Katharine Elizabeth Allen Stewart (23 July 1934 – 13 January 2013) was a British cookery writer whose columns in The Times made her a household name in the 1960s and 1970s.
[1] After training at the Westminster Hotel School, she worked as nanny for a rich family in Paris, where she gained a diploma from the Cordon Bleu school, and then spent two years working in the test kitchens of the Nestlé company in White Plains, New York.
There she learned how to record recipes accurately and how to prepare food to be photographed.
In 1966 she also began to contribute to The Times, where until 1978 she had a column every Saturday and a whole page of recipes once a month.
Alongside the glossily pristine productions of Gordon Ramsay, Sophie Dahl, Ottolenghi et al, The Times Cookery Book is almost always recognizable from its broken spine and pages dog-eared and stained with the oil and gravy of many years' service.