S7, Ep8: bonus episode – a few of the tastiest bits from all seven series

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:46Hello, friends. You find me meditating. No, not the cross-legged floating three inches off the floor type, but actually meditating, as I do quite often on how much I have learned about the role of comfort food in people's lives. Over the many years, seven seasons in fact of talking to people about the foods that give them comfort, I now know one thing for sure. Food is the gateway to the soul and I have been astonished at the range of comfort food dishes revealed to me here at this very table. For what it's worth, some of them are now actually part of the folklore of my own household for example when I say I'm having a Russell T Davies I am eating rice with an excessive amount of butter and pepper I know Russell would be proud of that legacy and when I ask my partner if he fancies a Siobhan McSweeney what I really mean is do you want a pint of Guinness a bar of dairy milk and some cheese and onion tato crisps eaten with such enthusiasm that all three tastes converge in your mouth at once.

2:00So I wanted to take stock and look back at some of the stories and anecdotes that our star studied guests have shared with me. Because although everyone is different, some themes return again and again. The first one's a real leveller. It's school dinner. Now for most adults it seems this childhood memory lives on forever. It's midday, you're starving, you're in school uniform, there's maybe a bell, there's definitely the smell of cake mixed with spaghetti hoops filling the air and shortly afterwards a huge snaking line into a school hall which doubles up as the assembly hall and the PE department too.

2:46Now for many of us these were pre-Jamie me all of her days when the turkey twizzler reigned and the general rule seemed to be one beige carb next to the other beige carb with a river of beans to break it up. Not all of us had an easy time at school. Back in season four of Comfort Eating, furniture restorer and TV presenter Jay Blades told me how that midday bell was the only redeeming part of school. I tell you the cooks in our school were unbelievable I love those ladies and then I used to get um I used to get paid in puddings because a lot of people were being bullied at our school so they would come to me and say oh this person's nicked my bag or he's took my trainers I've got to go back home and I haven't got them um or this one's picking on me because of my race and then basically they would say to me Jake can you have a word or get my bag back here's a pudding so we'll all have this ticket you know like free dinners so I ended up like this table just full of all these puddings and then I'd have to go and sort people out.

3:48So you had, essentially you were running a protection racket paid for by sponge pudding. It's all right, isn't it?

3:59I have this theory though with school dinners that those foods end up meaning so much to us throughout our lives because 70s and 80s school was hard. The kids were horrible. Like they were in a comprehensive school. The kids were, some of them were lovely, but some of them were absolute, like, they were horrible. And everybody went around being horrible to each other. And the teachers were a bit violent. And then at 12 o 'clock, a bell went and they gave you like some custard and sponge. Yeah, that's it. And that never goes away, does it? No, it doesn't. I love, love school dinners. In season two, actor Russell Tovey remembered how his offbeat tastes at dinner time meant that the school cooks all had a soft spot for him.

4:46Oh, the dinner ladies loved me. I was dinner lady favourite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was dinner lady favourite, but I used to eat... I was... I remember I was, like, odd. You know, once I ordered a whole bowl of Brussels sprouts, I was really into, like, healthy food, and I had a bowl of Brussels sprouts, and all the dinner ladies were like... Like, light was shining out of my whole body like I was the saviour for all kids eating Christmas. food everywhere but i remember i was having my bowl on my own with my brussels sprouts in my first year and they're all being like do you want some more brussels sprouts i was like probably not that many more but sure right talk me through this the sprouts did you have anything with them no you didn't have some gravy i'd have had gravy on them no it felt like christmas day then no i think it was just like a bowl of warm sprouts that have been boiled did you put a bit of salt on them no i don't think i seasoned them i don't think there was an option at school to have like condiments.

5:41You see, I would have defended you to the hilt all the way through. Everyone had to leave you alone and you weren't strange until the moment. And then you went, oh, I'm out. I'm out. Yeah, yeah, fair game. He's fair game. Do what you've got to do. For some people, school dinners were just part of the institution that they were trying to avoid. Back in season one, writer Candice Cathy Williams came to my house and made me delicious cheese crumpets but when I asked her about school dinners she told me you'd never catch her in the school dining room at lunchtime so me and my friend Sophie we used to bunk off at lunch times and it still feels like I'm gonna get in trouble for saying that now like the teacher's gonna come and be like I knew it but like we used to bunk off every lunchtime to go and get egg fried rice which seems insane like if I had a child and my little sister was like at lunchtime I'm just going to get a fried rice I'd be like just stay in the school I don't really I don't understand but for us it was like this really transgressive thing that was like we're in control of our own like culinary destiny and we can just sit at the bus stop and have like an entire foil tray of egg fried rice with spring onion inside what is it about egg fried rice at the time it must have been because it was cheap I think it was like one pound ten I think it was also just the thing that we were doing for ourselves because we were both like the naughty ones and so we would always be like all right fuck this let's go get an egg fried rice do you know what I mean like that was our that was our thing like just not gonna get a drink maybe now let's go get an egg fried rice babe yeah let's do it oh egg fried rice in a silver tray it will always be one of my Achilles heels and I can picture Candice and her friend in their school uniforms, perching at the bus stop, holding those takeaway boxes, steam rising from them.

7:37Oh my God, my mouth is watering. The umami smell of the MSG just wafting. Maybe a little pee here and there. I'm going to order some for my lunch. Candice snuck out of school to crank up the levels of her lunchtime sophistication which isn't something actor Rafe Spall needed to do because unbelievably his school already had a commercial baguette outlet installed. There was an uppercrust concession in my school. I mean what the living fuck. What an uppercrust like you get at a station? what the hell it was it was a comprehensive school in southeast london and there was a bloody upper crust in there i don't know what was happening it's almost like did i dream that they would in my school they would also i don't even let myself right if anyone is listening to this who went to haberdasher asks in new cross from 1994 to 2001 there was a bloody upper crust there wasn't there guys right there was an upper crust there i don't know whether it was some scheme whether the person who was in charge of i don't know what had happened but there was an upper crust there so hang on a minute yeah yeah where was it in the canteen so you so you know when you like get your little tray and queue up for your food at the end of where you get your food there was an upper crust so it would say would you like some fish fingers and chips or would you like a 1000 calorie cheese baguette no but the thing is you would already be laden with your chips gravy and fish fingers by the time you got to the upper crust concession it was an add-on we know it sounds too good to be true fiction even.

9:17So we have done some digging and we are unable to verify this. It was around this time that Rafe's dad, the actor Timothy Spoll, became unwell. And this was when Rafe discovered how comfort food plays a role at both the highest and the lowest points of life when i was uh 14 my dad was diagnosed with leukemia we went to um his hospital ucl gower street his ward was ppw4 and um we went in and i saw my dad in a bed and there was a table in his room and on the table there was a pamphlet on the front of it it said dealing with leukemia and that was the first time I knew that my dad had leukemia just the the sound of the word leukemia didn't sound good does it and I was beside myself with panic I was always a very sensitive worrisome child yeah it knocked me for six and so I uh went home and I was inconsolable and my um sister Pascal my big sister who was 17 at the time I was lying on a sofa very upset crying and she brought me in a milkshake that she'd made out of an aero an aero milkshake and it made me feel better but if i think now of my sort of difficult relationship with food it could perhaps be traced back to then because it just made me feel better i was like right now i feel okay i'm good to go and ever since i've used food as celebration and commiseration.

11:05Now, for my next chapter, it is all about a period of time, which I think many of us can relate to, and certainly many of my guests talk about. It's when they have flown the nest. It's their first time fending for themselves. They might have their sights set on one thing or another, or they might be working on discovering what their game plan is. But these are the years that shape us. Money may be tight, living accommodation might be unpredictable, and fridge wars are part of our day-to-day existence. I, for example, once lived with someone at uni who kept their cheddar in a petty cash box with an actual lock.

11:49Before the actress Adjoa Ando played Lady Danbury in Bridgerton, she lived in a squat in Bristol and to make ends meet, she cleaned loose and was a life-drawing model. Her dull money would pay for the vats of food she cooked up to feed the thousands. When you sign on and you have a brethren and sisterhood of signer honours as well, as you know, the gyro comes in, the sun comes up, you dash to the post office, You cash the gyro, you buy a Mars bar, and then you walk back from the post office with your cash in your pocket, your whole pack of fags and a half-munched Mars bar. And then everybody who's run out of gyro comes to your house.

12:37So there'd be a rolling thing of everybody pooling their resources. And we used to have a thing called proto-veg that's like mint. Yeah, like textured vegetable protein. That's the one. Proto-veg. And you'd make a vat of it. You'd make a vat of rice and you'd chuck kidney beans in it, tinned tomatoes, whatever you could afford or liberate from your local supermarket. There was a lot of liberation going on in those days. And you'd just cook it up with a load of chilli and soy sauce, whatever you could get. And that vat would keep going and people would come round and they'd eat from that. And then when their gyros came in, they would contribute.

13:19I bet they were delicious. The kind that sat on the stove for days, just improving. What I would do to try one of Adjua's vats. Sometimes I think back to a story that the hilarious and talented Siobhan McSweeney from Derry Girls told me. A word of warning, this story does contain some non-consensual animal eating. Siobhan had moved to London to pursue a career in acting. and like most students, food was a means to an end and the extent of her culinary prowess was... Well, I'll let her explain. I didn't really think about food. I was staying in this flat in Kilburn, I remember, and we had a moth infestation.

14:02And, God, I remember, like, frying a stir-fry up or something. And I know you're going to hate this, but there was a moth infestation and I remember a caterpillar that was on the ceiling that I hadn't noticed falling into the frying pan. And I remember just looking at it and trying to find it and I couldn't find it. And going, you're a fucker. I mean, probably the only bit of protein I had in it. Did you eat it? I did, yeah. Yeah, I did. I did eat it. I should go to sick. I know. I know, gross, right? That story, as they used to say in Scotland when I lived there, gives me the dry bulk. A soba noodle has never quite looked the same.

14:49When I started comfort eating, I didn't think moths would feature so heavily. But you know me, always happy to be proven wrong. Comedian Mania Chihuahua grew up in Zimbabwe and remembers the time when the electricity had gone out so they were eating dinner by candlelight. How lovely. Mania, over to you. Mealtimes were always quite exciting because well there's a number of factors really I mean your electricity could go off at any time which is quite intriguing I remember once you know eating a candle lit dinner just because that was literally the only way to provide any light and watching a moth fly through this candle set on fire and then land on my plate like a sort of really underwhelming birthday candle did you eat it no I did not no but if there'd been some Pyrenees involved I maybe would have

15:48Up next, I've chosen two stories which revolve around one of my favourite pastimes, putting things on toast. A classic. First, we have the soothing tones of one of Great Britain's finest natural assets. It's musician and singer, Mr Guy Garvey. This is a delicacy which I think was invented in the cafe on the top floor of Affleck's Palace in Manchester. It's called Your Mum and Dad on Toast. Tell me what it looks like and what's in it. It looks like quite a sort of robust Welsh rare bit. Yes. Is that tuna? Yeah. Oh, it's all in here. It is sick. So there's tuna, soft cheese. Oh, it's on a white piece of bread.

16:48Sweet corn in the tuna. I put cayenne pepper in there. And then I top it with cheddar and a bit of Worcester sauce on top of the cheddar. I'm going to take some. I'm going in. Yeah, that's pretty good. It's the heat. It's the heat, isn't it? Why is it called your mum and dad? I never asked. I was too busy acting cool in my corduroy cap. I'd sit in the corner looking writerly with my journal. Yeah. At that time, all my hair was shaved off apart from my fringe, like a twat. And Scarlett Moffat, the TV personality and presenter, pioneered a culinary hack while she was a student. Scarlett, take it away.

17:33You are going to be eaten. It's nothing crazy. It's beans on toast, lots of butter. But I had this dish when I was a student and cheese is very expensive. So I just sprinkle watsits on top.

17:53Don't knock it till you've tried it.

17:59The way you said cheese is very expensive. Honestly, as a student, like£2.10 a blog. You can get like about 10 packets of noodles for that. Show me how it's done. Okay, so you've got to crinkle it in the packet.

18:19Honestly, it's a taste sensation. And you're squashing them in the packet. You've got to really mush it up. Oh, it's beautiful. I don't know why Heinz haven't already made this an option. Like, do you know what I mean? Beams with what's up in. I have never seen anything like this in my life and I'm from Carlisle like I have never just sprinkle it on and it adds a bit of texture as well do you know what I mean? I feel like I am a master chef with you now it adds a little bit of texture another crunch let's do it let's do it okay so I'm putting the squashed crumbs and slightly lumpy bits of what's-its onto the beans on toast I love eating this when it's raining outside it makes us feel so happy I do class myself as a bit of a professional couch potato So yeah, I'll get my beans on toast, what's it's on top Maybe a little rioca if I'm feeling fancy Yeah, and I'll just watch the view and stick a bit telly on I personally am a fan of a sweet chilli crisp sandwich With a salad cream dipping ramekin But what's it's on beans on toast Is taking the crisp and bread relationship to a whole new level Back in season two I had the bona fide national treasure On the show Stephen Fry Now when Stephen was fresh out of school He got himself in What a sport of bother I eventually just left and went to London Without telling my parents Oh it was awful And I stole a credit card A couple of credit cards I stole a wallet Well I stole a coat from a pub somewhere and all of the code hand.

19:59How old were you? 16? By that time, I might even have been 17. I think I was 17 years old. What did you do with the credit cards? Did you go to restaurants? Oh, I stayed at the Ritz at one point. I would sit smoking ridiculous cigarettes. So you're 16 years old. You swagger into the Ritz. What do you order? I mean, I didn't dine there. I mean, I had room service, but I didn't go into the dining room, which was a rather frightening room. It still is. It belongs in Versailles, doesn't it? What did you order on room service? I think it would have been, I'm afraid, exactly the kinds of food that I thought were glamorous at the time, like, you know, entrecote steak with a tomato on it and some mushrooms.

20:43Classic sort of Bernie Innes-style steak. I was never one for the prawn mayonnaise that would go with it, but I certainly liked Black Forest cherry cake. I remember getting to Swindon and when I got to Swindon I checked in and they rolled the card through and I went to the room and then I went out again for something or rather a cup of coffee or whatever. When I came back there were two men in my room and I just was used to hotel life and thought we've got male chambermaids I said no no it's alright you don't need to do anything in the room and they said Mr. Gray they said which was the name of the person whose card I'd taken.

21:27And I said, yes. And they went, Wiltshire CID. Oh. And I was handcuffed. And so the game was up eventually.

21:46Moving on to Chapter 3. The way that food, I have learned time and time again on this show, is how we show each other without words how much we care. Giving food, making food, sending food is love. And I was lucky enough to talk to one half of the formidable Hairy Bikers duo, Dave Myers, who sadly passed away this year. When I spoke to him back in 2022, he told me about a time when Cy, the other hairy biker was in hospital. When Dave went to visit him, he was expecting a moment of sincerity, but what he actually got was a shopping list. He had a brain hemorrhage in 2013, and he was proper poorly.

22:37He was OK, caught it in time. But even then, the morning it happened, we'd been out, we were on a book tour, and he kept saying, funny headache, you know. And I was saying, well, so have I. You know, if you spend so many hours in Costco signing books. And it was that day he went home. He said he was watching the rugby and the players slid off the screen. And next thing I knew, he was in intensive care in Newcastle. So I went up there. You went there? Yeah. And he was, the people told me that he'd be all right. He was stable. They put a stent in. But he was quite funny. He was obviously in the land that I forgot, really.

23:12And the nurses were great. And he was, you know, it was okay. Did you take him any gifts? Well, no, he said to me, he said, Dave, and it's his hand, you know, and I thought, oh, it's going to get sentimental now. And he said, you couldn't nip down to Mark's and get us a pork pie. He said, I'm starving. So honestly, I'm not lying. I went down to Mark's and Spencer's and I'm breaking bits of pork pie. He wasn't on a ventilator, but he's like trying to discreetly eat this pork pie while I was in intensive care. Now that is friendship. Another of my favourite guests was comedian and writer Kiri Pritchard-McLean.

23:53She told me about the joys and puzzlement sometimes of taking in foster children with her partner and how this led them to working out the basics of Syrian cooking. One of the young people who came to us had come here from Syria. And when we were chatting to his gorgeous foster parents, they were saying, you know, obviously, like, so we always say what what do they want to eat what do they like what works well and they said oh there's there is this thing he talks about that's like a boiled chicken from back home but we can't really figure out what it is and i was like all right okay and then i i messaged the fantastic uh deborah francis white because i was like if anyone's plugged into anything to do with like syrian refugees i feel like deborah will know the person to ask and i so i mentioned this is a bit of a weird one do you know of like a boiled chicken dish and so she went she lives with the Steve Alley who's from Syria and lives here now and Tom who does a partner who does the cooking and said does anyone know what Kiri's on about basically and Tom was like what about that thing I make for you Kabsah and so I went to this kid and I said Kabsah and like his face lit up and so my partner was like right and so went out and got all that and there's lots of different ingredients stuff we hadn't used like black limes and things like that and it is the most delicious amazing hug of a dish and it's a so it's a rice dish i think it originates from uh from yemen originally but it's eaten all over the middle east and it's gorgeous and you literally do a massive pan of it flip it upside down and then put um like almonds and sultanas on the top and it is amazing and you know when something sticks to your bones and it like hugs you from the inside it's so delicious and also so every time we have it we're like what a beautiful thing that is in our life because of this amazing young man who was with us for a couple of weeks.

25:40I couldn't put it better myself when food hugs you from the inside. Now, as I said at the start, the Welsh screenwriter Russell T. Davis, who now has a feature in my home because of his butter pepper rice, spoke to me in 2021. Russell and I talked about the time he was cooking for his late partner, Andrew, who he became a carer for. Food had taken centre stage when caring for Andrew. Initially he only had about 18 months to live. He ended up living for eight years, not down to my cooking, but you never know. He was never going to go on a macro diet. You know, people were lining up to say, just live off flaxseed and onion peel and then you'll save your life.

26:23It's like, you know, he wants to be happy. Let's have food that makes you happy. A lot of fish and basically eight vegetables a night, eight vegetables on your plate every night. I love that. And I still cook that now to this day, Now that he's gone, I'm like a walking vegetable. Everyone was kind of amazed that I gave up work and became a cook and things like that. If anything, if anyone expected me to get starving, it was then when I was like, this is easy. I actually found it easy. And I'm very much aware you can be a carer. My God, you can be a carer for 20 years and really suffer. And also financially, I was okay.

26:54I always saved and saved and saved for a rainy day. And then one day it rained. And so I could take those two or three years off. I could have taken more years off. Preparing the breakfast of the same oats overnight. oats for breakfast every day uh with fruits which i still have now i love those oats you see i wouldn't swap that for the world so it was very very tasty stuff and but an honor really to an honor to be cooking it to be doing that it was never a hard time sometimes friends would say oh you know do you want me to come in and cook a meal for you oh no way no way absolutely i know exactly what and he loved it one of the very he was very old towards the end one of the last sentences he ever said to me it was feeding him the old overnight oats that he loved so much and he just said it's delicious he could hardly talk that was like wow that's nice it was delicious it still is so yeah bless him this conversation really struck a chord with me because i don't think people talk about food within the realm of caring when i was caring for my mom at the end the only thing we had left for the last 30 days was slices of cake stuff on toast pills daytime telly and me appearing like clockwork every few hours with a tray with something sweet jammy or maybe one of those little individual pots of trifle which after she could no longer speak was at least something we could share it was a way at least of still communicating at the end comfort food was all we had left and soon after she'd gone I began making this show and met all these wonderful guests.

28:31Thank you so much for coming with me on this delicious journey so far. I promise to invite many, many more stars into my home, find out the highs and lows of their larders and the gritty truths of their fridges, because I still firmly believe you can tell a lot about a person by what they eat behind closed doors. See you soon.

28:58This episode of Comfort Eating was produced by Eva Krisiak and Hattie Moyer. The executive producer is Lucy Greenwell. The music was written by Axel Gokutie. Mixing and sound design was by Solomon King. If you love comfort eating, then go and leave us a review and you can follow or subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

29:29This is The Guardian.