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

And I'm the Apprendegurst. And today we are delighted to be joined by food historian Penn Vogler.

Penn has written several books about food in the novels and lives of great authors,

including Dinner with Dickens and Tea with Jane Austen.

Her latest book, Scoff, examines the role food has played in our political, social and cultural lives

and how class has shaped the way we eat today.

Penn, welcome to table talk. Thank you very much for having me.

Penn, we like to start our podcast at the beginning with the simple question. What are your earliest memories of food?

Do you know, I've been listening to your podcast for weeks and thinking about this for weeks, and I still

don't know because I'm not very good at chronology, and so my whole childhood is a sort of leap

from one kind of foody treat to another, and probably it'll be something to do with sweets,

because I was slightly obsessed with sweets as a child, as many

kids still are, and many of us were. And it was probably Sunday sweets we were allowed to have.

We weren't allowed to spend our pocket money on them, so we had them once a week and I just

kind of kept going, you know, as a promise of the next treat. Or it might have been doing something

like making,

do you remember those,

did you make those crispy cracklets when you were a child?

They were the corn flakes and the golden syrup and the cocoa powder

and you put them into little paper cases.

So it might have been making those with my mum and my sisters

...