What's the first food we remember? Milk, I suppose. My mother tells the tale of valiantly trying to breastfeed twins, both at once, on a trip home to her parents in Normandy, with all the local farmers' wives coming in to marvel at the feat. Twins: a beast with two heads. Two big mouths. Feeding us was hard work. No wonder she adopted the no-nonsense rules of Dr Truby King [...]

In England I live in concrete in the inner city, where a single weed sprouting up through a crack in the pavement makes me rejoice. Anarchy and rebellion flourish despite the best efforts of the council to stamp out those thrusting green nonconformists. In the country, it's a different matter. Arriving back in France after only a ten-day absence, I searched for my vegetable patch, which had turned into a [...]

Running away from home at the age of nine, I took care to pack my bag with food. I took a couple of slabs of cake filched from the larder: my mother's teacake, made with sultanas soaked in tea, the slices thickly buttered. By the time I got to the local park I was hungry, so I sat on my bench and ate my cake. Then, my supplies having run [...]

My dear neighbour Claude used to come round at this time of year and pick dandelions from my garden for his rabbits. Others scoffed at my weeds, which I insisted, in my sentimental way, on calling wild flowers, but Claude would go away happily with a bulging sack. Now that he is dead, I pick the dandelions for his widow, Gisèle, who still keeps rabbits.

I decided to eat some [...]

Jesus leaps in the tomb and the Simnel cake leaps in the oven. You don't have to be Christian to celebrate Easter, that good pagan feast. The body-hating myth on which I was brought up, of a father god sacrificing his son to tortured death to save wicked humanity from burning in hell, no longer appeals. As a heretic, I prefer joy to guilt, want to replace the fires of [...]

Still racing after ideas for good fast food that can be cooked at home, I have decided that quick preparation is the key. As soon as you get in, dump your coat and bag, kiss any nearest and dearest hanging around, whizz into the kitchen, don your apron. Don't shilly-shally: just decide quickly what you fancy eating. Speed up your gestures. Practise slashing onions and thwacking carrots faster and faster. [...]

Slow food and slow cooking are all very well if you are in the right mood and have got enough time, but occasionally only fast food will do. If you come home at night exhausted and hungry, you are not going to start making a complex dish from scratch. Proper grown-ups have ovens with timers, and microwaves, and so can heat things up straight from the freezer. But I never [...]

Catholics eat God at Mass. In Munich, that centre of Bavarian Catholicism, you can eat angels. First you stamp them out in dough and then you devour them. The craft shop in the market was displaying biscuit moulds. The angel-shaped ones were irresistible. I brought several home and have been experimenting ever since with angels that taste of cinnamon and ginger.

I had given some lectures at the university. We [...]

Gastroporn means TV chefs' gorgeous, pouting recipes. We gaze, salivate, but don't cook. Why mock this practice? Only the sternest of pundits rigidly separates fantasies of food from those of sex. Sensual lovers of metaphor know that, just as food can stand for sex, can console for the absence of sexual pleasure, so sex connects to hungering and the delights of being fed. We are all big babies, yearning back [...]

Leeks look beautiful growing, their criss-cross pattern of green leaves, tightly enfolded, breaking out into a fan at the top. I buy them pencil-thick, in bunches, at the market in July, and plant them out in minutes, just dibbing holes and sticking the leeks in. No need to firm up the earth; the rain does that. You keep cutting off the green crown to encourage the white, hidden part to [...]