FAMOUS long before the term “celebrity chef” was coined, Robert Carrier epitomised fine dining in 1970s Britain. His restaurants, cookbooks and television programmes put truffles, brandy, saffron and spatchcock into the lexicon of many people still shaking off the memory of lumpy gravy, tinned fruit and food stamps.

His food, and his natural flamboyance, helped to persuade the British that there was nothing shameful in enjoying a good meal. He was as influential as Elizabeth David or Delia Smith, and some argued that he was the link between them.

Born Robert McMahon, an American of Irish and French descent, he adopted the French surname of his grandmother, with whom he often stayed in upstate New York. She first taught him to cook, making biscuits and butter-frying fish caught in a nearby stream.

During the war Carrier served in Europe with the US Army. He remained in Europe after the war, working in Paris for a US radio station and later editing a theatrical magazine. Carrier learnt the delights of French cooking by helping a friend who had a restaurant in St Tropez. He found that cooking was a form of therapy, too, during a period of depression after the magazine folded in 1949 and he found himself without a job.

He moved to Rome, where he added Italian dishes to his repertoire, then moved to Britain in 1953 where he took a job in public relations, an occupation that provided ample scope for his charm and flamboyance. With a colleague, Oliver Lawson-Dick, he wrote a sumptuous book on London, The Vanishing City, which was illustrated with reproductions of old engravings.

On the strength of a memorable dinner party, one of Carrier’s guests, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, offered him a job as food editor. He took it, contributed to other publications and soon established himself as a pioneer of modern cookery writing — some said that Carrier took over where Mrs Beeton had left off.

He produced several cookery books, a series of recipe cards and appeared on television. He became the leading populariser of the appeal of good cooking and helped to bring about a domestic revolution in imaginative, adventurous cooking. Tantalisingly, he promised that anyone could become a good cook. “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “It’s really simple. People tend to flap about cooking but there is no need to worry. A good meal needs care and attention, but anyone can do it.”

The pleasures which only his friends had previously experienced were shared with a wider clientele when he opened a restaurant in 1966 in Camden Passage, Islington, which had become a chic centre of the London antiques trade. It was a 20th-century version of the 19th-century French provincial style: small, restful, intimate and expensive. The following year he opened a cookshop in Harrods, the first of a succession of shops in department stores in Britain and America.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he produced a stream of cookery books. Great Dishes of the World (1963) was a collection of recipes obtained on a tour of the world’s best restaurants, followed by The Robert Carrier Cookbook (1965), The Robert Carrier Herb Garden (1969), The Robert Carrier Cookery Course (1974) and Cooking With Carrier (1981).

In all of them he sought to make food fashionable and home cooking more of a pleasure. His“négresse sans chemise” was a decadent chocolate truffle cake that celebrated an unrestrained indulgence, which many Britons, still slowly shedding the habits of austerity, were coming to enjoy. The recipe was adapted, with sharply reduced levels of cholesterol, by later chefs such as Delia Smith.

In 1971 Carrier bought Hintlesham Hall, near Ipswich. A stately home in Tudor brick with a Georgian front, it was close to collapse when he paid £32,000 for it without a survey. He had planned to use it as a rural retreat, refurbishing it at his leisure and eventually using it for some gastronomic enterprise, but he had to streamline these plans when he learnt of the pile’s perilous condition. He employed a crew of 60 to set it right and opened Hintlesham as a hotel and restaurant in August 1972.

He offered a standard of luxurious dining that few could rival. Produce came from its own kitchen and herb gardens and, as a reviewer in The Times noted, “elegance and delicacy” were the keynotes of the cooking.

Carrier’s name and charisma were by now so great that he could weather the occasional lapse of judgment and bear the expense of putting them right.

He invested more than £300,000 to turn Hintlesham into a cookery school, converting the stables and outbuildings into modern classrooms, with a lecture theatre and 12 cooking stations. However, the friend whom he had hoped to appoint as the chief instructor was unable to accept the post so Carrier had to give the classes himself.

An ebullient and gregarious showman who enjoyed entertaining, Carrier soon tired of the routine and repetition of playing schoolteacher to adults, many of them on his course for the social cachet of being taught by Carrier rather than for their love of food.

Like most showmen, he could also be temperamental. He closed Hintlesham at the end of 1982, just one year after opening his cooking school. He sold the house to the restaurateur Ruth Watson the following year. He also closed his restaurant in Camden Passage in 1984, but not before it had honed the skills of several new British chefs, including Shaun Hill.

It was said that Carrier’s lunch or dinner parties were prepared as though they were theatre — well cast, flatteringly lit and acted with panache. “I entertain several nights a week,” he said. “It’s my life.”

After closing his restaurants he concentrated on his publishing and broadcasting interests, spent more time in France and Morocco, and returned regularly to his native America, where a magazine, Robert Carrier’s Kitchen, was published weekly.

He was chairman of the Restaurateurs Association of Great Britain in 1984, during which he campaigned vigorously for changes to the licensing laws and organised competitions to encourage young people to take up a career in catering.

In 1987 he published his last cookbook, extolling the culinary delights of Marrakesh. Great Dishes was republished in 1999 and has sold more than two million copies.

Carrier had a romantic streak. While at Hintlesham he revived the town festival and for a while he owned a theatre in Montmartre.

One of his most prized possessions was a tattered, grease-spattered edition of Great Dishes, given to him by a man who had used it as his bible to run three very successful restaurants.

Carrier did not marry.

Robert Carrier, cookery writer and restaurateur, was born on November 10, 1923. He died on June 27, 2006, aged 82.