The Scottish Mail on Sunday - You
‘Being hungry makes my writing better’
The author, 69, tells Tom Parker Bowles about learning his mother’s recipes, the comfort of cheese on toast and the horrors of school-dinner liver
My first food memory is egg in a hole.
Basically, you cut a hole in some bread, add a cracked egg then fry them. Or it was Vienna sausages and puffles – small, crunchy potatoes. If you give me that dish, I can still hear the music from The Saint, which we’d watch on TV in the nursery as we ate Sunday supper.
My mother was a wonderful cook.
She died aged 65 when I was in my late 20s. I wanted to remember her through her recipes, so I sat with her and she shared them with me. I still cook some of her best dishes, and I think of my childhood largely through food.
My calorific intake as a child was off the scale.
We lived in Stanmore, Middlesex, and my mother made wonderful Yorkshire pudding, cakes, steamed sponges and a rice dish with chicken liver, served in a mould, which I loved. As well as chicken soup, latkes and salt beef, of course, as a lot of my food memories are related to Jewish cuisine. My mother always gave us chicken soup when we were ill. However, it didn’t help when she once dropped the bowl all over me in bed, and scalded a map of Africa on my stomach.
Talking of chicken soup, one of the greatest joys of my childhood was eating it with unlaid eggs,
four or five of which might be found inside the chickens from the butcher. The eggs were wonderfully rubbery and tasted like the very essence of chicken. We’d fight over who got the biggest. They’re gone now – illegal, I believe – and it makes me sad to think of them.
School food was horrible.
I remember the liver, and cutting through this greying flesh before finding a white vein you had to saw at to get through.
It was like eating roadkill.
like wurst, sliced and fried. You make an omelette around it and serve with toast.
My tastes are very simple, I don’t like fancy food.
I don’t believe in spending a huge amount on a meal. And I don’t like food snobbery.
My favourite crisps were plain Smiths with the twist of salt.
They tried to bring them back, but got it wrong as they used a sachet, rather than the twist of wax paper that made them so special.
Kitkats were also a favourite,
before they got rid of the inner silver wrapper. Nestlé didn’t realise that part of the joy of eating a Kitkat is tactile. It was the drawing of your fingernail down the foil that made the chocolate so particularly delicious.
My comfort food is cheese on toast, eggs on toast.
anything of that sort.
In fact,
I hate porridge. It makes me nauseous to look at it and even more nauseous to eat it.
When I’m writing, I try not to eat before midday
because if I have any breakfast, my blood-sugar level is satiated and therefore my writing is less good. It’s better to write with a sense of hunger.
I also try never to have chocolate first thing. Chocolate and biscuits make up about 70 per cent of my diet. I tend to graze at my desk and there are always chocolate biscuits knocking about.
I always have biscuits, butter, yogurt and milk in the fridge.
I eat a lot of cereal, muesli or Weetabix, which is a good writer’s meal.
My last meal would be something from my childhood,
along with something more luxurious. So Orford lobster, caught near where we live in Suffolk, with a latke. It would remind me of two happy parts of my life.
Close to Death by Anthony Horowitz (Century, £22*) is out now