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

I'm Lara Prendergast, and my guest this week will be well known to listeners,

partly because she is the co-host of this podcast.

I'm joined this week by Olivia Potts, who is as well as

the spectator's vintage chef columnist, the author of a new book called A Half-Baked Idea,

how grief, love and cake took me from the courtroom to Le Cordon Blur. We thought listeners might enjoy

hearing her story, so here she is. Welcome, is welcome livi hello thank you for having me

livi i've just finished your book and it's brilliant i'd recommend it to everyone listening

the premise is obviously that your your mother died and it sort of set you on this new path

you were a criminal barrister and then you became a professional cook let's start at the beginning where we always start though what was food like when you became a professional cook. Let's start at the beginning where we always start,

though. What was food like when you were a child? Food was good when I was a child. My mum was a

really good cook. I didn't really have a culinary inheritance from her as such, because although

she was a good cook, she didn't really enjoy cooking so it wasn't

something where I stood at her hip in the kitchen and learned how to bake fairy cakes or learn how

she makes her stews or anything like that but she was actually a really proficient cook she'd

learned to cook when her mother had had a hip operation and had been indisposed. So mum had been cooking from when she

was a teenager and was very much of the Delia Smith School of Cookery and, you know, had a smallish

repertoire of really good dinner party dishes that she would pull out. And, you know, she cooked

for me and my sister and my dad every day. So we were very well fed,

although I was speaking to my sister recently

as I finished up writing the book.

And I said, you know,

...