Her legacy was to change the way we cook and eat

Few people have added so much to the pleasure of life for so many of us as Rose Gray.

Whether or not you can afford the eye-popping prices of the River Café, whether or not you feel solidarity with its swanky clientele, doesn't matter. Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers have done more than perhaps anybody else to improve the way we cook and eat over the past 20-odd years.

And they did it with rare purity and grace. Although they did make some TV programmes, they were not an important part of what they were about. They did not open any more restaurants, choosing to ensure instead that the River Café itself always lived up to their ideals.

They inspired change instead by the most honest and direct means. They ran their restaurant without making compromises on the quality of the rustic, seasonal Italian food, based on the best ingredients (hence the prices). They incited younger chefs who, after working with them, carried on their values, including Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

And they published a series of groundbreaking books, brilliantly designed and approachably written. Any competent home-cook can manage any of their recipes (except perhaps the notorious Chocolate Nemesis). With the River Café Easy series, they went a step further in showing that the simplest assemblage of great ingredients is also a fantastic way to cook and eat.

Rose Gray was nearly 50 when the River Café opened in 1987 (at first as a fairly basic canteen). She had an up-and-down career to that point, including making lampshades and importing cast-iron stoves from France. In the early Eighties, with her second husband and four children, she moved to Italy, living near Lucca. There she realised Italian cuisine could be much simpler than the version she had known in Britain.

For six months, she cooked at a friend's nightclub in New York — but this was the only professional experience either she or Ruth Rogers had before opening. And that was all to the good. Their food was amateur in the best sense, a work of love, aiming to remain true to what might be found in an Italian home.

If the River Café remained exclusive, its food did not. Lots of us now enjoy fresh, healthy, seasonal Italian food, often simply put together, in a way that was unheard of 20 years ago.