At home, we had a brilliant book called The Times Cookery Book by Katie Stewart. It must have come out in the early 1970s and I basically became the pastry chef for my mum’s dinner parties. I made chocolate mousses, chocolate rum gateaux, profiteroles, eclairs and genoise sponge in the summer with three, or even four, layers of cream, raspberries and cake. But it wasn’t Bake Off: I didn’t try and make it look like Vesuvius or something.
I learned early on that it’s not a brilliant idea to name all the animals you’re planning to eat. On the whole you name the breeding stock but not the fat stock; so the sows and the nannies and the cows have names, but not the ones who are passing through, you might say, a little faster. I did call my first two pigs Charlie and Tom, after two of my best friends, and it didn’t make it any easier to take them to the slaughterhouse.
