Singer David Bowie was a gentleman. His model wife, Iman, a little demanding. Former US President George HW Bush kept a secret stash of peanut butter and chocolate he would dive into whenever his wife Barbara was not around.

Christine Francisco learnt at an early age that when you’re a chef for the rich and famous, it’s not always about the cooking.

“Barbara would call from abroad to do the menus and say, ‘he’s not to have any chocolate or peanut butter’. How is little me going to stop the former president from eating what he wants?” the 42-year-old said.

“David had coeliac disease so I had to cook with rice flour most of the time.

“But when Iman went away he wanted me to cook real brownies. He said the stomach ache would be worth it.”

When she is not catering to superstars, Mrs Francisco bakes using traditional Portuguese recipes.

Yesterday she was cooking malasadas, Portuguese doughnuts, to sell at this weekend’s Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series Bermuda festivities.

Proceeds will go to Amigos da Casas dos Açores da Bermuda, a new group devoted to promoting Portuguese culture here.

“Malasadas translates into badly fried dough,” she said. “You just lightly fry it; you don’t burn it. A lot of other cultures have something similar but I think Portuguese doughnuts are unique because they are so light and fluffy.”

Her recipe is a reconstructed version of one she inherited from her great-grandmother, Olivia Branco.

Unfortunately for her, she lost the recipes during Hurricane Emily in 1987.

“I cried for weeks after the storm,” Mrs Francisco said. “My grandmother [Leonora DeSousa] didn’t really remember the recipes I’d lost at all. You can never get something like that back.

“Then I learnt my mother-in-law in Portugal knew how to make them. She sat down with me and tweaked the recipe so that it tasted more like hers.”

Mrs Francisco started cooking as a child. Her mother, Maria DeSousa, cleaned the home of a family in Tucker’s Town.

“Her employer brought in two chefs and she would often send me to help them, to get me out from under her feet,” she said.

She studied under chefs Ricky DeSilva and Fred Ming at a government programme run out of Warwick Secondary School. Her skills were further “polished” at Bermuda College.

“I already knew how to cook by that time,” she said. “But they taught things like the proper way to handle a knife.”

Her first professional job was as a cook for Mr Bowie as he vacationed here with his wife.

Mrs Francisco was 22 at the time.

“I was just married and my husband, Ilidio, was working for the people who owned the property,” she said. “Iman liked to keep the refrigerator mostly empty other than milk for his tea. They also liked everything to be fresh. I couldn’t cook any meals ahead of time.”

Broccoli was banned from former President Bush’s house because he hated it. What he did enjoy was her pão de ló, a Portuguese sponge cake.

She also fed him bolo rei, a sweet bread with walnuts and pine nuts normally served at Christmas.

“He was in poor health and was not supposed to eat chocolate and peanut butter,” Mrs Francisco said. “But he kept a secret stash.”

Mrs Francisco, who is the host of Radio Lusitano Bermuda on FM89.1, said she speaks Portuguese on the show but was not taught the language as a child.

“When I was little being Portuguese was not a good thing,” she said. “My mother gave myself and my two older siblings English names so we wouldn’t stand out. She wanted us to learn English so we could get ahead.”

She had her first lesson at age 10 on a family trip to the Azores.

“My mother said she wasn’t going to translate anymore and I’d just have to learn,” she said. “Later, I took language classes with the Portuguese school in Bermuda.”

She and her husband take their 12-year-old son, Ilidio Jr, back to Portugal every summer.

“I want him to be emerged in his culture,” she said.