Michael Raffael, BBC Good Food Magazine, November 2003

A helicopter stutters to land on a lawn 60 feet from where we're cooking. Heads turn, but only briefly. We have more important fish to fry - red mullet to be precise. And we'll be eating them later as a salad with baby artichokes, rocket and saffron-tinted jelly. Every moment at a Rosemary Shrager cookery class is jam-packed. Switch off, however briefly, and you've lost the plot.

Equip her with a soprano voice instead of a balloon whisk and a boning knife, and she'd make a pretty good opera star. She has the manor of a benevolent diva, intensely self-conscious but passionate about sharing her enthusiasm. "I'm an instinctive cook," she says. "I cook by feeling."

A day's course at the school she set up this year at Swinton Park, a Victorian pile in the rolling farmland and moors of Wensleydale, is no easy ride. She hurtles her crew of would-be chefs through the culinary repertoire. From Italian meringue to mousse, from bread to butchery and from cauliflower puree to pea ravioli, it's a rattling switchback ride with no coffee breaks and no gossiping, bar the odd whispered aside.

Relationships between the group of 10 strangers have the dynamics of speed dating. Was it Robbyn who rolled out the focaccia with me and Jodi who helped me "prep" the artichokes, or was that Pat's daughter? It's so busy, so hands-on, that everyone mucks in and supports each other. Nobody shows off. Nobody puts up their hand to ask inane questions.

Those who do ask for help receive a sunburst of Rosemary's approval: "I love it when you're curious. That way I know you'll not forget."

Over and over she drives home the message that she's teaching us to cook for ourselves, rather than rehash her recipes. "Look at the mechanics," she insists. "Once you trust a process, you won't be frightened of adapting it." She once did a course for a group of home economics students - at the end of the session, they told her they'd learnt more in a day with her than in a term at college.

My favourite trick, among a host of good ideas, is cooking cauliflower in a water-and-milk mix, flavoured with bay leaves. Rosemary uses a little of it to thin out a cauliflower and parmesan puree, but points out that it makes an ideal base for a cheese sauce too.

We're filleting fish when Susan Cunliffe-Lister, co-owner of Swinton Park, brings in a Kilner jar containing a rose-coloured liquid. It bowls Rosemary over. Apparently, if you infuse heather flowers in syrup and add a squeeze of lemon juice, it goes a delicate, fragrant pink. They are planning on making it into a sorbet.

Susan has turned three acres of derelict walled garden behind the castle into a vegetable-lover's paradise. The artichokes are flourishing, sea kale has established itself along one wall and she has a massive patch of wild, alpine strawberries. Even a Tuscan cookery school won't be better supplied.

With a couple of TV series behind her, Rosemary has the credibility of a celebrity chef. She's a natural communicator. What's so attractive about her course is that she keeps us all to involved to feel in awe of her. It's only when we sit down to a late lunch, when the different elements have come together, that we realise what a good cook and teacher she is. We're all very conscious of tucking into a meal that we've prepared ourselves, and yet we know that, basically, it's all down to her.