Dame Prue Leith almost killed 30 people with a badly cooked chicken.
Dame Prue Leith nearly killed 30 people due to badly cooked chicken
The 'Great British Bake Off' star - who is known for her incredible talents in the kitchen - has revealed 28 people were hospitalised and one man left in critical care after her company Leith's Good Food botched a catering job for a city firm.
Speaking in Bath's Rondo Theatre on her 'Nothing In Moderation' tour, she recalled: "You can’t be in catering for 30 years without something going disastrously wrong.
“What you don’t want to do is to poison your best customers."
The 82-year-old star revealed her company had been tasked with making chicken mayonnaise for 25 guests, while another five people were added to the list the next day.
She explained: "The cooks poached another chicken while the flesh was still warm, which is a crime, and they mixed with the chicken that was already there.
“And when it got to the offices they had no refrigeration, and it was a very hot day. This chicken sat there and lunch was very late and we managed to poison everybody.”
Prue admitted the incident still "haunts" her, with everyone getting ill and almost all of them needing treatment.
She said: “It haunts me that episode as everybody was ill.
“All 30 people but two of them ended up in hospital and one of them was in critical care as he was very old and was a High Court judge.
“He could have ended up in the morgue and not in hospital. That was a wake-up call.”
However, Prue insisted the most embarrassing moment of her career wasn't the catering disaster, but actually the moment she congratulated 'Bake Off' winner Sophie Faldo in 2017 - her first year on the show - hours before it went on air due to a misunderstanding with time zones.
She added: "My greatest embarrassment was tweeting the 'Bake Off' winner. I can’t believe I did it.”
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