Lady Macleans Cook Book

Veronica, Lady Maclean (1920-2005) was a British food writer and hotelier. Her family owned Creggan's Inn on the shores of Loch Fyne in Argyll. Her first book pioneered recipes which she had collected from family and friends which she described as family or country house cooking, as opposed to the classical French haute cuisine which was the universal style in hotels and restaurants in the 1960s. Her first book, Lady Maclean's Cook Book (1966) was enlivened by such dishes as the Duchess of Devonshire's fish soup, Lady Diana Cooper's blackcurrant leaf ice, Lady Lovat's oxtail, Fitz's "plov from Samarkand" - and went through several printings. Her other cookery books included Lady Maclean's Diplomatic Dishes, 1975, Lady Maclean's Book of Sauces and Surprises, 1978, Lady Maclean's Second Helpings and More Diplomatic Dishes, 1984). Veronica Nell Fraser was born in London on 2 December 1920, the fourth of five children of the 16th Lord Lovat. After service in a mobile ambulance unit in France at the start of the Second World War, she met and married Lt. Alan Phipps in 1940, who after serving with distinction on the Arctic Convoys and in the Mediterranean was killed ashore at Leros in 1943. In 1946 she married Fitzroy Maclean. After serving as MP for Lancaster from 1941, Maclean was made a baronet in 1957 making his wife Lady Maclean.