A Recipe For Happiness

When Match of the Day presenter Jimmy Hill succumbed to dementia, his wife Bryony determined not to fade with him. She reflects on the healing power of growing and cooking your own.

- Angela Wintle

When Bryony Hill reluctantly accepted that her husband Jimmy, the much loved former footballer and sports presenter, needed fulltime nursing care for his Alzheimer’s disease, she was faced with the stark reality of living on her own for the first time in nearly 40 years.

“As I was no longer cooking for two, it would have been so easy to rely on sandwiches and fall victim to what my mother, a nurse during World War II, called ‘bread and butter anaemia’,” she says.

But she determined not to buckle, and resolved that she would cook food for herself the way her mother had done when her father died.

Bryony also threw herself, with renewed vigour, into nurturing her own seasonal produce on the two-acre plot she had cultivated behind her 14th-century cottage on the outskirts of Hurstpierpoint in West Sussex. And now, with the encouragement of friends, she has produced a charming cookbook in which she shares not just her recipes, but also gardening tips and wonderfully evocative photographs charting the changing flowers, vegetables and wildlife to be found in her garden each season.

“The recipes are a mixture of family stalwarts and ones I have conjured up or interpreted,” she says. “It’s the sort of food I enjoy: uncomplicated, satisfying and full of natural flavours.

“I’m not evangelical about what I eat, but I do love fresh and tasty food. I don’t believe in intricate recipes or ingredients that sit in the fridge and never get used more than once. I use what I have to hand, and a lot of it comes from my garden.”

Bryony grew up in Bolney, just a few miles from her current home, but moved away to London before returning to Sussex with Jimmy in 1985.