Nigel Slater Quotes

It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.

Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?

I am a winter person, never happier than on a clear, frosty morning.

Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light.

Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it.

It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality.

Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.

Pamper a tomato, overfeed it, overwater it and you will get a Paris Hilton of a tomato.

I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.

Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape.

I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.

Rosemary died when I was six, and when my parents told me, I cried. I wasn’t sure if I had a right to, but I think now of something the British chef Nigel Slater once wrote, that it is “impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.” I think the same can be said of the person who scoops your ice cream into a dish and stands, smiling, as you eat.

...I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in 'greens' than it is in meat - both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that go beyond me and those for whom I cook.

Believe me when I tell you that there is no lie quite so obvious as the one where you try to protest that you have washed your face ready for bedtime while you are still sporting an enormous ear-to-ear purple smile of dried Ribena.

Garlic as fresh and sweet as a baby's breath.

You can't smell a hug. You can't hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding.

I am not getting into the rarebit versus rabbit argument. Whatever you call it, it is still cheese on toast.

A brush of green olive paste is worth pursuing.

Nichts ist so nützlich und vielseitig wie ein kaltes Brathühnchen.

Gießen Sie sich einen Schluck ein, bevor Sie anfangen zu kochen.

Mit unserer Psyche stimmt etwas nicht, wenn wir glauben, wir müssten uns selbst mit dem Backen von Petit Fours abquälen.

A casserole of oxtail and prunes. This gives a perfect quantity for two. I would have done the recipe for four, but can't imagine ever getting four oxtail-loving people around the table at the same time.

A healthy attitude to eating I am concerned about the current victimisation of food. The apparent need to divide the contents of our plates into heroes and villains. The current villains are sugar and gluten, though it used to be fat, and before that it was salt (and before that it was carbs and . . . oh, I’ve lost track). It is worth remembering that today’s devil will probably be tomorrow’s angel and vice versa. We risk having the life sucked out of our eating by allowing ourselves to be shamed over our food choices. If this escalates, historians may look back on this generation as one in which society’s decision about what to eat was driven by guilt and shame rather than by good taste or pleasure. Well, not on my watch. Yes, I eat cake, and ice cream and meat. I eat biscuits and bread and drink alcohol too. What is more, I eat it all without a shred of guilt. And yet, I like to think my eating is mindful rather than mindless. I care deeply about where my food has come from, its long-term effect on me and the planet. That said, I eat what you might call ‘just enough’ rather than too much. My rule of thumb – just don’t eat too much of any one thing.

Claudia Roden, and Paula Wolfert (Mediterranean), Diana Kennedy and Maricel Presilla (Mexico), Andy Ricker and David Thompson (Thailand), Andrea Nguyen and Charles Phan (Vietnam). For general cooking: James Beard, April Bloomfield, Marion Cunningham, Suzanne Goin, Edna Lewis, Deborah Madison, Cal Peternell, David Tanis, Alice Waters, The Canal House, and The Joy of Cooking. For inspiring writing about food and cooking: Tamar Adler, Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Patience Gray, Jane Grigson, and Nigel Slater. For baking: Josey Baker, Flo Braker, Dorie Greenspan, David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich, Elisabeth Prueitt, Claire Ptak, Chad Robertson, and Lindsey Shere.

My energy and curiosity may be renewed but the larder isn’t. There is probably less food in the house than there has ever been. I trudge out to buy a few chicken pieces and a bag of winter greens to make a soup with the spices and noodles I have in the cupboard. What ends up as dinner is clear, bright and life-enhancing. It has vitality (that’s the greens), warmth (ginger, cinnamon) and it is economical and sustaining too. I suddenly feel ready for anything the New Year might throw at me.

A small meadow of dill and lemon thyme, tarragon and lemon verbena, set amidst Attar of Roses and Prince of Orange pelargoniums. I create a pretty enough landscape that is culinary and medicinal, tucking in pots of marigolds and nasturtiums here and there. The sun hangs low, a breeze sets in and my work is done, I run my hands through the tallest fronds and gently ruffle the leaves-- trails of aniseed and pepper, chocolate and lavender, rose and lemon dance on the breeze. There are hints of cinnamon and curry, camphor and orange, mint and something I can't quite put my finger on. My hands smell of Greek hillsides and Provençal fields, an Elizabethan knot garden and a Parisian apothecary, but they also smell of long lunches in the garden. As I head in to make supper it dawns on me that spring has finally slipped into summer.

Vietnamese-inspired salad, a cooling melon gazpacho, a paneer korma

This [waxed paper] is the paper that is perfect for keeping air-dried hams fresh. You could use cling film but it often causes the ham to sweat, and is rather wasteful. I have also reached the age where I can no longer find the end of the roll. Ditto sellotape. Ditto bloody everything.

Thin, like paper, light and doughy in the middle, crisp and delicate as honeycomb at the edges, the appam is tempting even before it is filled with a ladle of lush vegetable curry. It shares many of the attributes of a pikelet or crumpet, a round disc of batter, bland and comforting, but stretched until its edges are as fine and crisp as Belgian lace. Of all the yeasted dough goods throughout the world, the appam is the lightest and, at its best, the most fragile.

They are lovely in the way that all cherry blossom is lovely--- pink and frilly and slightly cloying to the eye--- but a few steps away from the crowds is a hut selling ice cream. I queue for a cornet, which comes with a perfect soft-serve swirl that id then showered with gold leaf. Tiny snowflakes of gold on a wave of vanilla ice cream that I eat under the cherry trees. Silly, decadent and breathtakingly beautiful. A gnarled, grey tree whose branches are covered in creamy-white bubbles of opening blossom. It is like a tree festooned with popcorn.

Are we talking sweet things (gooseberry crumble) or savory (sashimi)? Is it a winter's day (porridge with maple syrup) or deepest summer (chilled agedashi tofu)? Is it a pre-prandial snack (plain crisps) or post-dinner tipple (umeshu with umeboshi)? Is it a snack (plain crisps again) or an indulgent treat (yuzu soft-serve in a cornet)? And what about chargrilled chicken with lemon and za'atar or roast potatoes prised from the roasting tin? What about whipped cod's roe or buttered crumpets?

A spoon is hospitable, it is what I use to put food on my loved one’s plate. It is the first thing a baby associates with nourishment after the breast. Its smooth edges and soft shape bring comfort. A fork, with its sharp prongs to spear the food on the plate, feels somewhat violent in comparison. Food eaten from a spoon seems more sustaining than that from a fork because it often comes surrounded by a pool of broth, sauce, soup or gravy. An extra little puddle of nourishment.

Wenn Sie schon Blut, Schweiß und Tränen in den Rest des Menüs investiert haben, dann holen Sie einen leckeren Kuchen aus der Konditorei.

Hören Sie auf niemanden, der Ihnen sagt, Sie sollten nicht allein trinken.

bourgeois

There is a bit of a scrum at the salad stall as fifteen Guardian readers all try to get at the wild rocket at once. We might have a Zen-like appreciation of a single, perfect organic onion, but it makes us no less capable of elbowing a fellow shopper in the ribs when we have to. This is food after all, and we are happy to fight for it if needs be.

The curious fact about Oxo cubes is that we have probably never really needed them. These little cubes of salt, beef extract and flavourings were, and I suppose still are, used to add ‘depth’ to stews, gravies and pie fillings made with ‘inferior’ meat. Two million are sold in Britain each day. Yet any half-competent cook knows you can make a blissfully flavoursome stew with a bit of scrag and a few carrots, without recourse to a cube full of chemicals and dehydrated cow. Apart from showing disrespect to the animal that has died for our Sunday lunch (imagine bits of someone else being added to your remains after you have been cremated), the use of a strongly seasoned cube to ‘enhance’ the gravy successfully manages to sum up all that is wrong about the British attitude to food. How could we fail to understand that the juices that drip from a joint of decent meat as it cooks are in fact its heart and soul, and are individual to that animal. Why would anyone need to mask the meat’s natural flavour? By making every roast lunch taste the same, smothering the life out of the natural pan juices seems like an act of culinary vandalism, and people did, and still do, just that on a daily basis.

I fear for the custard. It is as old-fashioned as a slice of Hovis or a clothes brush. It belongs to a world of fire-tongs, antimacassars and black-and-white television. The appreciation of sinking your teeth into the soft, almost damp pastry of a custard tart and feeling the filling quiver against your lip is not for the young. The true enjoyment of a custard (as opposed to the pleasures of custard) is something that only comes with age, like rheumatism, bus passes and a liking for Midsomer Murders. I am probably the only person in England to regularly buy a couple of custards from Marks who is still in possession of his own teeth.

short list of puddings to die for (and you will). Spotted dick – A suet roll encasing a filling of currants, sugar and raisins. Spotted dog – A roll freckled with dried fruit, as Mary Norwak says in English Puddings, ‘like a Dalmatian dog’. Jam roly poly – In theory, a roll of suet pastry wrapped round a layer of jam, but I have yet to see one that didn’t look like the aftermath of a car accident. No doubt I am not the first: this pudding was often nicknamed ‘dead man’s leg’. Sussex pond pudding – A basin-shaped pud of golden suet pastry with a lemon and sugar filling. So named because the syrup runs out as you slice into the crust, forming a sweet pool around the edge.

It is an inescapable fact that the Great British Pudding is made of flour and water. In other words, our sweet culinary heritage is based on little more than glue. Sure, our puddings are sweetened with jam, or currants, or treacle, or syrup, or honey, or chocolate, or apples, but at their heart and soul is glue – something that cannot be said for a French crème brulée or an Italian tiramisu, or even a New York cheesecake.

unsealed

The soft pastels and red-wine colors of this garden change in the piercing sun. The deep reds fade to violet and walnut-brown; the pinks, soft oranges and creams crisp like old newspaper. I don't mind, in fact I rather like the faded colors in the glorious heat of late July. I haven't turned the oven on in a week or more. Today burrata, yesterday panzanella and before that rough-and-tumble dinners assembled from the deli. Lunches have been laid out in assorted bowls outside: preserved artichokes in oil, deli-made couscous salads, marinated octopus and tinned sardines. There are lumps of feta scattered with dill and bloomy goat's milk cheeses with rose-petal za'atar. Pudding is offered in jam jars. Makeshift trifles of sponge, lemon curd and apricots. Messes of meringue, loganberries and cream. Another of passion-fruit posset and halved cherries. In the top of each jar a flower: rose petals on the loganberries, a viola with the apricots, marigold petals scattered over the dark-red cherries. Little pots of treasure in which to go digging with your teaspoon.

It is when I get to wallow in the salacious delights of the crinkle-petalled Black Parrot and Orange Emperor, the brilliant tangerine Cairo that stands head and shoulders above the crowd, or fantasies about the soft ochres of Brown Sugar. The single-flowered, pale pastels are tempting, too, if only for their gentleness, their shy colors reminiscent of buttercream on cupcakes. The Rembrandts are the tulips of my dreams, great goblets the color of hot-air balloons; deep plum and crimson with flashes of yellow; tight green and white petals as crisp as ice on a pond and those that look like crushed berries being stirred through whipped cream.

The roses are fading. Turmeric petals soften to the color of old dusters, magenta becomes palest violet, edges that were dark and sumptuous turn to the color of a tea stain. What was once as white as snow is now buttermilk. Their texture changes too: petals soft and strong enough to support a portly bumblebee dry to walnut-colored fragments frail and aging till they shatter.

Some plants grow better in the shade. The woodlanders: cream spires of aconitum and aruncus, delicate ferns and the tall windflowers better known as Japanese anemones amongst them. As you might expect, the fairy flowers of thalictrum and epimedium thrive when grown in dappled light and will dance in the gentlest of breezes. The perfect hiding place for those who inhabit the 'otherworld.

There is soft ground underfoot, spongy and damp, the river is fast-flowing and I am careful to steer clear of the slippery bank. Lichen is everywhere; even the youngest trees are encrusted with it. Here it is as abundant as I have ever seen it, coating almost every trunk and twig with a soft green crust. We had smoked salmon for breakfast, with sticky bread like wet peat and cloudberry, juice the color of apricots. A meal so simple and perfect, a breakfast steeped in the spirit of the place. Here in the woods I hear gushing water and birdsong, but little else. Just the crackle of twigs, the occasional drip, drip of raindrops from the trees.

A second-hand bookshop draws me in a as a moth to a candle. Each shop is a small shrine to the power of beauty and words. Tightly packed shelves of old hardback novels; heavy tomes on art and design; teetering piles of poetry. There are copies of the Children's Encyclopedia used as a doorstop and wooden crates of paperbacks going for a song. Some are rare, with a price to match, others a fraction of their original cost. A book for everyone, I guess. Yes, it's the thought of words put together with such care, the pages whose surface has been worn by years of handling; the tired bindings and torn-edged covers where a book has been in less kind hands than it should. (A chance to give a damaged book a kinder home.) But even more, it is the smell that makes me want to enter every second-hand bookshop I pass. A smell that is dusty, a cross between an old leather saddle and a country church.

There isn’t a crumb I don’t like. The shattered crust of a baguette; the rounded pink and yellow remains of a slice of birthday sponge; the last currant from an Eccles cake or flake of puff pastry from a sausage roll. There are the spongy, butter-coated crumbs from a crumpet; a lost nib of candied peel from a hot cross bun or the sugary rubble that lies at the bottom of a dish of apple crumble. The truth is that all crumbs are good.

Ginger cake is perhaps the most magical cake of all. I bless the way you don't have to cream the sugar and butter together and gently beat in the eggs or sieve in the flour. I like the fact that you just put the syrup and black treacle, sugar and butter in a pan and melt them. That you then stir in the eggs, flour and spice, pour the runny batter into a cake tin and bake it. Literally magic.

The first time I smelled the soft, powdery rocks of Somalian frankincense James brought back from traveling; the whiff of a broken dahlia stem or inhaled green osmanthus-flower tea was like stepping through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. Likewise crocuses, charcoal and umeshu, the citrine-hued Japanese plum wine.

Vivid greens and bright crimsons fill my fridge; the larder has jars and bottles with every shade of pink and violet, orange and magenta. The more colorful and vibrant the food I eat, the happier I am. I have just made a salad of milky-white burrata, purple basil and peaches the colors of a sunset. Breakfast involved melon, wine-red raspberries and nuggets of crimson pomegranate. Eat the rainbow, they say, and I do.

The appearance of the full moon comes with a cast that includes ghosts and werewolves, vampires and fairies, lunatics and late-night revellers, but also this extraordinary light. An incandescence that picks out the white petals of certain garden flowers-- nicotiana, the spikes of actaea and echinops, allium snow globes and the dancing white fairies that are aquilegia. The best of these is probably the appropriately named sea holly, Miss Willmott's Ghost, with its ruff of grey spikes that appear to glow silver in moonlight. The name was given not for this delightful feature, but for the late gardener's habit of secretly distributing its seeds wherever she went.

The tulips are usually in flower in March, a carnival of orange, saffron, rust and purple-black. Once they have gone over, as we gardeners say, their petals brown and frail like antique satin, the bulbs will be lifted and replaced with fully grown foxgloves, whose faded notes of lilac, pink and speckled cream will stand tall till it is time for the dahlias to go in.

The day I filled my little larder with jars of beans and seeds, sugars and flours, was one I had looked forward to all my cooking life. A little space for tins of sardines and bottles of anchovies, a dark corner for dried shiitake and porcini, and a home for tins of treacle and golden syrup. There was an entire shelf for vinegars, a tall one for bottles of rose and orange blossom water and shallow ones for slim boxes of crystallized violets and jars of candied orange and citron peel. Two pink egg cartons sat on the marble slab along with space for pots of marmalade and damson gin. Over the years the larder has changed a little, and I soon realized I needed to make space not just for dried beans (flageolet, cannellini, ful, chickpeas, chana dal, green and brown lentils-- I could go on), but also for bottled and tinned. Dried fruits now take up eight storage jars and there are at least six of rice (white and brown basmati, arborio and pudding rice, sushi rice and a Spanish rice called bomba that makes a delicious paella and produces a fine undercrust). My obsession with storage jars is a result of a personal concern over opened cellophane bags of ingredients in the cupboard, bags that fall or unfold allowing the contents to spill or spoil. You can often tell the time of year by peeping through the larder door. At Christmas I juggle jars and bottles to make space for beribboned packages of panettone and Stollen, golden tins of Lebkuchen and the muslin-wrapped Christmas pudding. In summer the marble slab is a useful space for ripening peaches and melons.

Snow-white crab meat in an individual bamboo steamer. I lift the lid and inhale the sea.

We are batting away the pesky wasps that have come to take a dip in the jams-- apricot, fig, mulberry, rose-- that sit shimmering in pressed-glass dishes in the sunshine. We sit in the shade of a mulberry tree overlooking a field of damask rose bushes and sumac trees.

My lesson on which blooms to pick and how to do so to preserve their scent is followed by lunch on the stone terrace. We eat flatbreads, warm and patchily charred from the griddle, folded over crumbled white cheese, tearing them apart and dipping the smoky bread and salty cheese into bowls of rose-scented jam.

No chocolate or ginger cake, Victoria sponge or coffee and walnut cake tastes quite as good as that smudge of raw cake mixture stolen from the bowl. The beaten butter and sugar, eggs and flour have a special temptation all of their own. Cool and whipped till cloud-like, it has a hint of soft-serve vanilla ice cream about it. You can't eat much, of course, not even a full spoonful, only the merest fingertip's worth, a dab, a swoosh. But that is the point. Perhaps it is what makes raw cake mixture irresistible, the fact that it must be taken in precious amounts. Anyone who has dipped into excess knows how your treat soon cloys. We indulge at our peril. I say 'licking the bowl,' but our delight need not be confined to that. Wiping the extra uncooked cake mixture from the spoon or beater with your index finger is just as good. Seasoned with the false premise of waste not, want not, the raw mixture also carries with it the frisson of the illegal. In cookery classes at school in the late 1960s we were allowed to lick the black-treacle spoon but not the one we used for golden syrup, and certainly not one smeared with the vanilla-scented delights of raw cake mixture, so we (by which I mean me and all the girls in the class) developed a way of sneaking some with the deftness of a bunch of serial shoplifters.

Japanese water is soft and its low mineral composition is better for making soup. Miso soup sets me up for the day as surely as a bowl of porridge, though I have been known to take both. In Kanagawa or Kyoto, Okinawa or Sapporo, that soup may be made with dashi-- a delicate broth of smoked dried fish and seaweed-- and miso, a light (shiro) or red (aka) paste of fermented soybeans. Shiro miso has the color of thick heather honey or fudge, is lightly salty and makes for easy drinking. Aka miso is red-brown, more savory and umami-rich than the white, and makes, to my mind at least, a more soulful, almost melancholy broth. Sometimes there are shreds of seaweed or a few tiny clams waiting at the bottom of your bowl, like treasure. Soup-- clear, aromatic and lightly salty-- is a gentle way to begin the day. I am lulled, sip by slow sip, back into the rhythm of life. I start my day in good heart.

On our own hibachi, my friend Takahiro and I grill whole tiny fish at the counter and dip them into saucers of soy whilst the chef slices scallops for us to eat raw.

Late July. Friends arrive bearing gifts. A shallow white cardboard box turns out to be carrying a cluster of flat white peaches, their soft pink cheeks nudging one another. The scent of roses teases as I open the lid. Eight plump navels, their parchment skin flushed with brushstrokes of rose and carmine.

No matter its shape or its size, the perfect peach is the most heavily scented, the softest-fleshed, the one with the sweetest, most rampant juice. No acidity needed here, like with the perfect apricot. Just the softest, most suede-like skin, the most giving flesh and the sweetest juice. That is the peach I want.

The early-morning food is both perfunctory and delicious. Wedges of grapefruit and orange, a glass of blood orange juice and a bowl of rice threaded through with flakes of dried seaweed and beads of salmon roe as bright as Christmas baubles. It is the bowl of soup that is extraordinary. The usual light, instant miso has been replaced by a rich chicken broth, deeply savory, the beads of fat on its surface supporting a single floating mushroom. When I am eating eel donburi from a rust-red lacquered bowl and they bring me a cup of eel broth to go with it. Deeply smoky, slightly oily, dark as night.

Streaky bacon, marbled with creamy fat on dark-maroon flesh like Florentine endpapers is my bag, but others prefer back bacon, smoked or not. If I have any rules at all, they that a bacon sandwich should always be slightly too big, never elegant.

Tempura of orange pumpkin brought still crackling from the kitchen; slices of yellowtail sashimi in a puddle of sesame sauce; grilled bamboo shoots on a wooden skewer and a dish of rice porridge. There is grilled cod's roe with a pin's point of fresh wasabi, pickled butterbur buds and the earliest fiddlehead fern, simmered in dashi broth and curled up like a caterpillar. A pale-blue dish is filled with mustard greens and ground sesame. As the light lifts, the room fills with weak and watery sunshine and I am brought a bowl of suitably pale miso broth with matchsticks of dried nori and balls of chewy white mochi. As I lay down my chopsticks a pudding appears of green-tea blancmange with two rust-red goji berries. Dessert for breakfast is something I can get on top of.

Thin sheets of warm roti and mana'eesh are best for scooping food from plate to mouth like tactile, edible cutlery, but bread is better for sponging up the delicious detritus from the plate. The soft, open crumb swells with cream or curry sauce, gravy or meat juices, to leave us replete. A Chinese host may take a mopped plate as a sign that more food is needed, yet I would rather think of each painterly flourish as a signature, a thank-you note to the cook.

Direktör Benschop is a semi-double milky-white rose with egg-yolk-yellow stamens bred by German breeder Mateus Tantau in 1939, though not commercially available till after the war. The garden is also home to Alchymist, the crumpled honey, white and gold climber. I have always struggled with the notion of stripping a rose for its petals, though I do occasionally bring one into the kitchen in June, scattering them over an oval platter of raspberries, a sponge cake dusted with icing sugar or, most memorably, a vast fig meringue the size of a hat at a June wedding.

When you split and toast a hot cross bun, the warmth releases the smell of cinnamon and the citrus oils in the candied peel. The bun should be torn apart, never cut. Teasing one half from the other with your fingers provides a craggy surface whose furrows will hold the melted butter in tiny puddles like rain on a hoggin path. But (and it is a big but) the rough, toasted surface is never quite hot enough to melt the butter. Once the buttering is done, something that is to be set about with extreme generosity, the bun must be placed back under the grill in order for the butter to melt. Perfection is when you manage to catch the bun just as the butter has formed a golden pool yet retains a patch of glistening, soft-but-not-yet-liquid butter at its centre. A shining, golden coin in the middle of your bun.

Oden is many things: a stew of fishcakes and radish, boiled eggs and root vegetables or bits of meat that need a long, slow cooking. Winter food that is both cheap and nourishing, though little more. But to me, right now, it is the most comforting thing that has ever passed my lips.

I arrive back at my lodgings to a battered-tin dish of dried apricots in syrup. Small and plump, round rather than oval, and freckled with rust. I dip a spoon into the syrup, a pretty spoon battered and bent from years of service, and sip the heavily chilled, sweet liquor. Lighter than that used to soak gulab jamun, the heavy, sticky balls of dough I have consumed with nothing short of gluttony on this trip, but thinner and less cloying and with the faintest breath of rosewater. I sit in peace on the cool veranda with my tin dish of apricots like dumpy cherubs and with the dry citrus dust of ground ginger still in my hair.

On a deep bed of rice sits a neat rectangle of grilled eel fillets, a dish I could easily choose as my last supper if I could eat it here, in Japan. Those bronzed pieces of fish, shiny, soft enough to cut with chopsticks and tantalizingly savory, are the food I dream of when I am on the plane, and are now sitting in their shining box, dusted very lightly with fine green sansho pepper. What I refer to as Japanese dust-- the ground dried berries with notes of pepper and citrus.

Breakfast in a rather dingy hotel room, near the Roman ruins of Baalbek in eastern Lebanon. There are bowls of yoghurt; blue-and-white jugs of fresh mint, a basket of dimpled sheets of warm flatbread folded like delicate manuscripts, and pots of honey and fig jam. A lone brick of stale Madeira cake sits on an oval white plate. It is labelled 'English.

The content was clear, pale green and smelled of a summer lawn just mown. It was not steaming-hot but comfortingly warm, verdant and with a piercing clarity of color. Tea, green, bright and umami-rich, is now so much part of my life that I can hardly think of a time without it. Two, three times a day is not too often; I am making up for half a century of wasted time. The owner, Timothy d'Offay, is now a dear friend, the person who first encouraged me to travel to Japan, who introduced me to the senchas and gyokuros, the hōjichas and oolongs that now mark the progress of each day as surely as the ticking of a clock. I will be forever grateful.

The wicker basket of gnarled and dimpled bitter oranges is glowing like a beacon, the fruits flashed here and there with viridian, their skins tight to the flesh beneath. Each one sports a bright-green button, which is all that is left of its stem. The words 'Seville oranges', written in red, are as welcome as the sight of the first pink stalks of rhubarb, or lemons with their glossy leaves intact. I buy two kilos and take them home with a spring in my step-- a brown paper carrier bag of sunshine on a clear and frosty January morning.

Four in the afternoon, and Haga in Gothenburg is still shrouded in a cinnamon mist. A smell that will often lead you, as it will everywhere in Scandinavia, to knots and twists and bundles of dough laced with pearl sugar, butter and spice.

A cardamom bun is less sticky than the cinnamon-scented kanelbullar; more giving than the currant-freckled curls of the Chelsea bun, but just as much fun to unravel as you sip your coffee. You can spend a pleasing afternoon making a batch of buns. The milk-enriched dough is spread with ground spice, sugar and butter, sliced into wide ribbons then fashioned into an untidy knot. Each cook seems to have their signature tangle. The surface is speckled black and white, a gritty mix of caster sugar and ground cardamom. The salt and pepper of Swedish baking and my drug of choice.

Plump as a bee, pale gold and as thick as treacle, there is something jolly about a pot of honey. As presents go, a jar of the sticky stuff is always welcome. I twist off the lid and inhale. The scent today is of butter, toasted nuts and caramel whilst underneath lurks something dark, medicinal. A teaspoon is found and I dip in. I like that first nip of honey, whether it smacks of fudge or chestnuts or something altogether lighter. I dream of the orange blossom promised on the label. A pot of honey is a pot of memories, almost always good ones, as soothing as a Murray Mint.

The fruits scorch in the fierce heat. The smell of plum jam fills the kitchen. Flesh bubbles, edges blacken, plum juices burst from their skins and mingle with the honey and lemon. Twenty minutes later they emerge, collapsed in a pool of deepest purple-red. I twist the lid from a bottle of rosewater, hand-made, no label, and shake drops over the scorched fruit. A scent of rose, sweet fruit and honey. We let the fruit rest for ten minutes. The roasted plums are served on an old tin dish, a mound of salted labneh at their side, the juices seeping into the soft, thick yoghurt like lipstick into a pantomime dame's pancake make-up. I rain a pinch of dried rose petals over the surface and offer them up. We spoon the soft fruit and labneh into our mouths, then lift the dishes to our lips to drink the last drop of rose-perfumed juice.

It starts with salad, but the notion soon spreads itself throughout my cooking. From today, never again will I leave any toasted remnants of meat or vegetables in the pan. That goo, that savory butterscotch, contains the soul of the meat, its juices, bubbled down to a sticky, golden nectar. Salty as Parmesan, as sweet as honey, it will never again remain unused. Never again will such goodness be left behind in the pan to be dissolved in the washing-up water.

It is the lightest of snowfalls, the merest sprinkling of powdered sugar, but its presence, shaken through the mesh of a fine sieve, has brought a certain magic to the rugged surface of a tray of almond croissants. It has made a crescent of brown pastry and frangipane into a snow-freckled mountain range. On other days I have seen icing sugar used as thickly as driven snow, on a tray of softly mounded walnut shortbreads or in the cracks and ridges of a Stollen. At Christmas, no Yule log or mince pie seems festive enough without it. Unfashionable, yes, but icing sugar brings a certain enchantment. A dusting of powdered sugar can cover up a multitude of sins, but its presence is more than a way of papering over the cracks. It will highlight the crests and peaks of a crisp meringue, make a swirl of buttercream sparkle and render the deliciously blackened tips of a French apricot tart irresistible. When it lies on the waves and curls of a cupcake's piped frosting you would need a heart of stone not to be tempted.

There is sheer delight at the bowl of peeled segments of fruit, each crescent glowing, a hugger-mugger pile in a moat of orange and rose-pink juice.

Many years ago, around the early 1980's, I penned a story about fruit crumble in a rather delightful, now defunct, magazine called Food Illustrated. The point of the piece was not so much the crust (to which I suggested adding coarse brown sugar or ground almonds or oats) or the luscious fruit (gooseberries, damsons, rhubarb or plums) that lay sleeping beneath. The point was to identify what I consider to be the best bit, neither crust nor crumble but the layer of fruit-soaked dough that lies just beneath the crust. It is often a rich purple color or, in the case of apple crumble, the hue of heather honey. The hidden dough takes on a consistency that is both dry and wet and for which the most accurate description might be plumptious, if that was actually a word. I referred to it then as the undercrust, a term I have watched slowly spread. The undercrust of a crumble is only one of several such silken treats that await us. The layer of soggy dough where shortcrust pastry meats gravy in a steak or chicken pie for instance. The point at which custard meets sponge in a trifle or, now I come to think of it, that bit of the suet dumpling that sits in the sauce of the stew, richly sodden with flavor and plump with aromatic liquor.

But there, climbing up the whitewashed brick walls of the garage, is the rose of my dreams, a rose so utterly charming, so delicate and fleeting that I can forgive him his screeching reds and wishy-washy purples. It is rarely without a flower, its petals open wide, in shades of cream, faded fawn and soft pink, and here and there a crimson petal or two. Each summer it is as if a hundred butterflies have come to rest on the wall, baking in the late-afternoon sun. (This rose, chinensis Mutabilis, is to this day my favorite.)

Late February has brought crocuses to cheer us in the melancholy of winter. The petals-- white, lilac, mauve and gold-- are perfect against a grey-white sky. We planted a thousand small, hairy corms and a couple of hundred have come up. Plucky little flowers, they must fight against the rain, mice, squirrels and sparrows, all of which seem hell-bent on their destruction. Most welcome are the luminous white Jeanne d'Arc, which have swan-like petals with a tuft of egg-yolk-orange stamens. Others include Orange Monarch, a deep saffron and mauve, and a few Pickwick, the palest lilac with a delicate feathering of mauve. Common varieties, but none the worse for it.

There is nothing softer on which to walk. Your footsteps are silent, as if treading on velvet; each step becomes slower and more cautious. To set foot on a moss path, even the short one at the top of my garden, slows your pace, every movement now more thoughtful. The luminosity of moss is extraordinary. It holds water, a dampness reminiscent of cloisters and cathedral walls. I imagine that is how the walls of a monastery might smell.

Their petals are as delicate as antique lace but I grow them for their leaves, which are scented-- lemon, camphor and rose. There is Edna Popperwell's Ashby, whose leaves smell not of the advertised rose but (to this nose at least) of frankincense. Attar of Roses has furry leaves which remind me of Turkish delight, Orsett smells of balsam whilst Prince of Orange and Queen of the Lemons speak for themselves, the latter of sherbet lemons rather than the fruit. At the top of the garden is a wayward, rambling Copthorne, whose clusters of marshmallow-pink flowers are entangled amongst the bars of the old iron gate. Others are here not for their scent but for the delicate flowers. The diminutive Shannon sends her frilly parsley leaves and straggle of wandering stems over the table. She has no scent at all, but flowers that resemble salmon-pink stars, which twinkle against the watery-grey zinc of the garden table. The leaves are nothing to look at but show their magic once you rub them between finger and thumb. I use them for a spritz of inspiration as I write, but I occasionally take them into the kitchen too. If you layer their leaves amongst caster sugar in a jam jar they will infuse the crystals with the essence of lemon, orange or rose. Pick the right leaves and you have delicate, scented sugar with which to crown a summer sponge cake or to infuse in a jug of cream for raspberries.

Some plants give out their strongest scents during daylight, attracting bees and butterflies; like phlox and many lilies, jasmine keeps its headiest moments for the night, to attract moths, which are the plant's most efficient pollinator.

My childhood was full of hedges, the tight corset of green privet that ran the entire boundary of the house, orchard and garden; those I passed on the long walk to school, hedges of hawthorn and holly, sloe, blackberry and wild rose. In spring they were a tangle of white froth and carried primroses and cowslips at their base, violets and the odd bluebell that had strayed from the woods. In winter they would be peppered with scarlet, black and rust berries, grey clouds of old man's beard and dew-speckled spiders' webs that hung like diamond necklaces in the early-morning light.

Once established, jasmine grows well in this garden, and there are three, no, four varieties now. A soft yellow, like clotted cream, that hangs loosely from the window boxes, shifting in the breeze. A pink variety, Jasminum stephanense, clambers up the brittle, naked stems of a much older plant, using its relative as a trellis. White stars of Jasminum grandiflorum cover the tendrils that have woven a canopy over the courtyard, a fragrant white parasol whose petals fall like snowflakes each autumn.

Off the hob, the orange jam is left to settle for a few minutes, then stirred and ladled into glass jars. Four pots of glistening amber, the curls of peel suspended like jewels in the deep-orange jelly. The kitchen is still cold, and with the scent of oranges and syrup in the air I feel the urge to make a rack of toast. Marmalade is always a pot of joy. Button-bright, glistening and quivering on a spoon, it has none of the cloying sweetness of honey, a clarion call to the start of the day. Whisper it: this thick orange jam does not feel quite right at any other time of day. It glows like a candle on the greyest January morning, cheering us out of the door to work. No preserve causes such controversy, thick-cut or hair-thin, dark or pale, softly set or firm. Mine will be barely set, light in color and as much golden jelly as peel. Any morning now, the garden white with frost, I will pick up one of the jars I have filled today, twist off the glossy black lid and inhale. I will dip in my spoon, spread the lumpy jam onto a piece of hot toast, wipe a bittersweet tear of syrup from the crust and start my day.

Minutes later she returns from the open kitchen at the end of the restaurant with two brown plates of steamed jjin mandu on a paper napkin, the fat pockets of dough stuffed to bursting with shrimp and chives, and a plate of untidy crisp pork dumplings that I would be happy to live on for the rest of my life. There is a tiny plastic dish of soy and another of orange kimchi and a deep black bowl of soup with shredded omelette and spring onions floating to the surface. I pour the sticky soy into a little white dipping dish and add a few drops of the dark vinegar. My dumplings, doughy, spicy, scorching-hot and as comforting as an old teddy bear, are gone in a heartbeat.

A sea urchin in its spiky shell. Saffron-orange flesh cupped in a shell of black spines, served on a bed of green conifer leaves.

There is something fragrant to touch at every turn; scented geranium leaves to rub or pots of thyme to tear at. Such temptations would be spotted at any time of year but today, in this scorching sunshine, everything is heightened; the intensity of rose oil from the pelargonium leaves, lemon from the thyme and even the peppermint and pepper and notes of potted basil sing loud and true in the bright sunlight. Butterflies-- pale-blue hoppers, cabbage whites and even red admirals- head from bloom to bloom, one even coming to see what is on my plate.

Grilled mackerel, charred on the edges, on a small oval plate with a long pink shoot of pickled ginger and a snowdrift of grated radish.

A little cake in a sandwich shop in Kyoto. A single, bright-pink cherry blossom trapped in the snow-white icing.

A wedge of autumn melon the color of apricots with a honeyed scent you catch from three feet away. A shallow lacquered tray of rust red, laid with eight individual dishes. Yoghurt in a thin glass dish; a single teardrop of deep-red syrup and a tiny green leaf float on its surface. A deep-black raku bowl of okayu, the soft and soupy rice to gently lull us out of sleep. A triangular dish of pickled vegetables and a single umeboshi plum. A white bowl of chilled black hijiki seaweed and soybeans. A pretty dish painted with wisteria flowers of the softest, stickiest silken tofu the color of the pages of an old book, decorated with a single yellow chrysanthemum flower and a lump of fresh wasabi the size of a pea.

Rust-pink fish roe wrapped in a shiso leaf and fried in tempura batter. The fact that it is eaten in a plastic hut outdoors in January only adds to its deliciousness.

I ponder the idea of breakfast: a slice of chilled melon, a bowl of skyr or a slice of yesterday's summer pudding I know is part-submerged in a puddle of crimson juice in the fridge. I could cut a slice of treacle bread or fetch a short crackle-crusted baguette from the shop to eat with ice-cold butter. There is rice to steam and eat with luminous purple and green pickles from Japan, cold peaches from Provence and thin slices of air-dried ham from Italy. I could make a bowl of porridge.

At home, a bowl of long-grain white rice will get a stream of melted butter and a crumbling of sea salt and then, as I turn the grains slowly in the warm, golden fat, perhaps a grating of Parmesan, then a little black pepper and lemon juice. A bowl of sticky rice feels more at home with sansho pepper or toasted sesame seeds, crumbs of dried nori and some crisp pickled radish. Another day I will heat the meat juices left over from the Sunday roast and stir them into the rice, streaking them with ribbons of glistening mahogany.

In the food hall of a department store in Osaka, flat plastic packets of rose-pink cherry blossom on twigs. Just as we would sell herbs.

The land on which my home sits was originally woodland but was converted to pasture in the early 1700s by the Guidott family. The meadows provided grazing for the cattle that supplied much of the city's milk and cream. The farmhouse was known as Cream Hall and it is here that city dwellers would come to take tea-- the farm was renowned for its cheesecakes-- and in 1740 a Cake and Ale House opened 'offering cakes dipped in frothing cream, custards and syllabubs.

Each Christmas my parents would light candles for the table, flames that softened the twinkling pink lights of the tree and infused the air with the smell of beeswax. As the candles burned low into the late afternoon, their shadows hid the gaudy paper crowns and detritus of Christmas crackers that lay torn, their snaps exploded. The flames made everyone's eyes sparkle, the sugar crystals on the fruit jellies glisten and the edges of the room dim and more interesting. By five o'clock, instead of a scene of brightly colored carnage, it was like peering at a fairy-tale world through a piece of golden gauze.

A shallow washi paper box, a gift from its maker, Wataru Hatano, never moves. Artist and craftsman, Hatano works in Kurotani, northern Kyoto, the traditional home of this soft, deeply matte paper, where the mulberry trees that go into washi-making are part of the landscape. The soft charcoal color of the box is achieved with layer upon layer of tannin derived from fermented persimmon. It is a box of treasure, where I keep my folding wooden ruler, brown Yama-guri ink and folding wire-framed spectacles. For some reason it also holds a sprig of dried roses from the garden, their petals faded to the color of belladonna.

Petals the color of butter, primroses and farmhouse Caerphilly. Deep egg yolk and elephant's tusk. Others of piercing marigold, honey and Dutch orange. Trumpets of turmeric, saffron and Sienese alleyways. The narcissi I am planting have petals, coronas and stamens in all the colors of spring. The colors of a child's hand-made Easter card. The single narcissi are those I cherish most, as much for their scent as their simple, uncluttered form. Many are placed singly in small, chipped terracotta pots. They will sit snugly between larger terracotta pans of Thalia, miniature scented daffodils the color of buttermilk, and Jetfire with its orange trumpet. There will be a deep pot of Paperwhites and the scrunched creamy-orange Erlicheer. I'm digging in Avalanche with its tangerine fairy cups and Chinese Sacred Lily, which I fear I have acquired for its name alone. My plan is for a zinc table of spring yellows in all the colors of milk on its journey to cheese. Narcissi, their petals and their scent, carry the spirit of Easter. Planting them on a warm afternoon in November is something of an act of hope. The belief that spring will come once again, and that I will be around to enjoy it. If not, then perhaps someone else will.

Amongst the ochre leaves are roses: deep-crimson Gabriel Oak, apricot-blushed Lady Emma Hamilton and the final breath of the haunting white Direktör Benschop, which clambers through the yew hedges. There are Japanese anemones-- windflowers-- and at the far end of the garden, at the foot of the crab apple tree, a cluster of pale-pink autumn cyclamen.

At night the space is filled with the scent of daphne, philadelphus and Choisya ternata. Protected by walls and hedges, the leaves still rustle in the breeze, whispering to one another or, perhaps, to me. I fancy this part is occupied by relatives of the kami, the sacred spirits of the Japanese forest, which can take the form of trees, of which the Cornus Gloria Birkett is now the most splendid, its pale bracts like a shimmer of creamy-white butterflies come to rest.

The tree's demise has also opened up the green space beneath, allowing spring primroses and apricot-colored epimediums to thrive. And another joy... the small Japanese cherry tree that had struggled in the shade of the chestnut has now found its feet. In a heartbeat it has put on girth and height, a sudden spurt of growth as if in a hurry to fill the vacant space and cover our nakedness. For three weeks in May the blossom flutters in the breeze like a million white butterflies, then covers the underlying hawthorn and spiraea bushes with tiny petals. A silver lining of the very best sort.

There is a smell, rich and sickly sweet, so pungent I feel as if I am being choked. A smell that is both new and curiously familiar. Notes of the most intense jasmine with a back note of vanilla and overripe mango. The sea is too warm, and I cut short my night swim. As I pass through the garden, lanterns now glowing, the perfume has faded a little, it is less hypnotic, softer and more floral than before. Trumpets of deep-crimson hibiscus have closed for the night, chains of bougainvillea and a plant I do not know are the only ones in flower. It is this last from which the scent is emanating. Each blossom has thick white petals, crisp, like icing on a wedding cake. Almost too perfect to be real, the petals darken in the centre to a pale-yellow with a deep-saffron eye. Strangely, the scent is stronger from a distance than close up. My mystery flower is frangipani, or if we are talking in botanical terminology, Plumeria, the name given to honor the seventeenth-century French monk and botanist Charles Plumier. I note that the almond filling known as frangipane was once perfumed with the extract, though we are a long, long way from Bakewell. There are few perfumes I would call hypnotic-- tuberose, Casablanca lily, jasmine perhaps-- but frangipani is up there with them. I go back to my room, head throbbing, drunk on flowers.

It is late afternoon, darkness is falling and a stall in the town square is glowing like a candle. Tiny punnets of bright-orange berries on the twig-- sea buckthorn-- and jars of cloudberry jam jostle with honey and crimson lingonberries. I will not carry jars or bottles in my luggage, but I pick up a couple of cartons of berries to eat raw. Buckthorn lives true to its name, and after a few minutes of parting the berries from their branches my thumb feels like a pincushion. I pick up a pocket-sized jar of jam and the fruit is tart, extremely so, and therefore right up my street. I nibble the berries as I walk. Cloudberry jam, in common with most berry preserves, has too much sugar for me but it is good too, bright-tasting and sharp. I will bring it down at breakfast tomorrow, to eat with Lapland yoghurt. The buckthorn jam is pleasing, though not enough to risk bringing a jar wine in a suitcase. It does keep a little of its acidity when simmered with enough sugar to make it keep. That is probably why it works, like damson, blackcurrant, plum and gooseberry. The more tart the fruit, the better the jam.

At a café in Tokyo I order cheesecake. It comes in a thick slice with a lightly caramelized crust in the centre of a small white plate, the glaze gradually darkening to a deep cream towards the middle. To the top of the plate is what at first I take to be a logo, a golden crest. It dawns on me as I eat and sip my tea that it is in fact a carefully mended crack. A delicate piece of kintsugi, an exquisite golden repair.

In Kurama, Japan. A little train, its carriages decorated with leaves and a fawn. Another with cherry blossoms and a geisha.

A shallow dish the color of clotted cream, a scattering of raspberries, wine-red loganberries, redcurrants on the stem and wild strawberries the size of a child's fingernail, complete with tiny alpine strawberry flowers. Never has there been a prettier dessert, and not a recipe or a creative cook in sight.

Kyoto; I stop at a tiny restaurant I want to eat at but it is closed. Outside the locked door is a narrow table with a tin bath filled with flowering lily of the valley and a basin of wild strawberries, ripe and begging to be eaten.

The roses are very much the heart notes of the space, spilling from the formal green architecture in shades of apricot, white, buff and deep, arterial crimson. They bring a classical beauty and a certain untidiness, something this garden needs if it isn't to look uptight, and layers of fragrance and softness to a design made up of crisp greens. The top notes, fleeting, like butterflies, are grown in terracotta pots that change with the seasons. Narcissi, tulips, foxgloves and dahlias. The most fragrant of the top notes are the tubs of rust and maroon wallflowers whose sweet scent wafts on the breeze from February to April. They watch over the garden's annual transformation from brown to piercing acid-green.

The roses were originally picked as much for their perfume as much for their color and form. (Unlike my first roses, which were bought purely because I was enchanted by their romantic names.) Of the basic musk, myrrh, tea, fruit and old-rose fragrances I am drawn to the latter two. Fruity is a broad bush on a night like tonight. Lady Emma Hamilton, reliable though now retired by the growers, is at her most giving: apricots and white peaches spring to mind. Gertrude Jekyll is one of the most intense of the old-rose scented varieties. She calls me over every time I set foot on the terrace. Unlike the more generous jasmine, even the most scented rose requires us to bend a little, pushing the tip of our nose into the cluster of petals. Not so Gertrude tonight, mingling as she does with the white jasmine, hovering cloud-like over the hot stones of the terrace. I have a plan to bring the Queen of Denmark into the garden too, another old-rose scent, and I long for a decent musk rose such as Buff Beauty, exuding its faint note of cloves on a warm evening.

As soon as I moved into the house, I planted a Discovery apple tree at the foot of the garden, by the yew hedge. A gift to the Norse gods for eternal youth, but in truth a nod to the apple tree of my childhood, whose canopy shaded the patch of phlox growing underneath, whose long stems and flowers the colors of sugared almonds hid a treasure trove of fallen fruit. Discovery is a scented apple, with bright, acid flesh that does not keep well. The small, slightly flattened fruit are best eaten straight from the tree. The flesh is white as frost, flashed lightly with strawberry pink. A child's apple. It is aptly named. Brought up as I was in a world of Dairylea, Ritz Crackers and Wonderloaf, the flavor and scent of these pale fruits were my first hint that there was something more interesting out there to eat. My tree, twenty years old now, awaits the lacework of soft-green lichen that covered the branches of my parents' and, infuriatingly, phlox has so far refused to grow beneath its boughs. It is the earliest apple, ripening in August. A fruit I think of not only as the herald of the apple season, with its Michaelmas Reds and Blenheim Oranges, its Cornish Honeypins and Ribston Pippins, but as the beginning of everything.

There is a pot of coarse oat porridge with bilberries, a whole side of smoked salmon on a waney-edged plank and venison black pudding as crumbly as chocolate cake. Nettles are pressed into crispbread like leaves on a frozen pond. A sleigh ride from Lapland, snow falling and faced with the breakfast of my dreams, I spoon cakes of potato and kale onto my plate to eat with slices of beetroot-cured salmon. I drink glowing red lingonberry juice from a shot glass that feels like a transfusion and stir a compote of berries into my yoghurt.

The honey appears on an oval tin tray, craggy blocks of honeycomb oozing their sticky cargo onto the tray. We scoop the honey up with forks (I looked in vain for a spoon), trying hard not to drip on the tired pink carpet that covers the floor of the tent. The honey is not as sweet as that at home, more liquid, and its fragrance is both floral and resinous. Perched in the tent on a mountain, surrounded by tall pines, the scent of woodsmoke and the sound of the distant water rushing over rocks like the laughter of happy children, this could well be the breakfast of dreams.

Purées of plum or dusky berries float on glass pots of yoghurt; scallops and oysters quiver on the half-shell and platters of sashimi sit on jagged crystals of crushed ice. Slices of boiled bacon with a mustard glaze are arranged in a soldierly line; poached white fish is wantonly sprinkled with spring onions; a mixture of aubergines and minced pork and another of hot and leafy mustard greens bask in chafing dishes next to stainless-steel cauldrons of miso soup. There are wicker baskets of dumplings steaming and a whole table of ingredients--- rice, eggs, greens and soy sauce--- with which to build your own bibimbap.

White-paper boxes of cakes with lemon icing and pink cherry blossoms appear on the grass; salmon sushi in shallow lacquered trays and triangles of snow-white onigiri wrapped in sheets of dried seaweed. Even the sugar buns from the bakers are decorated with pink blossom.

Night bathing feels different to that done in the early morning. More meditative, a time to reflect rather than refresh. Enveloped in warm, still water, with just the scent of witch hazel or winter jasmine carried by the steam, the body, if not the spirit, feels at prayer.

We stop at a petrol station on the road to Tehran. Not only do they have packets of the original custard creams, but orange and banana flavor too. The existence of banana-flavored custard creams is something I am rather pleased to know about. The first thing I eat in Iran is white cheese, dry and crumbly, on white plates decorated with pink roses. A sheet of flatbread folded like a book. There are coarsely ground walnuts and a glass bowl of pomegranate molasses, sticky as treacle.

At the Taj Mahal, just after dawn, the sky is lavender, grey and orange. I notice that the walls of the vast marble mausoleum are not white but a soft and time-aged ivory, and much more beautiful than I had ever dreamed.

Scars on our kitchen kit, like those on our bodies, are a sign of a life lived and something to be cherished.

Eating rosewater ice cream from a shop in Beirut whose walls are riddled with bullet holes.

Our beekeeper turns out to be a bear of a man with possibly the largest hands I have ever seen. Gentle and benign, as you might expect of someone whose life is marinated in old trees and sweet honey. A man who cares for his bees like they were his children.

It is heartening when readers come up to me and tell me which of my recipes tey have been making, but especially so when they include this which they make each year to celebrate some event or another. The salmon pie on Christmas eve perhaps, or the sausage pasta with mustard and cream on their anniversary. I have often wondered why I feel such delight when this happens. It dawns on me today that it is not just that it gives me a brief sense of purpose; it is also a relief to hear that the recipes actually work.

The fluff of cherry blossoms is more sparse now, the flowers single rather than double and somehow more beautiful, with less pressure to perform.

A dust from the indoor spice market has permeated my clothes, my hair, my lungs. The ghost of ground ginger and pepper, fine and soft like talcum powder. Dust, on this trip, has been the dust of fatigue. But not today. This is dust that energises and lifts the spirits, that makes my eyes tingle and my nose run.

Some humans fare better in shade too. We do not crave the bright lights and the attention it brings but prefer to work quietly, a life lived, if not exactly in the shadows, in a certain cool, dappled light. Always one to dwell more contentedly in woodland than on a sun-drenched beach, I find the half-light with its shadows and needles of bright sunlight a fine place in which to spend my days.

I like choosing the right plate for the right food. A striped Cornishware plate for scones and clotted cream; a moss-green, rectangular platter for sushi; oysters from a round aluminium tray. There is no science behind this, it is purely a question of aesthetics, in the way that battered fish and chips ‘tastes better’ eaten out of paper or a Chinese takeaway does when eaten with chopsticks out of white waxed boxes than either does when tipped out onto a plate. It is why drinking a single espresso from a mug feels ‘just wrong’.

We have Nigel Slater to thank for some of the horniest food content. Marie Claire magazine, for which Slater was hired to write the recipes, published a cookbook in 1992. The food photographs, by Jean-Louis Bloch-Lainé and Kevin Summers, catch the food in moments of déshabillé: mussels coaxed open, crust of a cheesy gratin broken by a spoon, juices dripping down a figgy pudding. It was, as Slater put it in the introduction, 'the decision to abandon those props, those traditional scene-setters, and the avoidance of styling and tweaking the food to look good for the camera.' It was the same at the Observer, where Nigel Slater moved in the early nineties, with Kevin Summers and then Jonathan Lovekin photographing the food. Everything is burst, collapsed, juicy, swollen or sizzling, and indecently close up. This new kind of photo was composed to make the food look not beautiful, as such, but craveable. It's strange now to think that recipes weren't always supposed to be thirst traps. But the most consequential parts of food culture are often the things like this-- things that seem so obvious, so unquestionable, that it never occurs to us that they could be done another way.