While working as an examiner for the British Board of Film Censors in London in the late 1960s, Rosie Stark, who has died aged 78, also learned how to cook so that, in those pre-feminist days, she could feed her boyfriend’s cricketing chums. The result was The Loaves and Fishes Miracle Cookbook, published in 1976. If the relationship ended badly, her new skills did not.

By the 1980s, she was cookery editor on Options magazine. This job was followed by others on BBC Good Food, writing for the Sunday Times and Mail, and co-editorship of Food & Travel magazine. Rosie then became chairman of the Guild of Food Writers; she combined this with an MA in historical research at Birkbeck, University of London, her thesis – it got a distinction – being on 19th-century food production. In 2004, she set up and taught the food writing course at City University.

Her particular bugbears were celebrity chefs and food eaten out of season. Her twice-yearly parties – in summer and on Bonfire Night – were legendary: Nigel Slater insisted the cassoulet she always served at the latter was the best he had known.

When I first met Rosie, at a party in 1987, she was sitting, nonplussed, on a stair. She had just glimpsed herself in a mirror; her identical twin, Sheila, was not long dead, and Rosie had taken her own reflection for her sister’s. It was a poignant start to a friendship, if a misleading one. Mirrors apart, Rosie had a clear sense of who she was.

The daughter of John, a Scottish accountant, and his English wife, Edna, Rosie was raised in Stirling. John Stark had taken over the family road-making firm, but also to drink. In 1952 he had a fatal heart attack. George VI had died not long before. The twins – now with a brother, Jeff – were told to buck up: if Princess Elizabeth could take it, so could they. To their delight, they were removed from their pricy all-girls school and sent to the mixed Stirling High. Petite, laser-eyed and clever, they were much in demand. So alike were the twins that they could swap boyfriends without being spotted, and did.

After St Andrews they moved to London, Rosie acquiring a job on Vanity Fair and a cricket-mad boyfriend at the British Film Institute. Soon a cinéaste herself, she was taken on by the BBFC, later working alongside its sole Hindi-speaker. She recalled waiting patiently through a Bollywood epic for an elderly Parisienne character to appear, having misheard “her friend, Shanti” as “her French aunty”. She would be a BBFC examiner for 20 years.

In 2012, Rosie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She was cared for in her illness by Jeff and his wife, Sheila, who survive her.