Sophie Dahl's own food story

Sophie Dahl. Photo / Supplied

Author and former model Sophie Dahl tells about her formative culinary experiences.

My earliest food memory is of my father driving me to the Sussex coast to see my grandmother and stopping for fudge at a petrol station. I was only allowed one piece and I really wanted it to last, but it was probably only seven seconds in my mouth.

I recall the schools I was moved between by the food I ate there. Boarding at Bedales, I just remember having loads of toast with Marmite and endless pot noodles. At King Alfred I used to stuff down toasted plain kosher bagels with cream cheese at lunch in Golders Green.

If I had to become a food I would be a pineapple. Spiky, but quite sweet really.

The most evocative food smell is American seaside food - tuna melts and cookie dough ice cream, or the British version, fish and chips and toffee apples. They remind me of summers spent with my grandmothers, and get me every time.

I lived on an ashram in India at 12 and later I was a heroine in a Bollywood movie - I'm not telling you the name because I was terrible. I ate Indian breakfasts like there was no tomorrow - idli, uttapam, dosas.

At 18 I wanted to study art history in Florence. I think I just fancied myself as Sophia Loren, wearing a foxy dress and walking through a market with a basket bursting full of figs. Instead, they made me go to secretarial college in London. I had soup and a sandwich for lunch in the local cafe.

I went every day for a month to a raw food shop in Manhattan. I'd have strange Irish moss mousse and shakes made from coconut oil. I ended up with really good skin but a really big bum.

The greatest outdoor meal was my brother Luke's 21st birthday lunch in Massachusetts, where my maternal grandmother lived. We ate lobster from paper plates, washed down with icy beer. It was pretty close to food nirvana.

The television series The Delicious Miss Dahl was hard work in that I had to cook lots of dishes quickly and be quite formulaic, when really I'm just someone who potters around my kitchen making something in my own sweet time and enjoying the mess.

The first food I cooked romantically was spaghetti carbonara for a boy who ate and enjoyed it, then told me he was in love with someone else and left. If he'd only known how much research and effort I'd put into it. I wept and wept.

The first thing I made for my husband [Jamie Cullum] was coquette's eggs - scrambled with roasted red peppers and feta. But nothing beats his poached eggs.

I don't hate much food nowadays. I just know I don't ever want to eat tripe.

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