This is Spectator Radio, The Spectator's Curated Podcast Collection.

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

I'm Laura Prendergast.

And I'm Olivia Potts.

And we're delighted to be joined by the author and broadcaster Rachel Johnson.

Rachel, thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

So let's jump straight in at the beginning with your childhood. What were meal times like when

you were young? Oh, they were very, very noisy. And we had most family holidays. And in Somerset,

we have a family hill farm. And my father would sit at the head of the table and he would dominate proceedings by preventing conversation and instituting quizzes.

Lunch was always something like hind's tomato soup and bread and cheese. And supper,

if we were lucky, was my grandmother's rice salad, which was a much longed-for treat, which was cooked

Uncle Ben's rice, raw onion, raw tomato, and a can of tuna chucked in.

Now, to us, this was an unhoped for delicacy.

Because my grandmother, as you might have gathered, was not noted for her cuisine or her abilities in the kitchen. In fact, she was born in

Versailles in a very smart bit of Versailles called the Pavilion de Barri. And she was had a sort of,

was weighted on hand of foot kind of childhood. And then she married my grandfather and was she, as she says,

pitchforked into life as a ex-more farmer's wife and had never been taught how to cook and didn't

even put her own stockings on. So she could make about three things. And the other thing we liked

that she made was what she called chocolate ice cream, which was a mixture of cocoa and carnation milk that she were put into ice,

those metal ice trays.

You're far too young to remember them, but she'd put them in metal ice.

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