The other day I revisited one of Nigella Lawson’s cookbooks where she talks about what some prisoners on death row order for their last meals. It made me think. What would I want to eat if I knew I had to die tomorrow?

So I thought about my last meal for a long while – I’m a chef, after all, I breath food and have the world’s cuisines literally on the tip of my tongue. In the end I even discarded Italian childhood favourites, such as spaghetti with a sugo Bolognese, as well as my beloved Moroccan chicken stew.

Instead I discovered a desire for simple pleasures rooted in my gran’s way of scraping that last bit of meat off a pork bone with a bird’s beak knife in her greasy hand. She would smile at the bone and at me saying “Aren’t we lucky to have such food!” She never understood my brief stint into vegetarianism. Considering the quality and amount of food she had during and after the war I knew where she was coming from, but I was seventeen and didn’t know the meaning of “I’m starving”.