One of the first female chefs to win a Michelin star, Joyce Molyneux changed the way we eat. Now a new book brings her food to a modern audience.

There aren’t many cooks who write recipe books in their 80th year, but then Joyce Molyneux isn’t your average chef. “Who?” many of you may ask, but that won’t bother Molyneux – she has never been one to sing her own praises. Until her retirement in 1999, she had quietly set about turning The Carved Angel in Dartmouth into one of Britain’s original destination restaurants.

“We did fairly simple cooking,” she says. “Bourgeois home cooking, you might say. We didn’t go in for fancy nibbles or anything like that – just two or three ingredients on the plate, not like you get now.”

That’s as may be, but in 1978 this “simple” approach saw Molyneux become one of the first women anywhere to be awarded a Michelin star – even today, you can count on two hands the number of similarly garlanded female chefs working in the UK, and one of those is French.

(via The Guardian)