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

I'm Laura Prendergast. And today we are delighted to be joined by Rachel Roddy.

Rachel is a food writer and author based in Rome. Her first book, Five Quarters, won the

Andre Simone Food Book Award and the Guild of Food Writers' First Book Award. And her Guardian column is

multi-award winning. Her second book, Two Kitchens, was published in 2017, and her third book, An A to Z

of Pasta, will be published by Fig Tree Penguin on the 8th of July.

Rachel, welcome to table talk.

Oh, it's lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.

Rachel, as listeners know, we always start in the very same place, each podcast, with a question,

what are your earliest memories of food?

Well, I feel my granny's pubs got unfair biased here because I've just been writing about it.

My mum's mum, my granny, had a pub in Oldham called The Gardner's Arms.

As I say, I've been writing about my memories and how unreliable my memory is,

especially around food. It was sort of quite a lot of fabricating, but anyway, I have very

strong memories of being in the pub. It was a Robinson's pub. It was a big pub, an old-fashioned

Victorian pub. So it had a sort of main bar with this sort of great big horseshoe

mahogany bar, very thick red carpets. I do remember that right because I have a photo.

And there's a picture of me when I'm five outside the pub. So I sort of, I imagine that I'm five

and I remember sitting at the stalls because they were incredibly high, they were just bar stools.

...