Saturday Morning star James Martin is ever-grateful to his grandmother for introducing him to cooking. However, it causes him great pain to think of her final days, during which he claimed she “wasted away on hospital food”.
The first-class chef has since made it his mission to improve the quality of hospital food. So, he joined forces with the BBC for a documentary series called Operation Hospital Food.
More than a decade after his grandmother Marjorie’s death, James Martin – on with a repeat of his weekend cooking show every Saturday over the summer – recalled growing up eating the food she cooked and the influence it had on his career.
James Martin thanks his grandmother for his career
In an article he wrote for the Mirror in 2012, James detailed how his grandmother’s cooking influenced his career. Almost always “surrounded by good food”, he hardly remembers eating canned food, which was limited to very “odd occasions”.
Meat and eggs from the farm and vegetables from his grandparents’ allotment were a staple.
“My grandmother was a huge influence in my life and inadvertently inspired me to be a chef. She baked and cooked, and she was just wonderful. If I could be 10% of what she was, I’d be a lucky man,” the chef wrote.
The Saturday Morning star grew up watching his grandmother shop for fresh bread and bacon. His earliest memories are of his home filling up with the “smell of cooking fat” as Marjorie used “one of those old enamel gas cookers with red buttons” to grill bacon.
His grandparents encouraged him to cook and he worked in a local kitchen before going to catering college. But his grandparents never lived to watch him at the peak of his fame.
James said: “Sadly, my grandfather died before I became known and soon afterwards, just as I was beginning to become more well-known, my grandmother was admitted to York Hospital, where she spent four months before passing away, 12 years ago now.”
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Celebrity chef is ‘angry’ over her final days
James was deeply hurt to see his grandmother spend her final days eating hospital food, which was nowhere close to what he grew up eating.
Recalling Marjorie’s time in the hospital, her grandson wrote: “I used to drive 200 miles to visit her there as often as possible and I was shocked by what I saw. It was hard to see someone I loved so much apparently wasting away.”
It was “heartbreaking” for James to see her eat mashed potato, meat, pies and tarts. He said the items were “not just appalling but also chewy and tough”. She ended up losing about a quarter of her body weight by the time she passed away.
What Marjorie went through had a “profound effect” on James. He said that “to see someone like that suffering so much was one of the most traumatic experiences of his life”.
James added that he knows she’d have died anyway, but “it still made me angry and that’s why I wanted to do something”.
As a result, the celebrity chef teamed up with Scarborough Hospital to offer better food to its patients.
Read more: James Martin’s Saturday Morning ‘rested’ as ITV shows repeats
James Martin’s Saturday Morning is on Saturdays at 9.30am on ITV1.
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