I am staring at a potful of a glistening golden substance that's somewhere between solid and liquid, the colour of a dazzling Caribbean morning, and steaming hot. Aching with hunger, having fasted through a Friday at work in preparation for my latest assignment for these pages, I spoon giant globules of this savoury ambrosia – an amazing creamed polenta – straight into my mouth, without need of the plate before me. And it is a taste sent from heaven.
The green fronds of agretti were once sought across Europe to be reduced to ashes for use in making glass. These days, the verdant Italian plant is once more in demand – in a somewhat less well-cooked state – to feature on British dinner plates.
Trying to talk to Raymond Blanc and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall about the future of food is like chasing two runaway horses. Both chefs are so passionate about “the most serious issue we face on the planet”, according to Fearnley-Whittingstall, that I have to wait a good while to get in a question.
After travelling around Indonesia in my late teens, I returned home determined to recreate the exotic scents and flavours that I'd encountered in the food markets.
Clockwise from top left: Raised stem ceramic jar, £23, Orla Kiely, johnlewis.com
Last summer my family and I took part in an unusual social experiment. For two-and-a-half months, we opened our house and lives to a television production company, which filmed us 12 hours a day, while we travelled in time from the 1950s to the 1990s. And in each of those decades, we wore the clothes, lived among the soft furnishings, and most important of all, cooked and ate the food of the period. From 1950 to the end of the 1990s, the government ran the National Food Survey, in which families recorded what they ate, and our menus were planned from this, so that every meal we ate had been eaten by a real-life British family some time in the past half-century.
Spellcheck is a priceless invention I was dyslexic at school, so I probably shouldn't have trained as a secretary. It took me a while to realise why I couldn't keep a job: my work was full of spelling mistakes.
