The Carved Angel" is a successful Devon restaurant, highly rated in "The Good Food Guide" and with a "Michelin star" for over a decade. Joyce Molyneux is its co-proprietor and chef. Together with Sophie Grigson, she has carefully adapted a selection of her recipes for home use. But what joined these three women at the hip was more than recipes, it was a style of refined and observant cookery that respected the locale while never giving up on adventure or, most important of all, the taste of things. This is what made Joyce such a favourite with home cooks – and the many thousands who dined at her tables. Her Carved Angel Cookery Book, written in 1990 with Grigson’s daughter Sophie, sold well given that Joyce’s exposure to media attention was so slight. Bryan Webb, chef-patron at Tyddyn Llan in Llandrillo, Denbighshire, described her as "a fantastic cook" and "a great inspiration to all of my generation". When Perry-Smith sold up in 1972, Molyneux decamped to the south-west to take the reins of a down-at-heel restaurant in Dartmouth that would become her home for the next 27 years. To begin with, she ran the place with Perry-Smith's stepson, Tom Jaine (who went on to edit The Good Food Guide), and it was Perry-Smith's niece, Meriel Matthews, another Hole in the Wall graduate, who inadvertently provided the impetus for the new book. "While having a clearout, Meriel came across a stash of old recipes from the restaurant," Molyneux says, "and one thing led to another." (Her only previous publication was 1990's The Carved Angel Cookery Book, which sold 50,000 copies, a staggering number for a chef without a TV deal or newspaper column.)

It was a great combination, but more than that Joyce was a valuable source of advice, understated, as was everything about her but always wise. It was also the first restaurant I had been to where the kitchen was open to the diners, very trendy in those days. Leaving college (where she had to resit her cookery exam), she was found a job by her father in a canteen at W Canning & Co, manufacturers of electroplating equipment. A fellow student alerted her to the chance of a job at the Mulberry Tree in Stratford, where she was taken on in 1951 as general assistant by the chef, who worked alone. Douglas Sutherland was classically trained, very well regarded, and gave Joyce a thorough grounding in professional cooking over the next eight years. It was good enough for her to be able to teach Perry-Smith (an amateur) a thing or two when she joined him at the Hole in the Wall. Photograph: Collins During a period when the Roux brothers, Pierre Koffmann, Nico Ladenis and Raymond Blanc were transforming the culinary landscape of Britain, Molyneux was a lone female figure at the forefront of the revolution. She was a homegrown talent, without classical French training, but in possession of an instinctive understanding of ingredients and what worked. In the event, this proved to be two new ventures: a restaurant-with-rooms in Helford, Cornwall, looked after by George and Heather, and a place with sensational views of the mouth of the river at Dartmouth in Devon, soon to be christened the Carved Angel. This was run by Joyce in the kitchen and myself (Perry-Smith’s stepson) front of house. I stayed in the post until 1984 and, after a year or two’s interregnum, Joyce was joined by Meriel Matthews (George’s niece), with whom she had a most warm, profitable and satisfactory business partnership until her retirement. In Dartmouth, a small town, her work was no longer viewed with suspicion (‘Such prices!’) but as a matter of pride

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TV chef James Martin described her as "a pioneer of the UK food scene" while HOSPA president Harry Murray said she was "a true legend of the culinary arts". She went on to make the Carved Angel – now the Angel – her own until her retirement in 1999, and famously became one of the first British female chefs to earn a Michelin star while there. In doing so she put the restaurant, and herself, at the forefront of the growth of modern British cookery in the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to Dartmouth, Joyce had undergone probationary years at Stratford-upon-Avon's Mulberry Tree, and then an all-important stint at George Perry-Smith's Hole in the Wall in Bath, one of Britain's most influential restaurants in the 1960s. The salmon dish began there, but was honed to glazed, egg-washed nonpareil at the Carved Angel, along with offerings that owed a little to Mediterranean modes – Provençal fish soup with red-hot rouille; peperanata as a garnish for the cheese soufflé – as well as the demotic food of the European and English heartlands. There was crisply seared boudin blanc with lentils and apple, but there was also in winter a hefty mutton pie. Long before it became the universal badge of honour, Joyce championed local producers, fishers and farmers, with salmon from the Dart, moorland lamb, and Slapton strawberries with clotted cream.

When there was a change of regime in Stratford in 1959, she saw an advertisement for staff at this restaurant in Bath in the Lady magazine. Her application was successful and she soon realised it was no ordinary business. Perry-Smith dressed like a bohemian, had a commanding presence, insisted that his staff work both in the kitchen and front of house (purgatory for Joyce, who was quite shy), and cooked food of generosity and spirit that did not abide by the rules of classical cuisine. In 1974 Molyneux assumed the role of head chef at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth, Devon, when her friend, colleague and acclaimed post-war chef George Perry-Smith bought the property. It is small wonder that Molyneux's peers hold her in such high esteem. Angela Hartnett – one of the few women to have followed in Molyneux's Michelin-starred footsteps – says: "Hers was the first 'proper posh' restaurant I ever went to in this country – and the first place I had basil ice-cream, long before today's big boys discovered the Pacojet."Bath-based baker Richard Bertinet, said: "Sad to hear that the legend and our neighbour in Bath has passed away, I'll miss her stories and smile." Her cooking was often described as “heartwarming”, “reassuring” or “honest”: attributes that endeared her to her public, especially as they never detracted from taste and flavour. In her closing decades at the stove, although she never sought the role and although she had many male lieutenants, she might have been deemed a feminist beacon, as her staff and assistants were overwhelmingly female and went on themselves to often distinguished careers. Molyneux with, from left, Angela Hartnett, Nigella Lawson and Jay Rayner, 2017. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian Chez Bruce owner Bruce Poole said: "Joyce was a true titan of British cooks. A couple of dinners cooked by her at The Carved Angel are amongst the most memorable of my life. A great loss." Food writer and broadcaster Simon Hopkinson describes Molyneux as having "a very, very special approach to cookery, which is one of exceptional good taste, a natural understanding of ingredients and how they are best prepared, cooked, consumed and enjoyed".