What role did food play in your life when you were growing up?
“I had a very loving childhood. My parents were young – in their early twenties when I was born – and had figured out only exactly as much as most people have at that age. However, they loved me and my brother, and our home life was pretty magical. We shared our house with lots of other people, fairly communally, and the kitchen was the centre of the home. I did most of my early growing and crawling around the kitchen floor as people cooked, chatted, made coffee, ate, drank and danced. That sense of food being this binding force, drawing us together, and drumming out the rhythm of a shared daily existence, was something deeply engrained in me.”
When did you discover that food is your love language?
“As with anything you’re born with, this sense of cooking and eating as a gentle but constant reinforcement of our shared affections for, and obligations to, each other only became significant when I started to experience its absence. Adolescence, which I’m not sure very many people find easy, was quite hard for me. I was bookish, shy, introverted, awkward, desperate to have friends and fun, but deeply unsure of myself. The loneliness of that period of my life drew me to food, which seemed to conjure a vitality and sparkle which I was otherwise deprived of. I started reading cookbooks, most notably Elizabeth David, Richard Olney, Simon Hopkinson and, of course, my grandmother Arabella Boxer, and, finding in these books something deeply alluring, sensual, exciting and mysterious, in due course I started cooking from them. To be blessed with a childhood full of love and innocent of suffering is a beautiful thing. To be left adrift by the alienating effects of teenagehood is a painful but necessary aspect of growing into independence. I could no longer love, or be loved, with the easy simplicity of an infant. In food, I found something I could make my own, invest care and attention in, use to articulate feelings I no longer felt capable of expressing with words (but desperately wanted to offer), and receive. It gave me pleasure and pride, helped me learn not to hate myself, and gave me my first taste of the interesting possibilities of adult maturity.”