Roast Chicken and Other Stories

"I love the combination of food and stories. He is very funny, very English and very no nonsense. He was chef at Bibendum and La Tante Claire and has a really extraordinary cooking background, yet he cooks really homely food and describes it in the least snooty way. With this book he has broken it up into ingredients so you have, for instance, garlic, saffron, anchovies, and in each chapter there is a story about each little thing and they kind of dart from one thing to another. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The other book by him which is fantastic is Week In Week Out and I’m guessing that he was quite a big influence on Nigel Slater, and the rest. He could be called the godfather of English food. I have never been tempted to create them because they are just so fantastical, and that is what I love about Heston Blumenthal – we’ve got him to do that sort of thing! Description-wise, this book certainly got the tastebuds going when I was tiny but in the same way that Enid Blyton’s books did as well. I got conned into thinking I’d love boarding school because of the descriptions of the midnight feasts in Malory Towers . Oh God yes, he loved it. He was passionate about it. I grew up in a family of people who were passionate about food, and greedy, so that is where my love stemmed from."