The Edinburgh cookery queen who's saying goodbye to her popular and unique school

As the principal and founder of this Queen Street institution, since it opened back in 2009, she’s been marinated and baked into the essence of this place.

However, it has become time for her to retire, and pass the mantle onto the new executive chair, Genius Foods creator and former pupil, Lucinda Bruce-Gardyne, and the rest of the team, including new head teacher, Caroline Lamont. They have ambitious plans to turn the place into a hub for Scotland’s food and drink.

After the hours that Burrell put in, especially in the early days of the school, when she was developing the lessons, it’s time to step away.

However, I can’t imagine that she is suddenly going to take it easy. No chance.

“After nearly 17 years here, I’m thinking, what am I going to do? And I don’t really like the idea of stopping. Some of my friends have retired and that’s it. I do want to try and keep my brain working and find ways to do something,” says Burrell, who graduated from Queen Margaret College with an HND in Institutional Management in Catering and Domestic Administration in the Seventies.

Another practical book - potentially on ‘mum’s tips’, since her two grown-up daughters are always asking her for advice - is a potential idea.

She’s already contributed to two - Leiths Book of Cakes and Leiths Bakery Bible, which were published before ENTCS, back when she was principal of Leiths School of Food and Wine in London, and taught students including Diana Henry.

Despite her impressive career trajectory, which also included a spell at Edinburgh’s Woman and Home Cook School on Manor Place, Burrell remains very approachable.

She’s extremely proud of the school’s alumni, and, except for the very short course participants, remembers almost every student by name.

Sometimes they pop in to say hello.

Edinburgh’s culinary scene alone certainly owes a lot to her.

Among many others, she remembers teaching Rachel Morgan from the Capital’s bakeries Twelve Triangles, MasterChef contestant and author Rukmini Iyer; and Roly Simpson from East Pizzas. There are those who’ve moved away to do well elsewhere, like Sam November, who is just taking up a job as pastry chef at the new Six Senses hotel in London; Cheri Denham, author of The Irish Kitchen, and Ed Barrow, who started up The Monday Pasta Club and wrote a matching book, which is on display in one of the school’s cabinets.

“I’m so very proud, “ says Burrell.

There’s also Scotland’s youngest Michelin-starred chef, Sam Yorke, from Heron in Leith.

“He’s done incredibly well. He was very focused when he came. He’s quite young. It was a summer course and, when he left, I’d got him a stage at Castle Terrace with Dominic Jack,” says Burrell. “That was a hard kitchen to work in, but I think he just put in the hours. He got his head down. He worked really hard. So he’s always had this real drive and work ethic and it's great that we were able to be there”.

The best times at ENTCS have been seeing the graduates do well.

The hardest times were the Covid years, which kicked off just as the school was celebrating its 10th birthday.

“I had to furlough all the staff, which was fantastic, because otherwise we wouldn't have survived. But it was soul destroying,” she says. “The day before lockdown was the last day of term for our six month course students, and they’d had their exam the day before, and came in to get the results. And we all went, ‘Well, this is really weird, isn’t it?’ I had to make lemonade scones from my kitchen, and do some videos. There’s loads on YouTube of my husband looking terrified as we’re making pizzas.”

Burrell definitely prefers the in-person nature of cooking classes in the school’s immaculately gleaming open-plan stainless steel kitchen, where students wear their signature white apron and black hair scarf.

“We did a few online courses back then, which I hated. You can’t see the people, because they've got their camera pointing at the top of their head and you can’t really help them if somethings going wrong,” she says. “When we do courses here, everything is prepared, measured and ready to go, so everybody starts from the same baseline. Whereas, for online, I would send all the details of what they needed to prep in advance. A lot of people just had the packets there, and they were weighing as they went. So it was really hard.”

They say that lots of people got into cooking during lockdown. However, Burrell didn’t really notice this post Covid trend at the school.

Still, they have people travelling from Glasgow, Newcastle and even London to do their sessions, “We’re fairly unique in that we are the only Cookery School of this type that’s north of Birmingham,” Burrell says.

However, it seems that it’s sometimes hard to predict what courses will be popular. She has noticed that the trend cycle moves increasingly fast, and that cooking television programmes - like The Great British Bake Off, which was presented by Burrell’s friend and former colleague from her time at Leiths School of Food and Wine, Dame Prue Leith - don’t wield the influence they once did.

“Everything is fast now, with not so much concentration, so you have to adapt to that. We put on more short snappy evenings - one and a half or two hour classes, so that people don’t have to spend their whole day on one thing,” she says, with sessions including choux pastry and sushi proving attractive.

When the school first opened, the curry making short courses were consistently booked up, but that suddenly tailed off for no obvious reason.

They are, however, noticing an interest in Korean and Chinese cuisine, and knife skills have remained a popular course. Does anyone ever cut themselves?

According to Burrell, they do; “Especially if they’re using the wrong implement, like a serrated knife to slice an orange or something”.

The team always has to stay one step ahead, when it comes to health and safety, and the smoke alarm is triggered regularly.

However, the most memorable kitchen nightmare was the man who drained a pan of potatoes through a colander and straight onto the floor. “I just thought, what on earth are you doing?”

I’m sure there are one or two things that Burrell, who will remain on the ENTCS board as non‑executive founder director, won’t miss.

It’ll be very different without her on the frontline, but, as she says, it’s time for them to enter a “new era”.

www.entcs.co.uk

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