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

Lara Prendergast. And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we're delighted to be joined by the journalist,

novelist and critic Celia Walden.

Celia's new book, The Square, is out now.

Celia, thank you for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Celia, we're going to start where we always do at the beginning and ask you, what are your earliest

memories of food?

Oh my gosh.

That's about a five-hour answer. But I'm trying to, you know,

weirdly enough, and I was talking about this with my best friend the other day, lentils are my

favorite, my earliest memory, just eating huge plates of lentils. Because I came from a, my parents

were weirdly, what's the word the word I suppose quite puritanical

about food so everything we never had biscuits we never had fizzy drinks or sweets or anything like that

but when I came home from a school I would have a massive bowl of lentils which sounds like

something out of kind of Oliver Twist or but I actually really like lentils and since then it's funny isn't it the associations that you make with sort of comfort and since then if ever I am having a night in instead of having a kind of beans on toast or whatever it is that people go to I do just think a steaming bowl of lentils is there's something uniquely comforting about that.

And you were born in Paris and then raised in London. Was there a kind of French and also

British theme to the food that you're eating? Yeah, I suppose all the food my parents made has always

been very French, but minus the rich sources. And at Christmas, for example, we always used to have

the massive meal on the night before on Christmas Eve, which I think people just don't really do

...