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

And I'm Olivia Potts. And today we're delighted to be joined by Professor Philip Henscher,

the novelist and journalist whose books cover a wide variety of subjects, often dealing with

important historical change. Among other subjects, Philip has written about the fall of the Berlin

Wall, the First Afghan War, the Independence of Bangladesh and growing up in Sheffield.

As a journalist, he writes

regularly for us here at The Spectator, and he's also a professor of creative writing at

Bath Spa University. His latest novel is Tabassi Park. Philip, welcome to Table Talk.

Hello. Philip, we'll start where we always do at the beginning and ask you, what are your earliest

memories of food?

My mum was a very sort of inventive cook and I think one of the first memories I have was of her

making the weekday dinner of mints and mashed potatoes irresistible to a small boy by

christening it nests there was this dish called nests and it was just a dollop of mince in a in a circle of

mashed potato and there was such a kind of romantic thing for me romantic and poetic that was

lovely and the other thing that i remember loving when i was a very little boy was liver which must

have been very convenient for my my parents living on a tight budget i adored liver when i was little boy

it's not strange that was a more unusual taste for a small child.

And what were meal times like?

Well this is sort of the late 1960s, early 1970s.

And I can hardly believe it now, but we used to say grace every meal.

And we'd have water to drink. And if we were

...