Home comforts for Herbert...

In a cosy dining room filled with light, art and floor-to-ceiling shelves of beautiful crockery, Australian cook and writer David Herbert is apologising about the baked goodies on the table in front of us: “They’re not the most attractive-looking scones,” he says, with a smile.

This is a man who has cooked for the Queen Mother and two Australian Prime Ministers, and worked with Delia Smith and Jamie Oliver, but Herbert is as modest as they come.

His cheese scones, spread liberally with butter on a silver knife, are light, fluffy and impossibly moreish.

We’re having afternoon tea (Ceylon Orange Pekoe leaves in an infuser because “teabags are banned in this house”) at his West London home to discuss his cookbook, David Herbert’s Best Home Cooking, which is a collection of recipes from his weekly column in The Weekend Australian Magazine.

Although the 56-year-old now calls the UK home - he’s lived here on andofffor decades he’s sent two recipes a week back to Oz for the last 16 years. His column is very popular, and Herbert says letters from fans have, on occasion, moved him to tears, including one from a woman who says she carries his tomato soup recipe around with her in her handbag because it’s a constant in “an abstract world”. “There was a guy whose wife had died and she’d always made this chocolate cake, so every year he made it to celebrate her.” Herbert grew up surfing with dolphins and fishing in Nelson Bay, a seaside town on Australia’s east coast-butitwas cookbooks that fascinated him most.

“I used to go to the library as a kid, when I was eight, nine, 10, and borrow cookbooks from the shelves and go to bed at night thinking about them.

“I remember my father’s sister, who was quite sophisticated and lived in the city, telling us about how she went to Russia and had this dish that was a slice of salami under the grill, and they popped an oyster in it. I went to sleep for weeks thinking about how delicious this oyster and salami dish would have been; food always seemed to fascinate me.” Herbert has now notched up six cookbooks of his own. His latest is aesthetically simple but beautiful - smaller than most, it feels lovely in your hands - with a black cover, a la vintage Delia.

“The people that inspired me were always domestic cooks; mostly female food writers who weren’t chefs, they were people that were writing. From the Seventies, I had Katie Stewart’s cookbook and loved it because it was really practical, simple food that always worked,” he said.