JMorgan

Last updated 00:00, Thursday, 06 December 2007

NOTHING warms the cockles of your heart more on a cold winter’s night than watching Nigella pottering around her kitchen.

I find her genuine appetite for food a refreshing change from those cooks who look like they know how to make food, but not how to eat.

Of course, I also find her hilariously posh. On one programme she was seen wandering about exclusive parts of London talking about her childhood and how her grandmother took her to hotels for special treats.

Also on the programme she recalls making cheese fondues while she was a university student. If, like me, you grew up a working-class kid of the seventies, then fondue sets were very aspirational.

One of my primary school friends lived in a house with wooden floors (very chic at the time, but I remember thinking they couldn’t afford carpets) and her mother had a fondue set. It all seemed very bohemian.

Nigella also recalled her childhood Sunday evenings eating an egg dish made by her late mother, which she made on the programme. I can understand this.

When I am especially sad or feeling sorry for myself, I make what my mother called “chucky eggs’’ which consists of boiling two eggs, mashing them in a mug with butter, and eating them with a teaspoon and white bread soldiers.

Depending how blue I feel, I can usually be found eating this in the kitchen wearing a very unattractive dressing gown and thick woolly socks. True comfort food.

When I was little, the Sunday evening treat was real chips, cooked in one of those old, fat-encrusted chip pans, served in grease-proof paper lined baskets. My mother even allowed us to make butties with margarine-covered bread, which would satisfyingly drip onto the grease-proof paper.

Grown-up though we are, my brother and I continue to pine for that food. Nothing makes us feel more like contented 10-year-olds than when my mother is in the kitchen frying up her chips, which she does as a rare treat when we all gather like the Waltons.

Another family food tradition which I always remember with fondness is the “Good Friday tray’’. Every Easter (still my favourite time of year) my mother would load up a tray of scones, with cheese and jam, cakes and sandwiches and we would eat it all watching Jesus of Nazareth.

It doesn’t matter that I can devise my own tray of delicious grub – it never tastes the same if you make it yourself. I find I gain the same solace eating my mother’s food as I do making my kids meals.

Of course, this is ultimately less to do with food and more to do with love. Unfortunately for my waist-line, I enjoy food when I am happy and when I am unhappy.

I think this may be called greed. But I like to think it is more to do with the power of life.