Who inspired you to cook? We were brought up on good food. My mother used to cook on an Aga using Robert Carrier recipes. The house had big windows and there was a massive Spanish barbecue in the garden. Mum would jump out of the dining room window to cook us a steak, then jump back in with it. She once dropped a jar of capers into the fur of our Persian cat. We kept finding them for months afterwards.
Tell me about the best meal you’ve ever had: It was in a hotel in the South of France. I was about five, and I had a hot raspberry soufflé like a pink cloud.
What’s your favourite thing to cook? I love making jam. I’d like to write a book about it. I experiment with flavours, so I recently made rhubarb and vanilla jam, which tastes like rhubarb and custard. Then there’s some I made with blackberry, raspberry with mint. Someone described it as ‘like having your breakfast and brushing your teeth at the same time.’
Where’s the strangest place you ever cooked? I had to cook a three-course meal for thirty people using a calor gas stove on a Dutch sailing barge on the Solent during Cowes week. I was very hung over, the sea was rough, and I coped by focusing very intensely on the task.
Do you have a favourite cookbook? I’ve got a little yellow French cookbook of my mother’s with the pages falling out called Tante Marie. Mrs Beeton is useful for scientific formulas too.
What’s your favourite ingredient? Rosemary at the moment. Not just with lamb. In jam, or with chocolate in a tart. Very subtly of course.
What’s your favourite bit of kit? A lemon zester or a jam thermometer. EC