Prue Leith, a judge on “The Great British Baking Show,” was once stranded at sea — and rescued by an Italian fisherman.
Leith recalled the harrowing experience in an interview published Friday by The Mirror. The chef said she was spending a leisurely afternoon on a motorboat off the Sardinian coast when the engine failed — and the weather began to worsen.
“I couldn’t start it and the wind was getting up,” Leith told the outlet. “I thought, ‘This has the makings of a really bad novel.’”
She continued, “People would pass, not close enough to shout to them but close enough to wave and I’d be waving wildly and they just waved back, thinking I was just being friendly.”
While the baker didn’t specify when the incident occurred, she vividly recalled spending the entire day stranded. Leith famously joined the “Baking Show” in 2017 to replace exiting judge Mary Berry — but were it not for a Sardinian fisherman, she may never have.
“He was so angry with me,” Leith told The Mirror of her rescuer. “He said, ‘You tourists, you risk your lives. You could have drifted all the way to Corsica!’ And he just gave me absolutely blazes. And there was I… sunburnt,” she recalled.
“I was thirsty, I’d had a whole day of absolute misery,” Leith added. “But he was quite right and I was very foolish.”
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“The Great British Baking Show” — originally called “The Great British Bake Off” in Britain but retitled in the U.S., where Pillsbury owns the name “Bake Off” — sees a few chosen bakers across the U.K. compete for television glory.
Leith herself, however, has said she doesn’t particularly care for baking.
“Of course, I have made thousands of desserts and lots of wedding cakes and I’m so interested in the skills, but that’s not what I would naturally do,” she said in a November interview with People. “I think they hired me [as a “Baking Show” judge] because I have a great set of taste buds, not for my piping skills.”
The South African-born chef recently made headlines after revealing that she drowned a litter of kittens as a child at her mother’s request.
“Too many kittens was a frequent occurrence and there had come a day when my mother, unable to find homes for yet another litter, decided to drown the latest batch,” Leith told HuffPost in October.
Her newly published memoir, “I’ll Try Anything Once: My Life on a Plate,” chronicles that particular incident and many more across her childhood and winding career, including her “Baking Show” apex.