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

And I'm Olivia Potts. And we're delighted today to be joined by the food historian, Dr. Annie Gray.

She's the author of a number of books, including The Greedy Queen and the Alps in the Dale's 100 years of Betties.

Her latest book, Victory in the Kitchen, The Life of Churchill's Cook, is out this month. Annie, welcome to our podcast. Thank you very much

for having me. So we'll start where we always do at the beginning. What are your earliest memories

of food? Oh, my grandmother's food, probably. My parents were really bad cooks, or at least my mother was a really stonkingly awful cook. So my memories of home cooked food tend to revolve around things like chicken fricassees with oxo cube bits floating in them. So that was the umami of its day. And a horrific beer casserole that was really sort of acrid and eating fish

and chips with a lot of ketchup mainly for the peas so they're all quite bad food memories and my

early good ones revolve around my grandmother's house on my father's side we used to go and stay with

her she was in gloucestershire and she would always do steak and chips and then the next day it

would always be roast beef and Yorkshire puddings

so my sort of cozy food memories are very much associated with my grandmother's house and this

very sort of traditional food if you stayed more than about four days with her the good stuff would

run out and you'd be on fish fingers and bird's like potato waffles but she she was brilliant

as long as you were there for like two days.

And did you learn to cook when you were younger?

I didn't, no.

I think I was very interested in food from quite a young age.

I do remember cooking cakes for school, rock cakes and things out of the Hamlin All Colour Cookery book and things like that.

So I would sit on the worktop and sort of bake cakes and add things into sponge cakes

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