By Editor,Richard Godwin

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It is hard to imagine anywhere more English than the Phyllis Court Club in Henley-on-Thames, where I am due to meet Dame Mary Berry. I motor up to the grand Thameside manor under a lustrous blue sky. The lawns are trim, the flowerbeds discreetly showy and various vigorous silver-haired people are playing croquet in blazers – a picture of advanced good health. It feels like a little slice of The Great British Bake Off heaven. I wouldn’t be astonished to learn that the entire space is made of Victoria sponge.

And here she is, sitting in a bright reception room, in a floral blouse, neatly ironed slacks and Russell & Bromley loafers: Dame Mary Berry, queen of the all-in-one cake, doyenne of the traybake, and surely one of the most recognisable women in Britain, if you consider her pan-generational appeal. This nation’s favourite baker, who turned 90 in March, has just starred in a fashion campaign for British heritage brand Holland Cooper, looking cool in a three-piece tweed trouser suit. The label’s founder, Jade Holland Cooper, says, ‘I chose to work with Mary because she represents a blend of timeless sophistication and modern relevance, proving that true style is ageless.’

‘What could be better?’ as Berry says often in her new BBC six-parter, Mary 90, a leisurely buffet of a series (there’s a book, too), in which she remakes many of her greatest-hit recipes with celebrity guests including Gabby Logan, Alan Titchmarsh and Jamie Oliver.

Berry proves exactly as welcoming as you might hope, particularly when I answer yes to one of her first questions: do I cook? ‘Well done! Gosh. How wonderful! It’s lovely to meet someone who really does cook.’

She is also pin-sharp for her age: engaged and curious. ‘The best thing about turning 90 is that I’m well,’ she says. ‘I’m enthusiastic for the future. I have a wonderful family. I’m immensely fortunate that I still have my husband, who is 93. Many of my girlfriends are widows.’

She and her husband, Paul Hunnings, recently moved to Henley from nearby Buckinghamshire, she tells me. ‘It’s a perfect house for us,’ she says. ‘We moved 30 miles just to be nearer the children.’ So this is where she comes to keep fit?

‘You must be joking!’ she says. ‘I don’t do gyms. What a waste of time! What’s wrong with having a nice run out with a dog?’

I correct myself. This is where she comes to take her leisure? ‘Yes, that’s more like it.’ She and Hunnings will be taking part in a croquet ‘roller’ this afternoon. They have been married since 1966 but this is the first sporting activity they have tried together. ‘My husband has always been a keen sportsman. He’s frail now. but he can still play croquet. And he plays well because he has an eye for a ball.’

She is not sporty, she stresses, but she is outdoorsy – ‘The outdoors is what makes us healthy, what makes us well’ – and she is competitive. ‘Oh, absolutely. I’m competitive. Of course I’m competitive!’ It would be extremely difficult to maintain a 60-year-career if one wasn’t, I suspect. But, really, by ‘competitive’ I think what she means is she has standards. ‘I was always terribly domestic. I still am. Tidy kitchen.’

She likes a striped lawn – she and Alan Titchmarsh bonded over this – and she can’t bear exposed midriffs. Her colleagues, apparently, still bring her their delicates to wash and she ironed Paul Hollywood’s shirt on the first day of Bake Off. Her grandson once turned up to a book launch in ‘crumpled trousers, crumpled shirt, handsome face and charming the birds off the trees but oh! I thought, why didn’t you just run an iron over it? Because it looks scruffy. I don’t want to be scruffy. I like everything ironed and I fuss about it.’

As if to emphasise her adherence to traditional British values, she brings up Prince William, almost out of nowhere. ‘I mean he’s really such a wonderful man, you know. We’re so lucky with our royalty, aren’t we?’

She has met him and his children numerous times across various charity events down the years, she explains. ‘He slept on the streets, you know. He wants to find out about how everybody is in the country. He lives for all of us. I admire him. He sets an example.’

She is always struck by how tenderly he treats the Princess of Wales. ‘There’s always a little arm around the back, encouraging her. Early on when she started doing public life, he would chip in and say something really nice and encouraging, you know? He’s obviously immensely proud of her. They give us – well, they give their life to all of us.’

And so in a way has Mary Berry. Her career is, by now, part of the fabric of British life. She was never very academic, much to the disappointment of her father, Alleyne Berry, who served as Mayor of Bath and helped establish the city’s university. ‘At the beginning of term I would arrive at school early to get the desk at the back and then you were not troubled by teachers.’ She was always waiting for the holidays – at least until she brought a treacle sponge home from her first cooking class, and her father pronounced it better than her mother’s.

‘I think baking is really good for children who haven’t been good academically. They’ll have had no praise at school and I think it helps an awful lot for children to get a bit of praise.’

She trained at Bath School of Domestic Science and later in the 1950s at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, before making for London to work in the test kitchens of magazines and food companies. Her first opportunity to write a recipe came up when the cookery editor of Housewife magazine was on leave. ‘I said, “Well I can’t. I can’t! I didn’t pass English at school!”’ She was advised simply to write as she spoke. ‘That’s such good advice. Don’t try to be clever, don’t use long words that people haven’t heard – just give every bit of information you can give, and make it simple. That’s always at the back of my mind.’

Her first book, The Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book, appeared in 1970, and she has now published more than 80 titles – since the early 1990s with her co-writer, Lucy Young. Unusually for a woman of her generation, she continued to work after she had children – she loved her job too much to give it up.

Berry has had her share of grief, however. The second of her three children, William, was killed in a car accident in 1989 when he was just 19. ‘It was a huge tragedy,’ she told Vogue earlier this year. ‘We always think we were fortunate to have had him for 19 years… He brought us such joy.’ She has been a patron of Child Bereavement UK since 2008.

The through-line in all her work has always been clarity: recipes written to work, with no grandstanding or fuss. Television first came calling in the 1970s, but it was The Great British Bake Off in 2010 that made Berry into a household name for a new generation. Appearing alongside Paul Hollywood, she set the tone: firm but kind, precise but encouraging, a schoolteacher who genuinely wanted you to succeed. When she left after the programme’s move to Channel 4, she carried her audience with her, fronting Mary Berry’s Absolute Favourites and Mary Berry’s Simple Comforts, among others. A damehood in 2020 confirmed what most viewers already felt: Mary Berry is less a celebrity cook than a national institution.

‘Television is a huge cookery class,’ she says. ‘It’s rewarding because you do get feedback. People write to you. We would have a television programme and a few days later on screen you would see a little boy or a little girl holding something that wasn’t quite perfect but with very proud parents in the background.’

Bake Off was simply the largest cookery class she ever taught. She didn’t like the idea that contestants had to fail. ‘I didn’t want a drama, a cry or whatever. I wanted to be encouraging. If they took it out of the oven and it went down in the middle – I didn’t want to criticise them. They know exactly why they’ve failed. I wanted to say, “Now, if this happened at home, you’d just cut round there, fill it with fruit, big jug of cream or custard, they won’t mind. But next time, just keep an eye on it.”’

When it comes to ageing well – of course she has standards. She eats toast and marmalade for breakfast every day, the bread must be of decent quality and the marmalade homemade. At lunch, she has salad with ‘a lot of vegetables’. At dinner, she will have a proper meal but ‘no second helpings’. And no eating between meals – an injunction common to her generation that seems to have been almost wholly abandoned by modern parents. ‘If I do want something, I might go and have a few grapes or an apple. If I’ve had a very light lunch I’ll have some shortbread – there’s always shortbread in our tin. But I definitely watch what I eat.’

And yet she still spends much of her working day surrounded by cake. The afternoon we meet, she and her team are testing mille-feuille. Does she not find it hard to resist? ‘I have a small amount because it’s important to get it right. But I’m just tasting it.’

She stresses seasonality. ‘It’s very important to cook with the seasons but it’s very difficult for people. You’ll see a strawberry all year round but they’ll taste better when they’re in season in June, July. So I like to keep to the seasons as much as possible.’

Her belated reinvention as a style icon still makes her laugh. ‘I was well aware that I was getting older and I must make extra effort. I try not to be mutton dressed up as lamb. I put on comfortable things that I enjoy wearing and are flattering for my age.’

She has always worn Russell & Bromley loafers and is happy to note they’ve come back into fashion. She likes flared trousers that she can wash herself and iron a crease into. She likes blouses with sleeves that don’t flap. And she likes pockets. ‘I have a wonderful dressmaker who puts pockets in everything. She’ll find a bit of extra material so everything I wear has pockets. I’m always wanting a Strepsil or a hankie or something, in case I cough. I can’t be without my pockets.’

She is also grateful for her team – Young has been with her more than 30 years. And, of course, her cocker spaniels: Darcey, named after Darcey Bussell, as ‘she’s a beautiful mover’, and Freddie, who is Darcey’s son. ‘There’s always a welcome when I get home.’

It is being surrounded by her children, Thomas and Annabel, and their respective families that makes her most happy. ‘When I’m not on duty, I love having them round. We had a party the other day – 28 in the garden under the conker tree. The grandchildren came and helped me set up with trestle tables, checked cloths, all the chairs out. I had to cook a lot of extra food because they’re gannets. They love it.’

So she is still back and forth to the oven at 90? ‘Oh, yes!’ But on an occasion like this, she stresses, it would be a summer buffet: ‘mostly recipes from the new book’ and lots of salads. ‘I practise what I preach but the food is simple and there’s not too much choice, you know. If there’s too much choice, it takes too long to serve everybody.’

I suggest this is one of the reasons why she is so popular. She clearly has standards – one senses that Mary Berry does not suffer fools – and yet she is such a calm and collected presence, too, warm and reassuring. ‘I am just what I am,’ she says.

I ask if she has a golden rule. She does and it is simply this: don’t lie. ‘I have always told my grandchildren, “You must tell me the truth because I’ll never lie to you. If you’ve done something wrong, if you quarrel with Mum, come and tell me and we’ll sort it out. You come to me – I’ll look after you.”’

Mary 90 starts on the BBC this month, with the accompanying book published on 9 October (BBC Books, £28). To pre-order a copy for £23.80 until 19 October, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.

THE MAKING OF A NATIONAL TREASURE

Born in Bath, Somerset

Hospitalised with polio for three months, aged 13; left with spine, hand and arm injuries

Trains at Paris cookery school Le Cordon Bleu

Publishes her first book, The Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book, featuring more than 300 recipes

Makes her on-screen debut as a guest on ITV’s Farmhouse Kitchen

Fronts her first solo BBC TV show, Mary Berry’s Ultimate Cakes and launches Aga cookery workshops at her home, teaching 12,000 students over 16 years

Becomes a judge on the BBC’s The Great British Bake Off. During her six-year tenure, it becomes the BBC’s most-watched series

Receives a CBE for services to culinary arts

Publishes her autobiography, Recipe For Life

Becomes a Dame for services to broadcasting, culinary arts and charity

Presents BBC’s Mary Makes It Easy, focusing on stress-free cooking

Having turned 90 on 24 March, publishes Mary 90, her 97th cookbook

Additional copy: Scarlett Dargan