I don't know how she doesn't do it.: Hello Mr Chips.

Women are less likely to eat chips around handsome men, according to a recent study.* This might go a long way to explain why I eat so many chips, I tell the men in my life (just kidding). Personally I don’t know any women who forego chips, no matter who they’re dining with, although I do have a friend who won’t touch croissant. She says "pas de pâte feuilletée" because she can, and because she says that's what skinny French ladies say and is the reason they are skinny. Croissant is made with feuilletée pastry, she says, and feuilletée pastry makes you fat, but "ça va sans dire," she says. I have another friend who says she won’t touch cheese. She says it makes her elbows squeak. In English. What can I say? I have weird friends.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2017/04/further-back-in-time-for-dinner

I liked that programme Further Back in Time for Dinner because it's a bit like an old schools programme back from when I was a kid, called How We Used to Live, mixed together with a cookery programme, topped off with a sprinkling of likeable family (the Robshaws).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Used_To_Live

The last series of FBITFD used a terraced house just up the road from us near Wandsworth Common. Did you see how much meat they ate in the Edwardian era? It was meat, with meat, with meat on the side. Strange how food goes out of fashion. Who decides? Remember luncheon meat? Spam? Vesta curries? No, me neither, but lots of my friends do because they're older than me (ha ha) and they talk about them with great affection. You don’t see people eating luncheon meat nowadays although I do know plenty who eat ‘rillettes’ which I reckon is the modern-day equivalent, just a load of bits off the slaughterhouse floor, shoved in a jar.

It’s incredible what we used to feed children in the old days. In Britain in the 70s we all lived on rosehip syrup and Alphabetti Spaghetti, fresh fruit and veg was an alien concept. Someone I know says he’ll never forget being served marmite fritters on his first night at boarding school: white bread, smothered in margarine, with marmite on top, deep-fried. Try explaining that to a skinny French lady. No wonder British children can be so self-restricting. When he was little my little brother ate nothing but breakfast cereal, Frosties mostly, and we had a neighbour, a scrawny Artful Dodger sort of a kid, who ate nothing but prawns for six weeks. And that was before prawns were invented round our way.

Picnic.

I love descriptions of food in books. I recently read Heartburn by Nora Ephron and she intersperses her bitter-sweet account of marital breakdown with sweet and savoury recipes, Key lime pie is one of them. And I’ll always remember Ratty's picnic on the river bank in Wind in the Willows. “There’scoldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater…" said Ratty. And that wonderful image of little Laurie Lee in Cider With Rosie, tripping off to school with a warm potato in his pocket to keep his hand warm and eat later for lunch. And then there’s food in movies. Putting aside 9 1/2 Weeks, because I think we should, who can forget Juliette Binoche and her sexy chocolate truffles, Helen Mirren in the kitchen with her lover, and Babette with her feast, plus, of course, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, which I watched on repeat in an Italian hospital once when Youngest and I got holed up there on account of his appendicitis during a skiing holiday. Incidentally, the food we ate in that hospital was the best hospital food I've ever eaten and will probably ever eat. We got a pasta starter every day. We got confit of duck with Puy lentils.

Fifty shades of pasta.

It's a cliché to say that cooking for people is an act of love, but it’s true. I certainly love to cook for my family. One son told me in the heat of an argument once that my cooking isn't as good as I think it is, because he knew it would wound, which it did. Mind you, another son recently said the opposite. "Every night's like a dinner party round here," he pronounced. But perhaps those two comments tell you more about the sons than about my cooking.

The other son only wants nuggets and chips, so currently I'm doing a popular line in a homemade version using free range turkey because now we're told turkey is good for us, it's a 'superfood' apparently. So here's the recipe, Nora Ephron-style. Cut up and bash the meat flat with a rolling pin, dip it in egg, roll it in natural bread crumbs mixed with Cajun spices, lightly fry in oil. I use rape seed oil, which is also having a bit of a moment in the sun. Serve with purple sprouting broccoli or kalettes (that's baby kale to you plebs). And chips.