Georgina Landemare, the celebrity cook of her day, came to Mrs Churchill to offer her services for the duration of the war. She would be giving up all the grand banquets and parties she normally catered for as one of the most sought-after cooks in England.

Knowing from experience the salutary effect Mrs Landemare’s cooking had on her husband, Mrs Churchill did not hesitate to accept. For years the Churchills had stretched their elastic domestic budget to employ Mrs Landemare as an occasional cook for house parties at Chartwell. A plump, kind-hearted widow, who was in many respects a real-life incarnation of television’s Mrs Bridges from Upstairs, Downstairs, Mrs Landemare kept the Churchills happy with her large repertoire of beautifully presented Anglo-French dishes.

Mrs Landemare had risen from her first job as scullery maid in the dying years of Victoria’s reign to become cook to the nobility of the Twenties and Thirties, specialising in Newmarket racing breakfasts, Cowes Week lunches and country-house ball suppers. Mrs Churchill was “enchanted” by her offer, she wrote later, “because I knew she would be able to make the best out of rations and that everyone in the household would be happy and contented . . .”

The domestic suite in the Cabinet War Rooms below Westminster, which opened to the public for the first time last week, includes a tiny, windowless bunker kitchen where Mrs Landemare was quite prepared to fricassée a chicken, even had the Nazis been at the door. But the occasion never arose, and instead she cooked for the Churchills in their flat above the Cabinet War Rooms, which was known as the No 10 annexe, or at No 10 itself, a quarter of a mile away.

But her loyalty was certainly tried. “One thing that tested her a lot,” recalls Churchill’s daughter, Mary Soames, “was when my father, to show that it was ‘business as usual’, sometimes decided to use the dining room at No 10, instead of the annexe. So darling Mrs Landemare would have to transfer from one kitchen to another, sometimes at a rather late stage, and be driven round in the duty car, with the covered dishes, wrapped in shawls to keep them warm, clasped tightly on her lap.”

Even more trying were the events of October 14, 1940, when, during an air raid, Mrs Landemare’s attention was distracted from the delicate business of turning out a mousseline pudding by an anxious prime minister chivvying her out of the No 10 kitchen and into an air-raid shelter. Three minutes later the kitchen was, Churchill wrote, “a heap of black dust and rubble”.

The bunker kitchen at the Cabinet War Rooms has been equipped by Mrs Landemare’s granddaughter, Edwina Brocklesby, with the waffle iron, pastry cutters, jelly moulds and copper saucepans that she inherited on her grandmother’s death in 1979. There are no mechanical whisks or other such gadgetry on display, because Mrs Landemare scorned such “modern” devices.

Despite rationing, Mrs Landemare spared no effort in producing what her employer liked. And what he liked, she told the television interviewer Joan Bakewell in 1973, was underdone beef and Irish stew, the stew to be reheated the following day if any was left.

Her hours were long. She was at her post until Churchill had made his last demand of the kitchen, which might be after midnight, and was on duty again for breakfast. Yet, for Mrs Landemare, it was reward enough that, on VE night, just after Churchill had addressed the jubilant crowds in Whitehall, he should break away from his Cabinet colleagues to shake her warmly by the hand and thank her “most cordially” as he could not have managed all the way through the war without her. Less than three months later Churchill lost the general election; his daughter Mary found the cook making honey sandwiches saying: “I don’t know what the world’s coming to, but I thought I might make some tea.”

Mrs Landemare worked on with the Churchills through the years of opposition, too, and was back at No 10 with them when Churchill was returned to power in 1951. “Mrs Landemare was very calm and organised,” recalls Lady Soames. “If I went into the kitchen half an hour or so before a big dinner, I would quite often find her sitting, with everything under control, reading The Sporting Life.”

The Soameses’ son, Nicholas, the Conservative MP, concurs: “Mrs Landemare was a fantastic woman, and I am sure Mrs Bridges was modelled on her. She produced the most wonderful chocolate eclairs for children’s tea and glorious devilled kidneys. I am still a great fan, and I have her cookbook. It is a work of art, full of delicious, old-fashioned recipes and with a splendid section on savouries, which you simply don’t get in any ghastly modern cookbook. It is timeless cooking.”

Churchill (on the Thames with Clementine, in 1940) cherished his 57-year marriage: "My most brilliant achievement," he quipped, "was my ability to persuade my wife to marry me."

Imperial War Museum

Pour 4 personne(s)

500 gr de petites cerises noires si possible légérements acides
3 cuillérées à soupe de farine
3 cuillérées à soupe sucre en poudre
3 oeufs
1 pincée de sel
1/4 de l. de lait.

Moi je mets 4 oeufs et du kirch...qui dit mieux?