Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights
Sophie Dahl

photographs by

Jan Baldwin

Dedication

For Jamie, at whose table I wish to grow old. With all my love.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Cook’s notes

Introduction

Autumn

Autumn breakfasts

Poached eggs on portobello mushrooms with goat’s cheese

Rice pudding cereal with pear purée

Omelette with caramelized red onion and Red Leicester

Tawny granola

Musician’s breakfast (home-made bread with Parma ham)

Indian sweet potato pancakes

Baked haddock ramekin

Autumn lunches

Spinach and watercress salad with goat’s cheese

French onion soup

Squid salad with chargrilled peppers and coriander/cilantro dressing

Baked eggs with Swiss chard

Chicken and halloumi kebabs with chanterelles

Spinach barley soup

Buckwheat risotto with wild mushrooms

Autumn suppers

Peasant soup

Sunday roast chicken and trimmings

Paris mash

Sea bass in tarragon and wild mushroom sauce

Lily’s stir fry with tofu

Aubergine/eggplant Parmigiana

Grilled salmon with baked onions

Winter

Winter breakfasts

Pear and ginger muffins

Scrambled tofu with cumin and shiitake mushrooms

Kedgeree with brown rice

Scrambled eggs with red chillies and vine tomatoes

Winter fruit compote

Porridge with apricots, manuka honey and crème fraîche

Hangover eggs

Grilled bananas with Greek yoghurt and agave

Winter lunches

Warm winter vegetable salad

Chicken soup with chickpeas

Spelt pancakes filled with cream cheese and butternut squash

Pasta puttanesca

Hollers’ curried parsnip soup

Chargrilled artichoke hearts with Parmesan and winter leaves

Chestnut and mushroom soup

Winter suppers

Brown rice risotto with pumpkin, mascarpone, sage and almonds

My dad’s chicken curry

Monkfish with saffron sauce

Fish pie with celeriac mash

Cauliflower cheese

Buttermilk chicken with smashed sweet potatoes

Christmas done as healthily as it can be

Spring

Spring breakfasts

Grilled papaya/pawpaw with lime

Coquette’s eggs

Bircher muesli

Scrambled tofu with pesto and spinach

Lemon and ricotta spelt pancakes

Grilled figs with ricotta and thyme honey

Rhubarb compote with orange flower yoghurt and pistachios

Spring lunches

My mama’s baked acorn squash

Crab and fennel salad

Teddy’s lettuce soup

Asparagus soup with Parmesan

Courgette/zucchini and watercress soup

Baby vegetable fricassee

Broad bean/fava salad with pecorino and asparagus

Spring suppers

Sea bass with black olive salsa and baby courgettes/zucchini

Pan-fried orange halibut with watercress purée

Hortense’s fish soup

Crusted rack of lamb for Luke

Chargrilled scallops on pea purée

Turmeric tofu with cherry tomato quinoa pilaf

Chicken stew with green olives

Prawn/shrimp, avocado, grapefruit, watercress and pecan salad

Summer

Summer breakfasts

Cinnamon roast peaches with vanilla yoghurt

Blueberry strawberry smoothie

Cold frittata with goat’s cheese and courgettes/zucchini

Scrambled eggs with watercress and smoked salmon

Breakfast burrito

Home-made muesli with strawberry yoghurt

Summer lunches

Avocado soup

Quinoa salad with tahini dressing

Beetroot soup

Pea soup

Summer squash with tomato sauce and pine nuts

Salad niçoise sans anchovies and potatoes

Fish cakes

Summer suppers

Linguine with tomatoes, lemon, chilli and crab

Warm ratatouille

Chicken and fennel au gratin

Coconut curry with prawns/shrimp

Grilled vegetables with halloumi cheese

Barbequed salmon on a cedar plank

Wild rice risotto

Puddings

Ginger parkin

Baked apples

Lemon Capri torte

Lemon mousse

Clover’s Carnation milk jelly

Blackberry and apple crumble

Flourless chocolate cake

Cardamom rice pudding

Elderflower jelly

Flapjacks

Eton mess with rhubarb

Banana Bread

Chocolate chestnut soufflé cake

Orange yoghurt and polenta cake

Acknowledgements

Index

Suppliers

Copyright

About the Publisher

Cook’s notes

I long to learn about grams and kilograms—perhaps one day I will. Having lived in America for so long, I am used to cooking in American measurements of cups and sticks of butter, etc. However, this book has been cleverly translated so that you don’t have to.

All spoon measures are level unless specified otherwise.

1 tsp = 5ml; 1 tbsp = 15ml. An American tablespoon is slightly smaller than the standard British tablespoon.

A British pint = 600ml; an American pint (2 cups) = 500ml.

All pepper is freshly ground black pepper. I also use good-quality sea salt, such as Maldon.

Eggs/Dairy/Stock/Poultry: try to use organic, free-range where possible. If you are pregnant, avoid raw or lightly-cooked eggs and unpasteurized cheeses. For stock I use either fresh or vegetable bouillon; Marigold Swiss Vegetable Bouillon Powder is very good.

Citrus fruit: if the zest is to be used, buy unwaxed citrus fruit.

Crème fraîche: American readers can substitute soured cream.

OVEN TEMPERATURE CHART

Oven timings are for both conventional and fan-assisted ovens. However, use oven temperatures and timings as a guide: get to know the temperatures of your own oven, since individual ovens can vary quite a bit.

Introduction

The second word I ever spoke was ‘crunch’—muddled baby speak for fudge, which should have alerted my parents to what lay ahead. As a small child, food occupied both my waking and nocturnal thoughts; I had clammy nightmares about dreadful men made from school mashed potato wearing striped tights, chasing me into dense forests.

A welcome dream was a cloud made of trifle, a slick spring bubbling with chocolate or a fountain bursting with forbidden Sprite or Cherry Coke. My dolls had the fanciest tea parties in London and I kept a tight guest list, so the only person actually benefiting from the tea was me. My first (and last) rabbit was named for my then favourite breakfast food, the pancake. Pancake was a brute, and he performed an unnatural sex act upon his hutchmate, Maple Syrup, who was a docile, blinking guinea-pig. The shock killed Maple Syrup immediately and Pancake was banished to the country to live out the rest of his days in shame and isolation. It seemed unfair that his strange peccadilloes were rewarded with buxom country rabbits and fresh grass, but the karma police intervened and he met a gruesome end in the jaws of a withered fox.

I have always had a passionate relationship with food; passionate in that I loved it blindly or saw it as its own entity, rife with problems. Back in the day, in my esteem, food was either a faithful friend or a sin, rarely anything in between. Eating as sin is a concept more pertinent than ever before in this tricky, unforgiving today. I realized at an early age that I was born in the wrong time, food-wise. I would have been infinitely more suited to the court of Henry VIII, where the burgeoning interest I showed in food would have been encouraged and celebrated. Alas, in my London of the eighties it was simply cause for family mirth, sullen trips to the nutritionist and brown rice diets. Oddly enough, I was reasonably skinny with a great round moon face; just perpetually hungry like a baby bird. I got rather chubby and unfortunate-looking when I was about seven, and there are some rather sinister pictures of me looking like a grumpy old woman (I had a penchant for coral lipstick and any church-type hat), always with a large sandwich hanging out of my mouth.

I grew up surrounded by food lovers; my parents Tessa and Julian were natural cooks and both sets of grandparents were known for a full table. My earliest memories of food involve my paternal grandmother Gee-Gee, (an ex chorus-girl dancer, five foot of endless leg, saucer-blue eyes and marcelled blonde waves) who lived on the Sussex coast in a house surrounded by whispering trees. My dad and I would drive down from London, a journey that felt decades long to a child, but the monotony was forgotten as soon as Gee-Gee swung open the front door and we were embraced; first by a pleasurable blast of something roasting, and then by her. These lunches usually incorporated roasted something with gravy, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, parsnips, cauliflower cheese, and definitely puddings: treacle tart with a cool lick of cream to sophisticate and sharpen the sugar, incredible crumbles, swimming in thick vanilla custard. Every day there was proper tea at Gee-Gee’s, with homemade scones, ginger cake and her best bone-thin china. She understood absolutely everything about life, except three things:

1 Why anyone, most specifically me, would become a vegetarian.

2 Why it was difficult for hunger to be limited to three times a day, with a little pang left over for tea, devoid of desire to pick between meals.

3 The attraction of violently-coloured eye shadow to a sixteen-year-old. (‘Like an ancient barmaid,’ she’d sniff at my peacock-feather-green eyelids.)

Gee-Gee was brilliant; she taught me to bake without fuss. I watched the quiet joy she derived from feeding those she loved and I took it with me like a tattoo into adulthood, making idle breakfasts and Sunday lunches, Indian summer dinners and rainy day teas, revelling in the simple pleasure cooking for people I cared about brought me.

If anything, this book is a total homage to my family and the appetite and culinary legacy they left me with: Gee-Gee; my maternal grandmother Patricia of Knoxville, Tennessee, with her fondness for grits, collard greens, and lemon chiffon pie; my Norwegian grandfather, Roald, and his vast appreciation for chocolate, borscht and burgundy; his second wife, Felicity, who in his absence continues to keep his table with the same spirit and standard; my aunts and uncle, fine cooks all; my mum and dad, my brothers and sister; each and every one of them has an influence in here somewhere.

I am not an authority on anything much, but I do feel qualified to talk about eating. I’ve done a lot of it. In my time I have been both round as a Rubens and a little slip-shadow of a creature. Weight, and the ‘how to’ maintenance of it, seems to be something that preoccupies a lot of people, and because I lost some, rather publicly, it is something people feel free to ask me about. I have had conversations about weight with strangers in supermarkets, on aeroplanes and in bathroom queues. I could talk until the cows come home about food and recipes and bodies and why as people we are so consumed by the three. I have sat next to erudite academic types at dinner, steeling myself for a conversation that will doubtless include something I know nothing about, like physics, only to be asked in a surreptitious tone, ‘How did you get thinner?’ At which stage I will laugh and say, ‘Well, it all started like this…’

Autumn

We begin in the autumn because that’s when everything changed. Autumn is a season I love more than any other; for its smoky sense of purpose and half-lit mornings, its bonfires, baked potatoes, nostalgia, chestnuts and Catherine wheels.

It was late September. I was eighteen. I had experienced a rather unceremonious exit from school. I had no real idea about what I wanted to do, just some vague fantasies involving writing, a palazzo, an adoring Italian, daily love letters and me in a Sophia Loren sort of dress, weaving through a Roman market holding a basket of ripe scented figs. I had just tried to explain this to my mother over lunch at a restaurant on Elizabeth Street in London. She was not, curiously, sharing my enthusiasm.

‘Enough,’ she said. ‘No more alleged history of art courses. You’re going to secretarial college to learn something useful, like typing.’

‘But I need to learn about culture!’ She gave me a very beady look.

‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘No more. End of conversation.’

‘But I…’ The look blackened. I resorted to the historic old faithful between teenagers and their mothers.

‘God…Why don’t you understand? None of you understand me!’

I ran out into the still, grey street, sobbing. I threw myself on a doorstep and lit a bitter cigarette. And then something between serendipity and Alice in Wonderland magic happened.

A black taxi chugged to a halt by the doorstep on which I sat. Out of it fell a creature that surpassed my Italian imaginings. She wore a ship on her head, a miniature galleon with proud sails that billowed in the wind. Her white bosom swelled out of an implausibly tiny corset and she navigated the street in neat steps, teetering on the brink of five-inch heels.

Her arms were full to bursting with hat boxes and carrier bags and she was alternately swearing, tipping the taxi driver and honking a great big laugh. I remember thinking: ‘I don’t know who that is, but I want to be her friend.’ I was so fascinated I forgot to cry.

I stood up and said, ‘Do you need any help with your bags?’

‘Oh yes!’ she said. ‘Actually, you are sitting on my doorstep.’

‘So, why were you crying?’ The ship woman said in her bright pink kitchen. It transpired that she was called Isabella Blow; she was contributing editor at Vogue and something of a fashion maverick. We’d put the bags down and she was making tea in a proper teapot.

‘I was crying about my future.’ I said heavily. ‘My mother doesn’t understand me. I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, it’s so awful.’

‘Oh don’t worry about that. Pfff!’ she said. ‘Do you want to be a model?’

If it had been a film, there would have been the audible ting of a fairy wand. I looked at her incredulously. ‘Yes,’ I said, thinking of avoiding the purdah of shorthand. My next question was, ‘Are you sure?’

‘Now put on some lipstick and we’ll tell your mother we’ve found you a career’

The ‘Are you sure?’ didn’t spring from some sly sense of modesty; it was brutal realism. And not of the usual model standard ‘I was such an ugly duckling at school, and everyone teased me about how painfully skinny I was’ kind.

Bar my height, I couldn’t have looked any less like a model. I had enormous tits, an even bigger arse and a perfectly round face with plump, smiling cheeks. The only thing I could have possibly shared with a model was my twisted predilection for chain smoking.

But for sweet Issy, as I came to know her, none of this posed a problem. She saw people as she chose to see them; as grander cinematic versions of themselves.

‘I think,’ she said, her red lips a post-box stamp of approval, ‘I think you’re like Anita Ekberg.’ I pretended I knew whom she was talking about.

‘Ah yes. Anita Ekberg.’ I said.

‘Now put on some lipstick and we’ll go and find your mother and tell her we’ve found you a career.’

We celebrated our fortuitous meeting, with my now mollified mother in tow, at a Japanese restaurant in Mayfair, toasting my possible new career with a wealth of sushi and tempura.

‘Gosh, you do like to eat,’ Issy said, eyes wide, watching as my chopsticks danced over the plates. I would have said yes but my mouth was full.

Social activities in England often revolve around the tradition of the nursery tea. I was deeply keen on tea, but as an only child I was not at all keen on having to share either my toys or my food.

‘You must learn to share. It’s a very nasty habit, selfishness,’ Maureen, my Scottish nanny said, her grey eyes fixed on me in a penetrating way.

‘Urgh. It’s so unfair!’ I would cry, scandalized by the injustice of having to watch impotent as other children, often strangers, were allowed to torture my dolls and eat all the salt and vinegar crisps for the mere reason that ‘they can do what they want—they are your guests.’

But I didn’t invite them! You did. I don’t want them messing up my dressing-up box and smearing greasy fingers on my best one-eyed doll, or asking to see her ‘front bottom’. I don’t want friends who say ‘front bottom’. I want to play Tarzan and Jane with Dominic from next door, who has brown eyes and kissed me by the compost heap. I don’t want to be the ugly stepsister in the game, I want to be Cinderella! No, I’m not tired. I might go to my room now and listen to Storyteller. They can stay in the playroom on their own.

When I was six, my friend Ka-Ming came for tea. There was macaroni and cheese, and for pudding, yoghurt. Maureen announced in her buttery burr that there were only two yoghurts, chocolate and strawberry, on which Ka-Ming, as the guest, got first dibs. Agonizing as Ka-Ming slowly weighed up the boons of each flavour, I excused myself and ran to the playroom, where the wishing stone my grandmother Gee-Gee had found on the beach sat on the bookshelf. I had one wish left.

‘Please, wishing stone and God, let her not pick the chocolate yoghurt, because that is the one I want.’ I cradled the stone, hot in my palm.

I walked into the kitchen to find Ka-Ming already eating the strawberry yoghurt with enthusiasm. The chocolate Mr Men yoghurt sat sublime on my plate. This turn of fate cemented my belief that if you wish for something hard enough, as long as it doesn’t already belong to somebody else you tend to get it.

At ten, to my great dismay, I was sent to boarding school. I recalled the permanent midnight feasts in Enid Blyton books, and reckoned that this was the sole pro in an otherwise dismal situation. Yet on arrival I realized that the halcyon midnight feasts were a myth. The reality was fried bread swimming its own stagnant grease, powdered mashed potatoes, bright pink gammon, gristly stew, grey Scotch eggs and collapsed beetroot, which I was made to eat in staggering quantity.

The consolation prize when home from boarding school was picking a Last Supper. Last Suppers were cooked the final night of the school holidays by my mother at her bottle-green Aga; a balm to the palate before another term of unspeakably horrible food. I chose these suppers as if I was dining at the captain’s table on the Titanic—beef consommé, roast chicken wrapped in bacon with tarragon creeping wistfully over its breast, potatoes golden and gloriously crispy on the outside and flaking softly from within, and peas buttered and sweet, haloed by mint from the garden. Puddings were towering, trembling creations: lemon mousse, scented with summer; chocolate soufflés, bitter and proud.

We were grumpily ambivalent about the food at school; the English as a rule aren’t a race of protesters, particularly the ten-year-olds. School food was meant to be bad, that was its role before the advent of Jamie Oliver and his luscious organic, sustainable school dinners. There was the merest whiff of protest during the salmonella crisis in the late eighties, when some rebel chalked ‘Eggwina salmonella curry’ over the curried eggs listing on the menu board and got a detention for their efforts, but that was about as racy as it ever got.

I left boarding school at twelve, and we moved from starchy London to svelte New York. It was in this year that food first became something other than what you ate of necessity, boredom or greediness. I noticed that food contained its own brand of inherent power, certainly where adults were concerned. Women in New York talked about food and how to avoid it all the time. Their teenage progeny religiously counted fat grams, while the mothers went to see a tanned diet guru named Dr R, who provided neat white pills and ziplock bags for snacks of mini pretzels, asking them out for fastidious dinners where he monitored their calorie consumption. If they were lucky they might get a slimline kiss at the end of the evening, the bow of his leonine head offering dietary benediction. It was a savvy way of doing business; Dr R had a repeat clientele, as all the divorced mums were in love with him, staying five pounds over their ideal weight in order to prolong both that coveted dinner and his undivided attention.

I loved New York, loved its fast glittery shininess and sophistication, which was the polar opposite of the dowdy certainty of English boarding school. At my new school, my ineptitude with maths was greeted with such bolstering and enthusiasm that, for a brief blissful period, I was almost good at it.

In our biology class we read about the perils of anorexia. We learnt the signs to be wary of: secrecy, layers of clothing, blue extremities, pretending to have eaten earlier, cessation of menstruation, hair on the body, compulsive exercise.

My taste buds awoke from their slumber with the tenacity of Rip Van Winkle

We were eagle-eyed mini detectives, each classmate a suspect. After these sessions we didn’t see the irony in spending the whole of lunchtime talking about how many calories were in a plain bagel and who looked fat in her leotard. Awareness of eating disorders seemed American-specific; my friends in England were baffled by it.

‘Isn’t Anna Rexia a person?’ My best friend asked me on a crackling transatlantic line.

‘Duh.’ I said.

There was a pause.

‘That’s really awful. Why would anyone not want to eat when they were hungry?’

Cafeteria food in America was even worse than in England; gloopy electric-orange macaroni cheese, iron-tasting chocolate milk and ‘pudding’, a gelatinous mess meant to be related to vanilla in some way. I stuck to wholewheat bagels with cream cheese and tomatoes, because that was low-fat, and the then wisdom told us that low-fat was the way forward. On a Friday morning we were allowed to bring breakfast to school and eat it in our first class as a treat. I bought these breakfasts from the deli on the corner and did consider them treats; a fried egg sandwiched in a croissant and milky coffee (made with skimmed milk, of course) seemed deliciously adult and forbidden.

I shaved my legs for the first time at thirteen without permission and left ribbons of skin in the bath with my shaky novice hand. My mother came in and shook her head and said sadly, ‘Now you’ve started there’s no going back. That’ll be waxing for the rest of your life, my darling.’

I wondered how I might look to other people in a swimsuit, as during the summer there were pool parties where there were boys, and, perhaps even more scary, the narrow eyes of the other girls. It seemed much more complicated territory than my English boarding school, where everyone was blue from cold, clad in the same troll-like, unflattering regulation green. These golden girls wore tiny bikinis and had manicures and pedicures.

In the absence of hearty boarding school stodge and endless picking, my body had willowed. My legs were long; my skirts were short. I was a wisp with a wasp waist and pertly-chested to boot. I joined the chattering lunchtime throng, reading food labels as if they were Dostoevsky, pretending to understand, while at home I tore up steps on the Stairmaster as Jason Priestly twinkled at me from the television.

For reasons complicated and long, we left the sophisticated city when I was fourteen and fell heavily down to earth, onto England’s sodden soil, in 1991. No one seemed to have heard of ‘low-fat’ in England, not even in London where I was now at day school. They didn’t seem to care all that much. I tried for a few gruelling months to avoid the fat in food I’d learnt to be careful of, but it just kept coming back, persistent as a lover spurned.

I eventually surrendered on a half-term holiday in France with school friends who were eating their croissants and drinking their full-fat milk hot chocolate with deep abandon. Having ascertained that there really was no skimmed milk in the house (or indeed the country), I took the plunge. But oh! How delicious! My taste buds awoke from their New York slumber with the tenacity of Rip Van Winkle and they never slept again.

My body responded, and how; my cheeks plumped up like an indolent Matisse lady’s. On the street, my complicated curves and awkward wiggle sent a message that my brain and heart could not keep up with. Grown men called out to me; dark adult things in sly tones. I found this unsettling and felt naked even when I was dressed. Yet I dressed the part of the vixen in viciously-heeled shoes, breasts jutting forward proudly, betrayed only by my eyes. I was constantly followed home from school, and flashed at on the bus. My mother despaired and sent me to a progressive boarding school in Hampshire, surrounded by fields, where I could stomp around in my inappropriate clothing without being accosted by potential rapists. We lived on bread, and I filled myself brimful with it; warm and soft from the local bakery, covered in butter and Marmite.

Because of my school’s nice progressive nature, there was an abundance of personal choice and options. I discovered one could opt out of games and do something called ‘Outdoor Work’, so I opted out and tottered off to the woods in my suede miniskirts, lamely clutching a saw as I pretended to erect fences with the boys who still played dungeons and dragons. Our fences were spindly rickety efforts and our pig-tending was not much better.

On Wednesday we had a half-day of school to make up for the fact that we had school on Saturday and we were allowed to go into the nearby town in the afternoons, as long as we stayed clear of the pub. My interest in the pub was cursory. On Tuesday nights I planned epic gastronomic excursions, formulating the menu of what and where I would eat, the conclusion invariably involving an epic fiesta of cake and clotted cream.

Unsurprisingly, at boarding school I gained two stone. It happened quite by accident, and I didn’t even notice to begin with, but you can’t exist on bread and cake, with your sole exercise taking the form of watching other people build things, and stay thin. It didn’t occur to me how I could have contributed, or that I could do anything about any of it.

I just thought it was yet another adolescent unfairness foisted upon me. I ate more cake, read tragic French novels and hated the fields and stupid fences I was surrounded by. I longed for London, a minor Parisian appetite, lithe limbs, complication and Chantal Thomas knickers. Mercifully, the knowledge of how to acquire such things remained totally out of my reach.

My country sojourn over, I arrived back in London at sixteen with child-bearing hips and a trunk full of smocks. Everyone pretended not to notice. Sixth form was in Golders Green, and instead of café dining once a week on a Wednesday, planning lunch in the local establishments became a blissful daily affair. This is where all of my summer babysitting money went. At the bottom of Golders Hill, near the station, there was an amazing kosher deli where I ordered fresh bagels, sweet and doughy inside, smothered with thick cream cheese and smoked salmon. In Golders Hill Park, it was the sweet little Italian café where you could get a plate of al dente penne with a smoky tomato sauce and dear little cream-filled pastries for pudding. The pub at the top of the hill was all about jacket potatoes and a fine ploughman’s. But what jacket potatoes—twice-baked and filled with butter, gruyère and watercress, or the alternative: tuna, mayonnaise and sweetcorn. I think I tried to go on a diet once, and it involved, from what I can remember, eating a lot of brown rice and apples and lethicin, because a friend of my mother’s told me that they all lived on it in the seventies and that it melted fat clean away. In the sixth form games were no longer compulsory, and I began to feel the same way about school, causing an academic rift that I rue to this day.

Between school and modelling, before I met Isabella, I was first a nanny, then a waitress. Both were perilous where food was concerned. As a nanny, I was constantly picking at leftover fishfingers, Twiglets, egg sandwiches and Victoria sponge. The two girls I looked after were incredibly sweet: a round baby and a six-year-old with a voice like Marianne Faithfull. We went to lots of rather posh tea parties where the mothers greeted me as ‘Nanny’. I adored the little girls but was a bit hopeless really; not ironing their clothes, taking naps with them and trying on their mother’s scent when she was out. I was very much eighteen. We did, however, make each other laugh, and I loved Jaffa Cakes as much as they did.

I tottered off to the woods, lamely clutching a saw

And not for me the kind of waitressing job where I ran on skinny legs around a steamy frantic environment, collapsing at the end of a twelve-hour shift in sheer anaemic exhaustion. No, I went to work the 7.00 am shift in a coffee-shop bakery after the baking had already taken place. Thus, my arrival coincided happily with things coming out of the oven; a muffin with apple butter, a dark molasses banana bread. I think it was my all-time favourite job. It involved chatting, smiling, eating and concocting lovely coffee-based milkshakes which I would sip through the day. I was an awful waitress, because I was clumsy and could never remember anyone’s order. But they were terribly sweet there, and I learnt how to sweep a floor properly, and that you cannot wear five-inch peep-toed mules to waitress in.

I was dripping in diamonds and not much else

When I began modelling after those brief jobs, I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity it carried with it. I was in that funny teenage place of being both very aware of, and yet somehow forgetting I had a body. I wanted to look the same as my friends; I wanted to be able to borrow their clothes. Beyond that, I didn’t think about it too deeply.

Issy had never told me to lose weight; she had just said rather vaguely, ‘Now, my love; no more chips and puddings for you, and always wear a good bra and red lipstick.’ My concession to this advice was a DIY diet; eating instant powdered soup with dry pitta bread for three days, which was revolting, and certainly had no effect. I ended up being measured for a bra at Rigby and Peller, which had an infinitely more tangible result than the soup, and also developed a lifelong love affair with Yves Saint Laurent’s Rouge Pur, which smells of roses.

It was Issy who introduced me to Sarah Doukas, the founder of Storm Model Management, and when she signed me, weight loss was nowhere on the day’s agenda. Sarah is famously visionary; she discovered Kate Moss at JFK airport when she was fourteen and manages her to this day. With her customary canniness, she saw that there might actually be a place for me in fashion, given the vocal protest the media were making against the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look that was defining style. The timing, and her instinct, made a happy marriage to set the scene for what was about to happen.

My first job was being photographed nude by Nick Knight for ID magazine. They gave me five-inch long silver nails, silver contact lenses and a canvas of skin powdered silver. I don’t remember feeling naked; I felt like an onlooker, such was the transformative power of the hair and make-up, which took four hours. The overriding memory I have of that day is of being turned into someone else; some alter ego with comic-book curves and a rapacious smile. Being naked seemed almost incidental. A few hours later I was sent in a cab up to Park Royal to be shot by David La Chapelle for Vanity Fair in a portfolio about ‘Swinging London’, this time clad in a string bikini. When I went home late that night, I didn’t wash my make-up off because I wanted to wake up looking like that forever. Of course the next morning I was a smeared shell of a creature, my sheets covered in silver dust.

A few weeks later, I boarded a train to Paris, carrying nothing but a little basket with my nightdress, knickers and a toothbrush, and went straight from the Gare du Nord to the house of Karl Lagerfield, who was shooting a story for German Vogue about King Farouk. Gianfranco Ferré was playing the part of the erstwhile king, and I his bawdy American mistress. I was dripping in diamonds and not a great deal else. I felt incredibly shy around Mr Lagerfield, who was kind yet reticent behind his fan, until he roared with laughter, pinched my cheeks and kissed me like an uncle. We stopped for a proper French lunch, a stew heavy with red wine, oozing cheese and crusty bread and little pots of dense, dark chocolate for pudding. I was in heaven. The shoot went on long into the night, and after everyone else had gone home he photographed me waltzing around his beautiful library, which shone with swathes of waxy lilies and hundreds of candles. At 3.00 am I walked across the street to the old-fashioned hotel where I was staying, and I lay in bed with my eyes wide open, unable to summon sleep. There was so much to absorb and evoke, from the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, to the church-like smell of the lilies, the cool of the diamonds as they slipped around my neck, the food…

People had noticed me. Big women from all over the world wrote me congratulatory letters, commending my big bold form. Morning television shows wanted to interview me. Newspapers breathlessly reported my strange fleshy phenomena; a welcome backlash, finally, against the x-ray fashion industry. In the wake of the very angular, it seemed people wanted an anti-waif; a sensual woman who indulged in whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it. By default, this became me. But reflection on what it represented and what it might mean had escaped me; no longer reliant on waitress’s wages, I was too busy skipping around London, Paris, New York and Milan, spending my modelling money in posh restaurants, city appropriate. I went to Nobu for the first time and nearly died with pleasure—that black cod! In Italy it was risotto, in Paris remoulade, and New York was just a culinary world mecca, full stop.

I remember doing shows in the early days, happily squeezed into some mini little thing. Although a walk up and down a runway is over in minutes, you can register the faces of those you walk by in slow motion. I produced such a strange mixed reaction, one that was palpable. The more formidable fashion editors would sit there with their arms tightly crossed, looking embarrassed and rolling their eyes. Others would cheer and shout. The photographers at the end of the runway would sometimes catcall and whistle. It had been a long time since the advent of tits in fashion, so they were pretty enthused. I found a sort of sad teenage validation in this—not particularly thought-out or examined—something along the lines of ‘It’s men, whistling at me. They seem to fancy me. Hurrah! That must mean I’m kind of sexy.’

Every woman in my family had been through a tricky adolescent over-spilling phase. The difference with mine was that it became both representative and a matter of public record, rather than something to look back on with tender mirth when presented with a family album. We always joked as a family about our greediness. We described events by what we ate. There was and is, a total ease and pleasure around food and cooking. My path has been a funny one; having come from such a background, to then find myself at a formative age dropped into the middle of an industry not exactly renowned for its epicurean appreciation. There’s something sort of fun and subversive about it. It was a slightly wiggly trajectory, but one full of interesting stuff.

And guess what? I’m now right back where I was at seven, bar the penchant for coral lipstick and bad hats. I just couldn’t get away from the siren call of the kitchen that is an inherent part of me. The kitchen of which I speak is both literal and metaphoric. It’s the sum of what I’ve learnt so far, and am still learning.

This kitchen is a gentle relaxed one, where a punishing, guilt-inducing attitude towards food will not be tolerated. In this kitchen we appreciate the restorative powers of chocolate. The kitchen would have a fireplace, and possibly a few dogs from Battersea Dogs’ Home curled up next to it. There might be a small upright piano by the window, with an orchid that doesn’t wither as soon as I look at it. On long summer days, the doors to this kitchen are thrown open, while a few lazy, non-stinging bees mosey by. Children stir. When it rains, there is room in this kitchen for reading and a spoon finding its way into the cake mix. Serious cups of tea are drunk here; idle gossip occurs, balance and humour prevail. It’s the kitchen of my grandparents’, but with some Bowie thrown in. It is lingering breakfasts, it is friends with babies on their knees, it is goodbye on a Sunday with the promise of more. This kitchen is where life occurs; jumbled, messy and delicious.

There is room in this kitchen for a spoon finding its way into the cake mix

It is lovely.

Autumn breakfasts

Poached eggs on portobello mushrooms with goat’s cheese

SERVES 2

2 generously sized portobello mushrooms

Salt and pepper

Olive oil

2 thick rounds of soft goat’s cheese

2 eggs

1 teaspoon of white vinegar (for poaching)

1 sprig of fresh tarragon

I make this when I’m a bit breaded out, but hungry. Portobello mushrooms have a satisfying meatiness about them that sates without the heaviness of a full English.

Preheat the grill. Wash the mushrooms and remove the stalks, season with salt and pepper and give them a glug of olive oil; a spoonful should do. Crumble the goat’s cheese.

Pop the mushrooms stalk-side up under the grill for about 5 minutes. While they are searing away, poach the eggs in a pan of gently boiling water (a teaspoon of white vinegar should stop them separating).

You can do one of two things with the goat’s cheese: you can add it on top of the mushrooms when you put them under the grill, so it browns; or you can put it on just after they come out.

You should poach the eggs for about 3 minutes if you want them soft in the middle (5 if you want them stern and unyielding). Drain them, put them on top of your crumbly goat’s cheese/mushroom mix, scatter some chopped tarragon on the top, grind on a bit of pepper, and voilà!

Rice pudding cereal with pear purée

SERVES 2

375ml/1¹/₂ cups of the milk of your choice—I’d use semi-skimmed or soya

100g/¹/₂ a cup of basmati rice

2 cardamom pods, lightly crushed

1 stick of cinnamon

Honey or maple syrup, to taste

crème fraîche (optional)

For the compote

2 pears

60ml/¹/₄ of a cup of apple juice

1 teaspoon of cinnamon extract

There is a theme to my cooking that tends towards baby food. This is a perfect example.

In a heavy-bottomed pan, bring the milk and rice to the boil. Add the cardamom pods and cinnamon stick. Take the heat down to its lowest flame, or use a heat diffuser, cover the rice, and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

While this is cooking, peel and core the pears and chop into slices. Bring the apple juice to the boil; add the pears and cinnamon extract. Cook until the pears are tender, 5 minutes or so, adding more juice if needed. Remove from the heat and transfer to a blender, or purée them with a hand-held blender.

Fluff the rice and put into a bowl. Pour the compote on top with a drizzle of honey or maple syrup and, if it’s a particularly grim morning, stick in a spoonful of crème fraîche.

Omelette with caramelized red onion and Red Leicester

SERVES 1

¹/₂ a small red onion

Olive oil

2 eggs

Salt and pepper

50g/2oz of Red Leicester cheese (any good, sharp, hard cheddar like Monterey Jack will do as an alternative)

I cry like a baby when I chop onions. A few years ago I found a brilliant device from Williams Sonoma online which does all the work for you. You simply peel the onion, put it in the top of the contraption, pop the lid on and turn the handle. Voilà, diced onions without tears.

Roughly chop the onion. On a low flame, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil in a non-stick frying pan. I use a small fat pan as I like my omelettes tidy and plump. Gently fry the onion, letting the edges brown but making sure the middle stays softly purple. This should take about 5 minutes. When it looks to your liking, take it out and reserve on the side. Remove any crispy bits from the pan.

Beat the eggs and season. On a low heat again, heat a scant bit of olive oil in your frying pan and add the eggs. Let them settle for 30 seconds. Either grate or break the cheese up into rough chunks and put it in the setting omelette. As it melts, pour in your onions and gently fold the omelette in half with a spatula. Depending on how done you like your omelette to be, you can then fry the other side. I like mine very slightly oozing.

Delicious with a dollop of mustard! (And if you are my pernickety brother, Ned, without the onions!)

Tawny granola

SERVES 4-6

Oil for greasing

200g/2 cups of rolled oats

70g/¹/₂ a cup of pumpkin seeds

50g/¹/₂ a cup of flaked almonds

50g/¹/₂ a cup of desiccated coconut

2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

160g/¹/₂ a cup of agave syrup or honey

2 tablespoons of apple juice

1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon of ground allspice

1 pinch of freshly grated nutmeg

100g/¹/₂ a cup of chopped dried apricots

You can eat this with milk as a cereal, sprinkle it on yoghurt or porridge or simply stick your paw in the jar throughout the day. It makes one feel very fifties housewife, because as it bakes the house is bathed in a warm cinnamon-y glow.

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/Gas 4 and oil a large baking tray/cookie sheet.

Combine in a mixing bowl the oats, pumpkin seeds, almonds and desiccated coconut. In a separate large mixing bowl, mix all of the wet ingredients and the spices. Combine the dry ingredients into the wet.

Spread the mixture out evenly on the baking tray/cookie sheet, using a spatula to smooth it down. Bake for around 40 minutes, keeping an eye on the granola. When it starts to brown, turn the mixture over with the spatula to make sure it toasts evenly on both sides.

When it is ready, take it out of the oven, let it cool, then add the apricots.

Store in an airtight container and serve with milk or yoghurt, or eat as a snack when the whim takes you.

Musician’s breakfast (home-made bread with Parma ham)

MAKES ONE LARGE LOAF

450g/4 cups of wholemeal/whole wheat flour or spelt flour

100g/1 cup of rolled oats

20ml/1 large tablespoon of quick yeast

1 teaspoon of sea salt

600ml/2¹/₂ cups of warm water

1 tablespoon of sunflower oil

1 tablespoon of runny honey

My beloved is a musician. This, a strong cup of tea and Miles Davis on the stereo makes him a happy fellow of a morning.

In a large mixing bowl, mix together all the dry ingredients with a wooden spoon. In a large Pyrex jug, mix together the warm water, sunflower oil and honey. Add the wet to the dry ingredients in the large bowl, mixing them together. Cover and put in a warm place, like a plate warmer or airing cupboard. It should stay there for 20 minutes, or until it’s doubled in size.

Once it has doubled, take it out, stir it with the wooden spoon until the air is gone and it is back to its original size. Trust me on this. Place the dough in an oiled 1.5-litre/6³/₄-cup (23 x 13 x 6cm/9 x 5 x 2¹/₂-inch) loaf pan, and banish it back to the warm place for another 20 minutes. Preheat the oven to 190°C/170°C fan/Gas 5.

Take it out, and put it in the oven for 45 minutes to 1 hour, depending on how it looks.

Serve with butter, mustard and a big slice of Parma ham—or, if you’re like me, simply butter and marmalade.

Indian sweet potato pancakes

SERVES 2 HUNGRY PEOPLE WITH SOME LEFT OVER FOR TEA

2 egg whites

340g/1¹/₂ cups of cooked and coarsely mashed sweet potatoes

2 medium-sized spring onions/scallions, chopped

1¹/₂ teaspoons of curry powder

1 pinch of ground cumin

Salt and pepper

Groundnut oil

I once spent a few months in Bombay making a film that cemented two things: one, an actress I am not, but two, should all else fail I can now dance while lip-synching in Hindi. I love, love, love Indian food and, most of all, Indian breakfasts with a stress on the savoury. These aren’t really pancakes, more like latkes without the oil.

Beat the egg whites with a fork in a bowl. Combine everything else except the groundnut oil in a big mixing bowl with your fingers, putting in the egg whites last.

Heat a frying pan or griddle, rubbed with a little bit of groundnut oil, and place dollops of the mixture onto it. Remember: the bigger the pancake the longer it will take to cook, so keep them little and neat. Squash them a bit with a spatula once in the pan. They’ll take about 5 minutes each side on a medium heat, with another couple of minutes’ blast on the first side at the end.

Baked haddock ramekin

SERVES 2 – ALREADY IN LOVE

Butter for greasing

1 generous piece of undyed fresh smoked haddock (about 350-400g/11-13oz)

250ml/1 cup of milk

2 bay leaves

Freshly ground black pepper

50g/¹/₂ a cup of grated strong/sharp Cheddar

Fresh parsley, to garnish

Don’t make this in the first throes of love or when you have people coming over. Haddock is not, and never will be, a sensory aphrodisiac. It is, however, delicious.

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/Gas 4. Preheat the grill.

Butter two ramekins. Halve the haddock and put a piece in each ramekin. Pour the milk over the top and add a bay leaf and black pepper to each. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove from the oven, top with Cheddar and blast under the hot grill for a few minutes. Chop some fresh parsley and sprinkle on top.

Autumn lunches

Spinach and watercress salad with goat’s cheese

SERVES 2

2 eggs

90g/3 cups of spinach

1 small bunch of watercress

110g/¹/₂ a cup of soft goat’s cheese, crumbled

70g/¹/₂ a cup of toasted pumpkin seeds (or as many, or little, as you prefer)

For the dressing

1¹/₂ teaspoons of harissa paste

2 tablespoons of olive oil

This is an easy salad, so I suggest buying harissa for the dressing! You can find really good harissa in any good deli or Middle Eastern shop, and all you have to do is mix it with some smoky olive oil (see below), pour it on your salad and luxuriate in being a bit damn lazy.

Hardboil the eggs for about 5 minutes. Wash the spinach and watercress leaves and put in a salad bowl. Peel the hardboiled eggs, add them to your leaves and mix in the goat’s cheese. Mix the harissa with the olive oil to form a dressing. Scatter the pumpkin seeds on top of the leaves and dress.

Easy peasy!

French onion soup

SERVES 4 GENEROUSLY

3 large yellow onions

1 tablespoon of butter

Slug of olive oil

2 litres/8 cups of stock—I used 4 cups of chicken stock, 4 of vegetable. Beef is the traditional choice, but I think this is as good

1 tablespoon of good aged syrupy balsamic vinegar

Salt and pepper

100g/1 cup of grated cheese—Gruyère is delicious, but Parmesan will do as well

Purists will argue this is nothing like the real thing, which should be made with beef stock and have a great molten island of bread and cheese on top. I use vegetable stock and lose the bread—it’s not as heavy, yet still as decadent and comforting. The trick is slooooooooow cooking the onions, so they impart their rich caramelly flavour to the soup. A drizzle of good balsamic vinegar also gives it a rich enigmatic taste, perfect for a blowsy autumn day.

Roughly chop the onions. In a large pot (I use a heavy-bottomed Le Creuset), melt the butter with a few glugs of olive oil on a low heat. You don’t want it to burn. Make sure the bottom of the pan is covered, by swishing it around.

Pour in the onions, mix them into the oil with a wooden spoon and sweat gently for about 40 minutes. If your heat is kept to the lowest setting they won’t need more oil. Sometimes this is helped by using a heat diffuser pad. Towards the end of the cooking, turn up the heat a bit; you want the onions to brown and caramelize, not to be charred to a crisp.

When the onions look golden and browned round the edges, pour in the stock. Turn down the heat to low again, stir, and add the balsamic vinegar. I don’t know why, but this gives the soup a mellow, sweet earthiness. Let it simmer for another 15 minutes, taste, add salt and pepper if needed and then, using a ladle, pour into bowls.

Pour the cheese in when you are about to serve.

Squid salad with chargrilled peppers and coriander/cilantro dressing

SERVES 4-6

1 large red pepper, chopped into four lengthways, seeds removed

1 large yellow pepper, chopped into four lengthways, seeds removed

Olive oil

Roughly 100g/4 cups of cleaned baby squid

For the dressing

1 bunch of fresh chopped coriander/cilantro

A few basil leaves

4 tablespoons of olive oil

¹/₂ a clove of garlic, peeled and chopped

Juice of 1 lime

One of the best lunches I ever had was on a small boat in Greece, where the mother of the captain dived into the sea in an enormous swimming costume, surfacing triumphant holding a wiggling bag of squid. She fried them with lemon and olive oil. It was heaven. This is a tribute to her.

Chargrill the peppers (or ‘bell’ peppers, if you’re in the US) in a grill pan with some olive oil. Once they are grilled and cooled slightly, cut them into thinner strips.

Chop the squid into rings, but leave the tentacles whole. Sauté in a hot frying pan with a little more olive oil until they are lightly golden: 2-3 minutes. Pour onto a plate and mix with the peppers.

Put the coriander/cilantro, basil, oil, garlic and lime juice into the blender and blend on high. If necessary, add a bit more lime juice. Pour over the squid and peppers and serve.

Baked eggs with Swiss chard

SERVES 2

Butter for greasing

2 tablespoons of olive oil

160g/1 cup of chopped red onions

75g/1 cup of chopped Swiss chard

2 eggs

110g/¹/₂ a cup of crumbled goat’s cheese

There is something redolent of the nursery tea about baked eggs. They are so easy and are a miniature cosy meal in themselves. Mix with Swiss chard—nutty, more-ish, and oh so good for you.

Preheat the oven to 180°C/160°C fan/Gas 4.

Butter two large ramekins (or a large dish if you want to bake the eggs together). Heat the olive oil in a pan until hot. Add the onions and caramelize for about 10-15 minutes, being careful not to let them burn. Mix the onions with the Swiss chard and divide between the ramekins. Break an egg into each ramekin carefully, so it sits on top of the Swiss chard/onion mixture. Bake in the bottom of the oven for 10 minutes.

Preheat the grill. Remove the ramekins from the oven, scatter the goat’s cheese on top and put under the grill until the cheese is bubbling.

Chicken and halloumi kebabs with chanterelles

SERVES 2

2 skinless and boneless chicken breasts, each one cut into four

Olive oil

1 packet of halloumi, cut into eight cubes

4 kebab skewers (either metal or wooden soaked in water)

Salt and pepper

225g/3 cups of chanterelles

For the marinade

1 bunch of mixed herbs, such as parsley and mint, chopped

1 clove of garlic, peeled and crushed

4-5 tablespoons of olive oil

For the dressing (optional)

Olive oil

Juice of 1 lemon

I am obsessed with halloumi cheese. I love its sharp, slightly rubbery soul, and I love it grilled and in salads. If you don’t eat meat you could replace the chicken with vegetables—the first that springs to mind would be an aubergine/eggplant.

Make the marinade by chopping the herbs and garlic and putting in a mixing bowl with the olive oil. Add the cubed chicken, cover the bowl with cling film and marinate for 2 hours.

Preheat the grill. Sauté the chicken pieces for 8-10 minutes over a low heat in 1 tablespoon of olive oil, then assemble the kebabs in the following order: chicken, halloumi, chicken, halloumi. Season to taste. Before you grill the kebabs, make sure the chicken is moist and, if needed, add more oil. Grill for 4 minutes under searing heat.

While the chicken is grilling, pan-fry the chanterelles in 1 tablespoon of olive oil for 3 minutes. Pour a mound of the mushrooms on a serving plate and lay the kebab sticks across them. You can make a separate dressing of olive oil and lemon juice if you want and pour that over thetop.

Spinach barley soup

SERVES 4-6

3 tablespoons of olive oil

1 onion, chopped

2 large fresh sage leaves, chopped

1.5 litres/6¹/₂ cups of vegetable stock

180g/6 cups of spinach, washed and chopped

150g/³/₄ a cup of pearl barley

Salt and pepper

50g/¹/₂ a cup of grated Parmesan

My nanny Maureen is a master soup-maker. It was almost worth being ill from time to time as a child, just in order to get a steaming bowl of comfort on the sofa in front of The Wombles. This is my homage to her.

Heat the oil in a heavy-bottomed pan, put in the onion and sage leaves and cook on a low heat for about 5 minutes. While that’s cooking, heat the stock in another pan. Stir the spinach into the onion mixture and cook for another few minutes. Pour in the hot stock and cook, covered, on a low heat for 10 minutes. Add the barley and leave it cooking for another half an hour or until the barley is soft. Season to taste. When it is ready, ladle into bowls and sprinkle the Parmesan on top.

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