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Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the Spectator's Food and Drink podcast.

I'm Olivia Potts.

And I'm Laura Prendergast.

And today we are delighted to be joined by Amir Ketecta

Amir is a chef and food writer and a regular contributor to the spectator he's also

first secretary at the UK Foreign Office and his first book the platinum jubilee cookbook

recipes and stories from Her Majesty's representatives around the world will be published on the 28th of April.

Amir, welcome to Table Talk.

Thanks very much for having me.

And as listeners know, we always start with the same question, which is, what are your earliest memories of food?

Well, I don't know if it's my very first memory, but I do have a very vivid memory of sitting in the family kitchen on the tabletop,

licking the inside of a cake batter bowl when my mother was baking.

So it was one of those brown mason cash bowls that probably everyone knows.

And yeah, I just have a very vivid memory of that.

It was this green linoleum, floored kitchen.

The floor was always sticky, I think, sort of years and years of pasta sauces and all that sort of thing

probably splattered on the floor.

But, yeah, a very vivid memory of that.

And it's probably, you know, baking with one's mum is probably

a bit of a sort of cliche, but I'm not sure I helped very much, but I did, I did lick the

inside of a lot of raw batter. I remember that.

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