‘I absolutely hate tripe, guts and lungs’

The garden writer, 61, tells Tom Parker Bowles about making scallops aged eight, own-grown herbs and the joy of sandwich spread on white bread

My first food memory, and I remember it very clearly, is chicken risotto,

in a town in the foothills of the Dolomites, where I spent a lot of time as a child.

My father was not a good cook and my mother, while quite interested in food, was not particularly domestic.

But we did have a couple of people who cooked for us. So I learned from both an Italian cook and a more traditional British cook called Mrs Titley, who worked for us in the summer holidays.

The first proper meal I ever cooked was aged about eight, for my father’s birthday.

He loved scallops, so I made Coquilles St Jacques from The Constance Spry Cookery Book. And I continued cooking from that moment onwards.

School food ranged from neutral toawful.

But my abiding memory is sandwich spread on white Mothers Pride for tea – I loved it.

When I was a medical student at Charing Cross Hospital, I also worked as a waitress at The River Cafe.

Itwas very small back in those days, literally doing burgers and chips for Richard Rogers’s studio, which was across the courtyard. But having spent a lot of time in the region of Veneto in Italy, I was a mega foodie.

I actually did two degrees, and the first one was history at Edinburgh.

When we sat in the National Library, everyone else used to get out serious tomes on medieval life in Slovakia, or something similar, while I would just sit and read Elizabeth David all day.

Christopher Lloyd [the famed gardener and writer] was somewhat of a mentor to me.

I remember going for dinner with him one February, and him quite rightly boasting that the bowl of salad before us had 22 different herbs and leaves. That became an aspiration for me, although I’m not sure you really need 22!

I love being able to pick leaves for dinner from the kitchen garden.

At the moment there are 15 to 20 different ones. I pick loads of stuff from the greenhouse in the winter months. And outside, too. February, March and April are the easiest times to grow these things, because they don’t bolt and they don’t get attacked by flea beetle.

I hate most forms of tripe.

Guts and lungs, too. And those French andouillettes, which still smell slightly of poo. Although I do like liver and kidneys, and can eat sweetbreads, too.

I really love a huge Parisianstyle fruits de mer.

However, I’ve just spent the winter in Seville and got food poisoning twice from shellfish – prawns and clams. So I’m not sure if I’ll be able to eat them again.

My comfort food is pasta puttanesca.

Whenever my children come home and I ask them what they want to eat, it’s always pasta puttanesca.

My youngest daughter is a very good cook and wants, in time, to have a café.

But she’s currently a human rights lawyer, so that’s a way off!

I always have parmesan in my fridge,

along with parma ham, chorizo and bacon. And a good goat’s cheese, smoked mackerel, for a pâté, then salad, picked from the garden two or three days before and wrapped in a damp tea towel to keep it fresh. So I don’t have to go out when it’s raining.

I love Greek food in Greece.

You can just turn up at a tiny garage, and they’ll light a fire and cook a souvlaki over rosemary branches, and you cannot go wrong. For me, for simple, cheap, good food, it has to be Greece.

My last meal would be my version (which is very inauthentic) of Italian tagliata:

a good piece of sirloin steak, marinated in an Asian dressing of soy, sesame and lime, then seared for three minutes either side and served on a massive bed of peppery leaves. With a sweet potato and coconut dauphinoise on the side.

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FOR SIMPLE, CHEAP FOOD IT HASTOBE GREECE, SAYS RAVEN. BELOW: HER LAST SUPPER? TAGLIATA