Marguerite Patten

Died: June 4 2015.

Marguerite Patten, who has died aged 99, was the first and most widely influential figure in the post-war transformation of British cooking; she was a television cook before Fanny Craddock and her Cookery in Colour was one of the most successful publications of its type, selling more than two million copies.

Patten's 170 books, her broadcast appearances and her cookery demonstrations focused on the practicalities of everyday household management. While she helped to introduce the British public to unfamiliar ingredients and foreign dishes, which gradually became more readily available after the Second World War, she was - unlike Elizabeth David - not chiefly concerned with the discovery and dissemination of Continental recipes. Her approach was closer to that of Isabella Beeton or Delia Smith - though she preceded the latter as a well-known presenter and writer by several decades.

"My audience is those who must cook but don't necessarily like doing it," she said. "They want positive straightforward advice." She had begun on this pragmatic mission during the war, when she was the Ministry of Food's senior adviser in East Anglia and then ran its advice bureau based at Harrods.

In this role, she had to deal not only with the shortages and compromises imposed by rationing and the difficulty of obtaining basic ingredients but, in Knightsbridge, with women accustomed to domestic servants, who had never previously picked up a pan. She provided instruction in making the Spam fritter (in 2000, she produced the nostalgic Spam: The Cookbook), "mock duck" constructed from sausagemeat, apple and onion, the use of dried egg, and ways to bulk out stews with oatmeal. Christmas pudding was assembled from breadcrumbs, carrot and potato, and served with imitation cream made from Echo margarine.

These tips continued to be useful during the post-war period of rationing, which continued until 1954. Her cookery column, which had begun in 1948 in the London Evening News, offered advice on how to deal with exotic new ingredients, such as bananas, which had been unavailable for more than a decade.

It was a period when British cookery was at a low ebb. Items now seen as staples, such as olive oil, were available only in chemists in 8 fl oz bottles as a remedy for earache; olives themselves, peppers, oregano and the like were exotica which might - if you were lucky - be available in foreign-owned shops in London's Soho. At the same time, the end of domestic service and widespread urbanisation had led to the neglect of many of the traditional techniques and ingredients of native cookery.

While the vanguard of the revival of cooking in the late 1950s and early 1960s was confined to the well-to-do, and sparked by foreign travel, Mrs David and the Cordon Bleu school run by Rosemary Hume and Constance Spry from 1945, Marguerite Patten was the prime mover in disseminating this knowledge to the wider public. It would be difficult to overstate her influence; by the end of the 1960s, there can scarcely have been a household in the country without one of her books.

Hilda Elsie Marguerite Brown was born in Bath on November 4 1915, the daughter of a printer. She grew up in Barnet, north London, with her younger brother and sister; money was short after the death of her father when she was 12, and she took over many of the domestic duties in her teens.

She had ambitions to be an actress and was offered a place at RADA, but could not afford to take it up. Instead she got a post as an assistant demonstrator for cookery shows with the Northern Metropolitan Electricity Supply Company. Her occasional acting (with a rep company in Oldham) made her a confident natural in front of audiences, explaining the merits of ovens and other kitchen gadgets.

She moved to a similar role as senior home economist for Frigidaire, a job that involved travelling around the country until the outbreak of war. She then produced meals for policemen and air raid wardens before being taken on by the Ministry of Food in 1942. By this point she had met and married Charles Patten, always known as Bob, an officer in the RAF.

Not long before the war ended, she began broadcasting on the radio, work that led to her appearing as the cook on the television show Designed for Women in 1947. Though she was the first television cook, in later life she insisted on being described as a home economist. "I don't think I'm a chef and I'm definitely not a celebrity," she said.

She had already published four cookbooks for Harrods during her stint there and soon added more journalism to her column for the London Evening News. She was in demand for large-scale cookery demonstrations, often sponsored by food companies or manufacturers of kitchen appliances. One, bizarrely, involved a variety act with full orchestra, and led to an appearance on the West End stage.

It was Cookery in Colour, however, which contained more than a thousand recipes, each illustrated by photographs, that cemented her position as the country's foremost cookery writer. It also made a fortune for her publisher, Paul (later Lord) Hamlyn - though not for Marguerite Patten, who had assigned copyright to his company. Over the next decade, she produced dozens of books, among them Classic Dishes Made Simple (1969) and the Every Day Cook Book, which found their way into almost every household in the land.

Marguerite Patten kept up this regime well past normal retirement age, and eventually sold more than 17 million books. In 1991 she was appointed OBE for services to the art of cookery, and in 1999 had a series on Radio 4 examining the history of 20th century food. She produced a number of nostalgic books, including We'll Eat Again, The Coronation Cookbook and Marguerite Patten's Century of British Cooking. She was voted Woman of the Year in 2007 and advanced to CBE in 2010. As sensible, forthright and unstuffy as her recipes, she was universally regarded as a national treasure.

She and her husband lived modestly in Hove. He died in 1997, and she is survived by her daughter Judith.

ANDREW MCKIE