestry’s Wynnstay Hotel recently was to talk about this new collaboration.

In conversation with Moreton Hall’s Caroline Lang, Prue and Peta revealed how a planned book on cakes and pastries evolved into a vegetarian cookery book (although still with plenty of cakes and pastries too).

Leiths student Tilly Prytherch said: “It was great to hear the different recipe ideas – it was an unforgettable experience."

Caroline added: “For all of us gathered in the Wynnstay for this Booka Bookshop event, this was the ultimate foodie treat.

"Two truly inspiring women talking about their passion for food and then the opportunity to go home and try out some of the mouth-watering recipes for ourselves”.

The pair discussed the rise of vegetarianism and how our interest in food from around the globe means that vegetarian food need never be dull, and how she had felt stepping into Mary Berry’s shoes.