8. Let Them Eat Cake

Memory is a funny old thing. Not only do I remember the train-shaped cake my mother lovingly crafted for my (then) eight-year-old brother, but my memory of it is so charged that I dreamed of making one for my son one day. When I became the mother of girls, my memory morphed into daydreams and I longed for them to be big enough to gasp at the pink turrets on top of the fairy castle that I alone would carve from whatever I found around the house. The fact that I can’t even draw a turret (or a fairy) didn’t spoil my fantasies and when the day came that Ellie, already sewn into a pink tutu, turned four, I rolled my sleeves up and my ready-made icing out onto the kitchen table with a smug grin shaped from genes of a super-mother.

When I asked my mother about the train-cake, she had no memory of it. My father, who can remember every tiniest detail of his life, looked blank. My mother told me that my brother had also denied any knowledge.

I was rocked. If this super-mother memory was a fantasy from the first, then what else wasn’t real? I didn’t dare ask about the lullabies or the long journey take-a turn story-telling that I think I inherited. What about the talking toys? The Johnny Morris-voiced puppy? There was a chance, I realised, that I had made my whole childhood up.

I dusted myself down and frantically rattled through the pieces of my children’s past to see what might fit. I chanced upon the moment last year when LouLou revealed herself to be the sum of our family parts (or what I thought they were then). I had taken her to see Georgia Bing, author of the Molly Moon books, at the Brighton Festival and she was mesmerised (that’s an in-joke for Molly Moon fans). She leant across to me and whispered in my ear; “When I grow up, I’m growing to write children’s stories like Georgia Bing and Grandpa.” While I blushed with pride, she leant over again and, with eyes still burning into her new heroine, added “or become a professional cake maker”.

So when her tenth birthday approached in October, I promised her a proper cake, thinking more of building tiers and turrets like I had done when she was little rather than hiring in some help. But LouLou wasn’t looking for just a cake; she was looking for a mentor and set about scouring the autumn food festivals for someone who would fit the bill.

At Chiddingly, she found her. Emerging from the cake tent beaming, she led me silently by the hand to Lizzy Harman and her Little Village Cake Company stall, featuring a stunning rose-covered wedding cake, and proclaimed her journey had come to an end.

I blanched at the price and took Lizzy aside.

A few weeks later, LouLou’s birthday arrived and we piled her in the car with big sister and sleepover chum and drove her to a kitchen in the country for her secret birthday treat. She didn’t immediately recognise Lizzy who sat her down amid colouring agents and peacock feathers, but as the penny dropped, her excitement grew and they set to work.

There’s something wonderfully timeless about making cakes, and three hours disappeared in a haze of petal-making, bowl-licking, icing-colouring bliss. The girls busied themselves with cutting out daisies and polka dots while the kitchen filled with the sweet smell of warm cake until magically, the squidgy yellow mess was transformed into a smoothly iced hat-cake.
The table was cleared for the finale. Polka dots spotted the yellow icing and tiny cupcakes, topped with delicate daisies, circled the brim of her birthday bonnet.

LouLou’s smile was something out of Alice in Wonderland, and when Lizzy asked her to place the peacock feather in the centre of the hat-cake, I knew that it didn’t matter anymore whether or not my mother really had made a train-cake. LouLou will tell her children wonderful home-made stories and make them cakes laden with flowers and feathers when she grows up. She will very probably never remember the fairy castle that I made when she was almost one but I don’t care; she will remember the peacock-cake as having something to do with me. And as her memory and her daydreams collide, it will probably be me that made it for her tenth birthday, and me that becomes the super-mum whose mantle she will one day inherit. The fact that my cakes turn out like biscuits and my turrets are made of loo rolls need never be part of the story she grows up to tell.

Chapter 7. Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens

I’ve got a confession. I killed a chicken.

Now, I know that millions of people do this every day. Children do it at Indian picnics after lugging the birds along with all the other local, seasonal goodies to a family do in some beauty spot in the Himalayas, but my meat was murdered by a townie in a panic rather than a kid in touch with his food.

I had always wanted to live with chickens. In fact, when we were pondering the pros and cons of moving out of Brighton into a community of 22 families in the middle of nowhere, it was the chicken club that clinched the deal. My mother’s tales of popping out the back to get some eggs from Hetty and Betty for tea had been a soundtrack to my childhood memories of Grandad’s fruit and vegetable garden where runner beans would snake up smart lines of canes beyond the rows of potatoes, lettuce, beetroot, onions and radishes and the bushes of redcurrants and gooseberries with the smell of Felinfoel Ale wafting over the garden wall from the brewery next door.

Years later, as I watched my own kids skip down supermarket aisles of featherless, skinless, soul-less shrink-wrapped fowl, I dreamed of my Grandad’s chickens and of giving my girls a basket of corn to scatter among our own free-range girls and marvelling at the deep gold of the yolks compared to the pale yellows of their battery cousins. Even Ellie, my vegetarian animal activist eats eggs. I couldn’t fail.

The moment when the kids first lifted the lid on that egg box to find Hetty XXXVII looking at us with a mix of pride and suspicion and scooped her up to find a clutch of freshly laid eggs, I felt that my job as a mother was done. I was Barbara Good and this was the life. As the years rolled by, our waste was reduced to virtually nothing as the 20 hens devoured our leftover pasta and peelings, speeding towards us like something out of Looney Tunes to see what was in the pot. Unfortunately we weren’t the only ones to become misty-eyed at the sight of a free-roaming chicken and, in similarly cartoon style, Foxy Loxy ran off with all but two.

So when Poppy, our newly rescued Springer scampered off into woods last Saturday morning and returned with Hetty in her mouth, proudly dropping her at my feet, I was appalled. Hetty had flown the coop, leaving Betty alone behind the electric fence. My mind was spinning. Poppy’s soft retrieving mouth is not designed to kill, but at 7.30 in the morning, someone might see us with a chicken and think the worst. I put her back in the coop, madly thinking that it would look like Foxy-Loxy had decided he was full. She looked at me like someone from Rotherham looks at a London TV researcher and I picked her up again to inspect the flesh wound, furtively scanning the meadow for any witnesses. I would have to put her out of her misery. A quick twist of her neck spun me out about the fragility of life before the next dilemma flooded my hazy brain. Surely I couldn’t eat her? Surely I should eat her? Readers, the shocked expressions of the people to whom I have related the end of this story prevent me from doing it again here.

One of those expressions came from Linda Turvey at Hen Heaven, a rescue farm for end-of-lay hens and a handful of cockerels which well-meaning townies have given to their newly rural mates before checking the packaging, if you know what I mean.

The kids were clucking over Matilda and her chicks, Milly,Tilly and Lily and Peter the shoulder-perching cockerel as Linda showed us around the 500 or so chickens that live out their days with her. “People don’t think” she muttered, as she told us how she had spent the last 40 years clearing up the mess left by shallow consumers and city folk playing farmer. “I got Avril and her husband George after a family moved out of their manor house to go back to the city leaving the elderly cat and the chickens. The estate agent rang me and said that if I couldn’t have them, they’d be put down.”

At Hen Heaven, ex-battery birds, de-beaked and often featherless after stress-pecking by their fellow hens join back-garden and small-holding hens to roam in total freedom around the farm, often laying well into their dotage under the TLC of their devoted Linda. “This old speckled hen was replaced when she stopped laying and was then badly pecked by the new hen”, she told us, picking up the old dear’s still-warm egg. “I gave her some limestone grit as soon as she got here and she’s been laying for the past five years”. Lucky really as apart from donations, eggs provide the only income at Hen Heaven. “I could have given that one to those people who came this morning from Ealing” she chuckled, looking remarkably similar to the Old Speckledy. “I do wish people would ring before they come, especially at this time of year when they don’t lay as much”.

While we were chuckling, I told her the story of Poppy and the chicken. Her face fell and the place became eerily silent. Ellie was standing beside Linda now, their vegetarian solidarity failing to see the funny side. “A bit of arnica on the wound and some rescue remedy would have had her right as rain in no time,” she told me as she showed me to the gate. “Yeah Mum,” sneered Ellie and sulked all the way home.

I thought of Hetty in that wheelie bin and wondered if I could have eaten her. I managed to pluck, roast and eat the roadkill partridge, so what was the difference? As I walked Poppy and the pups that evening past the lonely chicken coop, I sat down and watched Betty casually scratching at the ground and I knew the answer. I can take the girl out of the town and play at self sufficiency, but I’ll be back to get my local, free-range organic chicken from the local butcher. At least until the oil runs out.

Chapter 6. I Scream, You Scream...

“Assoc-i-ation. Are you ready? If so, let’s go!” “Ice Cream” … “yummy”… “tummy”… “eat”… “strawberry”… “sundae” …“treat”… The kids are rhythmically batting words in the back of the car as we drive through a Sussex summer afternoon to the local dairy farm to watch ice cream being made.
Estelle, our French teenage visitor is baffled by yet another English eccentricity and, fluency aside, can’t find enough words about ice cream to join in. In her world, dinner is a defrosted plate of haute-cuisine, heated on the hoof by a working mother bemoaning an absent father (in this case, the President of Monaco) followed by a supermarket crème brulee. It doesn’t evoke pictures and smells like ours does, mixed as it is with a spicy dash of obsession, denial and childhood memory. To her, ice-cream is, ben, ice cream. Licked on the beach in Monte Carlo it doesn’t have quite the same je ne sais quoi as a Mr Whippy at Black Rock.

For me, ice cream is an even richer blend, infused with my mother’s tales of South Wales in the 1940’s. As we queued at the Sidoli ice cream van on our annual family summer camping trip to The Gower, she would tell me about the coffee shops of her youth, the smell of espresso and steamed milk. And I would swoon as a swarthy young Welsh-Italian helping his dad out for the summer handed me my vanilla cornet, catching my eye for a brief but everlasting moment.

Around 370,000 Italians came to South Wales from the Bardi area of Italy during the mass immigration to the Welsh Coalfields between 1851 and 1911. As a result, the coffee shops of Swansea and Llanelli were unlikely pockets of sophistication in a Britain still dunking its biscuits in a nice brew. As I shyly licked my cornet, I imagined my 16-year-old-mother, tiny-waisted in post-austerity voluminous skirt and sling backs, sharing a sundae with a group of giggling teenagers to a Mantovani soundtrack. I/my mother was Sophia Loren and ice cream was the epitome of sex appeal.

“Creamy”... “cows”… “dairy”…” Luke’s farm”… the stream of consciousness in the back seat is fast-tracking me now past the cinema usherettes and the Dayvilles ice cream parlour of my own teenage years to the local source right on our doorstep. LouLou’s class mate, Luke delivers our milk twice a week, directly from his parents’ herd of 150 extensively-farmed cows at Downsview. It’s not organic but the grass the cows graze upon is pesticide-free after its initial seeds are blasted, and the only anti-biotics the girls get are for the inevitable mastitis all of us milk-producing mammals have to endure. Apparently cabbage leaves don’t work. The milk smells of cows and grass and fresh summer rain and is, according to LouLou, the best milk in the world.

We arrive at the “factory”, a super-sterile little room behind the dairy where Kate, one of the mums from school, is carefully separating by hand five dozen eggs from Barcombe for the 10 litre batch of ice cream she’s making this morning. The girls are openly dribbling now as she shows them the mix of cream, egg yolks and sugar before whisking it with something that looks like my dad’s hedge cutter and pouring it into the freezing/stirring machine.
“How long will it be before it’s ready”, Ellie asks as politely as is possible when your salivary glands are open full throttle, and blanches when Kate replies twenty minutes.

The ice-cream is finally ready to be squeezed into Downsview Farm pots and handed to the quivering children. Even Estelle is drooling now. And it is heavenly, tasting as it does of cows and grass and fresh summer rain.


As we drive home, I ask Estelle whether she ever goes across to Italy just for an ice cream and all three of them look at each other, raising left cheek and widening eyes in that way that kids do when words are beyond them. Even the English ones. It’s ok; she still thinks of ice cream as Magnum White. And my kids’ associations with ice-cream are hot summer days in Britain and cows. They know nothing of Italy, coffee and sex appeal, and for now, that’s fine by me.

It’s a long way from Ringmer to Bardi, and Kate, the mum-from-school and little Luke Farnes are a far cry from the sexy Italian boys from my mother’s childhood. But at less than one food mile from our house, it ticks my box. When the oil runs out and buying locally and seasonally is the only option, I’ll pop over to Luke’s farm for a couple of pots and settle under the oak tree with my girls, ipod scrolled down to Mantovani and dream of Italy.

Chapter 5: Just Kidding

“Tell me what you know about cheese, girls,” I cheerily ask my daughters as we head out to the Golden Cross Goats Cheese dairy. “It gives you nightmares?” suggests LouLou. “It smells,” says Ellie.

It’s two years since we left the supermarkets of Brighton for the butchers and fishing boats of rural Sussex, and I have carted the kids around most local farms to meet the meat keeping these verdant Downs neat and tidy. But with Ellie now a confirmed vegetarian and LouLou pulled equally by the lure of the animal activism of her big sister and the smell of a beef burger, I’m not quite sure what I’ve achieved.

I always thought that giving my children a little of my foodie childhood might inspire a lifelong love of the stuff. But I was used to the pigs’ trotters simmering gently on the hob as my father told us about the spit-roasted buffalo at the fairytale banquet of the Sultan of Perak and the monkey brains served live at the night-markets of my Malay early years. When Ellie makes her excuses at Sunday lunch these days, he looks crestfallen.

So I’m giving in. If this little experiment is about getting the kids to appreciate good food, then let them eat ice-cream (1 food mile) and goats’ cheese (3.3). After the pig farm, I owe it to Ellie to show her fluffy goats with years of frolicking ahead of them and no-one eying up their back end. I just won’t tell her about what happens to the boys.

Kevin and Alison Blunt have been making cheese at Golden Cross for the last twenty years and have come a long way since the bucket and ten goats they had back then. Pan-fried on a bed of local leaves, slightly spiced with a balsamic dressing, or, even better, soaking up the pink of a local beetroot, Golden Cross goats’ cheese is what a Sussex summer has come to taste like for me.

As we drive down the windy country lanes, I tell the tale of Grandpa and his home-made cheese, how he let the milk sour over a couple of days before stuffing the curd into Granny’s stocking and adding some garlic and olives until the mixture settled. I falter as I remember the ending, and quickly shift the story to his mother’s more successful efforts. The kids are too quick. “What happened to Grandpa’s cheese?” they demand, and as much as I energetically point out the enormous mansions and sweeping drives along our route, swearing that they belong to Robbie Williams and Madonna, their steely gaze is burning into my back. “Ok, so he ended up in hospital”, I finally admit.

I’m about to introduce them to cheese making and to Kevin Blunt who will tell them that it is bacteria that makes milk into cheese. They won’t differentiate between the hairy spores they regularly find in the back of my fridge (and what probably landed Grandpa in hospital) and the benign germs that have made the Blunts famous. How am I going to get them to taste the stuff now?

The girls inspect Kevin’s every move as he wipes the goats’ teats before attaching the pumping cups to their aching udders. Happily, as he takes them to see the curds and whey, Kevin dons a set of germ-free whites and insists that they too stuff their hair into nets, bag themselves in plastic and cover their shoes in sterile bags before they so much as sniff the air.

Kevin is bombarding my children with so much information that they can barely take it all in. While I had gone for the Little Miss Muffet route, he’s talking cheese starter, vegetarian rennet and penicillium mould, inadvertently muffling the message that this is bacteria city, that the only way milk can become cheese is something not far off what Grandpa did.

A tour of the eleven day process, through separating trays and drying rooms leads us to the tasting trays, and I stand back, one eye closed and watch as my children taste, savour, pause, taste some more and…. “I like it!” beams LouLou while Ellie politely nibbles an edge before putting it in her pocket. Apparently it smells of the little sweeties gambolling outside.

As we drive home, we pass a field full of young goats almost ready to give birth themselves, and the girls tell me that this has been the best of all the food trips. As this year of Food and Farming reaches midsummer, I am only just warming up. I dream of that goats’ cheese in the bottom of my handbag and our next trip and its booty. Hmm; Ridgeview Champagne is not that far away…

Chapter 4. This Little Piggy Went to Market

An email popped up on my screen a few months back inviting our local school to host a Local Sussex Breakfast. All that egg, bacon and sausages subsidised by a government initiative to encourage local food procurement in the public sector, it couldn’t fail I thought as I forwarded it onto the Dinner Lady.

I hadn’t realised that an email could do a sharp intake of breath. It wasn’t so much the caterer’s inability to source locally, she said; it was more that the fat content in an ‘unapproved’ sausage could bust the weekly ration. “But, but…” I tried. Surely a school food caterer would know that the meat content of a local sausage made by the local butcher would be at least 85%. “It’s the new nutritional standards,” sighed the Dinner Lady, as if Jamie Oliver had personally torn up the invitation.

I first made sausages with Mauro Bregoli, a gregarious Italian chef from the Old Manor House in Romsey, who famously smoked his own bresaola, made his own cotechino sausage and slaughtered his extensively farmed pigs, each of whom he named and petted, in a mobile abattoir. “The stress of the journey to the regular abattoir is not good for the pig or for the meat” he told me.

Although a recovering meat-eater at the time, I found the process of stuffing what was Susie and, I think, Joanna, into the mincing machine rather fascinating. And slicing up a piece of dried Becky, I have to admit, was a sheer delight on the tongue as Mauro poured me a glass of something expensive to go with it.

After my run in with the Dinner Lady, I was determined to share that love of a good pig with my girls and, made a few calls. And so it was, one sunny afternoon, that my girls, along with requisite gaggle of mates arrived at our local pig farm.

Rather handily, as I stuck rigidly to my Disneyesque script about the difference between extensively and intensively farmed pigs, the farmer was the spit of the bloke from Babe. I almost expected to see a plucky little pig herding the sheep across the 200 hectares, bullied by a talking duck and encouraged in a motherly kind of way by a gentle but earthy sheep-dog.

In real life, Plashett Park Farm, where lapwings wheel over traditionally rotated fields and hedgerows provide homes for one of Britain’s rarest mammals, the Bechstein’s bat, could well be drowned by a new reservoir planned by South East Water. It’s a drama which could see the end for the pig farm – and Farmer Peters – within the next year.

But the girls were more concerned about the rather more imminent threat to the sweet little piglets they had already named, and suddenly the second part of our day out was losing its appeal. “Look” I tried, “they wouldn’t be here at all if people didn’t want to eat them”. It’s an argument I’ve used before and four pairs of eyes reminded me that it didn’t wash.

By the time we got to the butcher, I knew that I had lost my eldest. Ellie will one day find out that Carla Lane lives nearby and will very probably move in. She’s an activist at heart and her vegetarianism runs deep into her veins. And yet I still took her into that butcher. And I still made jolly observations about happy meat.

Luckily, her sister has been brought up on a rich mix of Horrid Henry and Grandpa’s real life “stories from nature” and she and her carnivorous little chum had already spotted the slimy string of intestine the butcher was preparing to stuff for our benefit. As the minced pork shot into the sheath, I blanched as Ellie turned green, and I hastily looked around for a bucket. I racked my brain to remember what Mauro had done to make my experience so different.

As I shooed them out with a pile of sausages curled neatly in my bag, our butcher stopped to put the rest of the meat in the cold store. “Ooh, ooh” cried Lecherous LouLou and Salivating Stephie, “can we go in? Pleeeeeasse?” In a move that would have had our Dinner Lady scrabbling for her health and safety rule book, the butcher ushered them in and they gasped at the side of lamb and the little pig trotters gripping the meat hooks. Ellie sat outside, presumably planning a midnight raid on Plashett Park.

As I drove them back through the country lanes, I realised that I’d made a mistake. It’s not that my attempts at introducing my kids to their dinner are a waste of time, it’s just that I’d taken the wrong passengers. My kids didn’t think that sausages were packed with fat and mechanically reclaimed meat in the first place. My kids know that you don’t fry sausages when you can grill, griddle or barbeque them. It’s the Dinner Lady who’s in charge of feeding around 1200 kids in Lewes who needs to meet the meat..

Chapter 3. Life is Sweet

Strolling down Church Street with my girls at Brighton Festival time a few years ago, I noticed a hippo made of Smarties making its way towards me. “Ooh look, kids”, I said casually, before pausing to look at the hand-painted ties in Gresham Blake. It was when the girls didn’t even break their step that I realised I had come a long way since window shopping with my mother in Abergavenny High Street.

We moved out of Primrose Hill when Sadie Frost and Kate Moss moved in and broccoli and carrots moved out to make space for jelly beans and lingerie. Brighton seemed an earthier kind of place to bring up our two-year-old, who was already sewn into her pink tutu and having tantrums in Sainsbury’s on Chalk Farm Road if I refused to buy an extra bag of gnocchi.

In those days, you couldn’t even find a coffee bean, let alone a jelly bean in Brighton, and lingerie was still strictly Marks and Spencer’s. It was a town where children could grow up dazzled by annual festival delights while keeping their feet bruised on pebbles and chilled in the good old English Channel. It was eccentric but down to earth, a world away from Primrose Hill.

But then came city status, and (dare I say it?) The Juicy Guide and its immigrant readers, bringing their taste for coffee beans, jelly beans and sexy lingerie with them from Crouch End, Tooting and Kensal Rise, and economically hyphenating Brighton with Hove.

The rest is history; a gastro-city was born as restaurants and local produce food shops quickly stirred up a more Notting Hill flavour, winning awards and reviews in national newspapers and attracting celebrity chefs who featured us in their latest TV shows. It all seems strangely familiar; there’s a certain parallel between the towns where my kids and I grew up, but Abergavenny, food hero that it is, is still lacking something.

Chocolate.

Now, I’m not talking Black Magic or Milk Tray with their stranger-danger fantasies distracting us from the fact that nobody ever eats the cherry ones. I’m talking hand-made, cardamom or chilli flavoured, perhaps sculpted into an angel kingdom or a pirate’s cave, maybe even prised from a plastic stiletto for a sexy night in. And all hand-made in Brighton-and-Hove.

Audrey probably started it all in Hove back in 1948 but it was Choccywoccydoodah in 1994 and Montezuma in 2000 that put Brighton on the map before Real Patisserie’s Anthony Heurtier stirred it all up with his French fancy and then went solo with his Gateaux d’Amour at The Chocolate Empire. Now there are at least two cafes which only sell chocolate – surely the mark of a city which refuses to grow up?

And so it was one day late last year, as my nine-year-old and I were queuing for my super-deluxe muesli at Infinity Foods, that the spit of Sadie Frost momentarily flung me back to my Primrose Hill days, feeding us pieces of Chocoholly cinnamon and cranberry organic fair trade dark chocolate. I fretted for a moment as I watched LouLou commit this 21st century sales promotion to childhood memory, before letting it go. Besides, there was a seven-foot transvestite in a gold ball-gown in front of us in the queue, and she hadn’t even mentioned that.

As (Choco)Holly and I chatted about blogs (www.chocoholly.com) and chilli chocolate, I told her about my mission to encourage the kids to be more adventurous in the kitchen, and a twinkle appeared in our eyes...

A couple of months later, my kids and nephew, Edward (10) were smeared with that organic fair trade dark chocolate as Holly gave them their own master class in her pristine kitchen in Hove. As they took turns in tempering her melted couverture, she encouraged them to mix gogi berries with raisins, marshmallow with chilli, refereed the fights over the fish, rabbit and stilleto moulds and even found time to make suitable noises about Edward’s breakdance.

Finally sated, the kids collapsed on Holly’s hot pink sofa, surrounded by the original artwork that makes Chocoholly packaging leap off the shelves, and announced that this was “way better” than the mackerel catch. “The pig farm is next” I reminded them, but Edward was back on his head, looking suspiciously green.

As I quickly carted them off to buy something leafier for dinner, I realised that it was almost ten years to the day that we had left Primrose Hill. It seemed a lifetime away – and for LouLou, it was. But that lunchtime, I swear I could almost hear the call of the peacocks from London Zoo.

Chapter 2. A Fish Out of Water

Day One of my trip back to the days when shopping was a social activity and food still had its head on. The supermarket is already a distant memory. I’ve left the car in the multi-storey and am strolling through the rain to the market, reusable bag (Soil Association logo facing out) in hand and I can’t remember when I’ve felt so excited about buying fresh fish.

The fishmonger, as leathery faced and smelly as I remember fishmongers of my youth, is shooing flies away from the open-jawed aliens of the deep whose body parts I’ve been happily grilling for the past 25 years without a clue to where they came from. Now, I’m going local. I’m thinking baked mackerel for lunch and a cod pie for supper. Remembering Jamie Oliver’s advice, I take a sniff. “Oh, no you don’t” says the fishmonger. “If you can’t see that it’s fresh by looking at it, you should go to the supermarket.” Horrified, I put it down quickly and ask sheepishly if he has a wet wipe. Fishmongers seem much friendlier in Sainsbury’s.

I feel a fraud, but he’s right; I am one of those Johnny-come-latelies who have watched too much Jamie and think we can save the world by shopping locally and seasonally. As I slope away, I want to stamp my foot and tell him about my childhood summers of crab filled rock-pools, of campside suppers, pulling our freshly-caught mussels from their shells and mopping up the sea-salty white wine sauce with a hunk of local bread, of barbecued mackerel swapped for next to nothing from the local fishermen bringing their boats in with that day’s catch. I want to tell him my family’s stories of the Saturday morning door to door visits by the women from Penclawdd who would carry their cockles in baskets perched on their heads.

The years between those bygone countryside summers and my city-based parenting have been largely shrink-wrapped instead of line-caught, and I’ve brought my kids up on a diet of Mediterranean goodness rather than local, seasonal produce. My kids’ idea of a coastline is The Brighton Pier and their relationship with animals is based on their eight rabbits, two hamsters, two cats and an ageing dog. My eldest is more likely to liberate a crab from Shoreham Fish Market than snap its claw and suck out the flesh. I blame the parents. Perhaps it’s time to take them fishing.

Ernie the Fish, whose little boat has been bringing home the catch from Newhaven for more years than he cares to remember, agrees to take us out. The September morning is a stunner, the sea a glassy green, and the kids are already telling me that this is the best day of their lives. I’ve done it; putting a few twenties in the palm of an old seagdog has awarded me the crown I gave my father for strapping crochet hooks to the old broomsticks we used to winkle out our crab dinner from those rock-pools, and I haven’t even got my feet wet. I sit smugly and watch my nature-girls and their gang of mates move like eels about the boat, studying Ernie as he prepares their rods, even picking up a wriggling ragworm and skewering it with their shiny hooks, eager to cast their line.

An hour later, the tide has turned. Our little boat which had been puttering on gentle waves for the first few miles is now rearing wildly on walls of water as if trying to dump the secret supermarket shoppers it has spotted within. My girls have long since crawled into little green-gilled balls and, mercifully, are sleeping through this freak storm, but their father is fighting with 12-year-old seasick Sam for the mackerel bucket after being hurled against the side of the boat. I think he may be concussed.

As our brutalised little army heads home, the sun shines again, and Ernie stoically suggests to the few of us still standing that we cast our rods and see if we can save the day. The low throb of the engine is the only sound as the worms wriggle and hooks glisten in the now dead calm of the English Channel - until Sam throws the last of his breakfast over the side. Suddenly the rods are bucking and bending, children are screaming as the sea comes alive with fish grabbing at Sam’s Coco-Pops, and my sleeping girls wake up wondering what happened to their perfect day. One of the dads clings to his five-year-old before his rod pulls him over the edge, and there are cheers now as mackerel after mackerel are reeled in and flung on deck.

Back home, gloves and aprons on, the girls watch solemnly as we gut the fish and lay them on the barbecue. As the skin toasts and shrinks to reveal the perfect white meaty flesh, I pass one to each of my little fishermen, my body language unable to quite conceal my empty hope. Politely they decline, skip off to grab a sandwich at someone else’s house, and I am left with 36 mackerels staring at me, wondering which of us has won.

Chapter 1. Meeting the Meat

I grew up in a little market town in Wales, notable only at that time for a irritating little ditty called “Taking a trip to Abergavenny” recorded by Shannon in the ‘50s and Marty Wilde in the ’60’s. Ok, so it was also home to The Walnut Tree, where even back in the ‘70’s you couldn’t get a table without booking six months in advance. But the idea that Abergavenny has become a foodie celebrity in its own right, with articles about it in Observer Food Monthly and famous chefs heading down there every September for the Food Festival is more of a headspin to me than that Shannon track ever was.

It’s true that Abergavenny has changed. I tried to buy a dozen eggs at the local supermarket a couple of weeks ago. Next to my lava bread tossed in oats and a couple of rashers, believe me, these eggs don’t have to be anything special, but could I buy a normal egg in an Abergavenny supermarket? The following week I discovered that the Columbian Blacktail eggs I’d settled for had won an award at The Observer Food Awards. It wouldn’t have happened in my day.

Back in the mid 70’s, my school holidays were filled with food. When my brother and I weren’t packing a picnic and setting off for a day’s strawberry picking, I would head into town with my mother with a shopping list for that day’s lunch and dinner. She would have asked us what we wanted to eat while we were still tucking into breakfast, and irritated as I was about having to mentally leave my muesli for floured plaice and roast lamb, it was the daily ritual, and a day without planning a feast would have been a very odd day indeed.

First stop was the butcher where we’d stand in a long queue eyeing up the fresh meat on offer and reading up about their award winning sausages until it was our turn. “Morning Mrs Smith”, said the butcher “I’ve got some lovely oxtail for you today.” And the two of them would flirt over a recipe for braised oxtail, and he’d give our dog a bone.

Then it was onto Vin Sullivan, the fishmonger in the high street which, so my parents kept telling me, provided Harrods Food Hall with fish from the area. We would go in to buy the plaice for lunch that day and lava bread for breakfast, but I thought it was impossibly exotic, with three sides of counters proudly displaying lobsters, crabs, cockles and mussels, and whole salmon from the River Usk jostling for space with locally caught rabbit and pheasant.

Abergavenny market on Tuesdays and Fridays was the most exciting thing to happen in the course of the week, largely because nothing else happened in Abergavenny in the 1970s, and we would buy up the vegetables for the half week there. If I was lucky, I might even manage to persuade my mother to buy me a cheesecloth shirt or garish kaftan which I’d wear proudly on the next market day.

My father would arrive home at the theme tune for Radio 4’s PM programme, often with whatever he’d managed to mow down on the way back from Brecon. Invariably it was a pheasant which had been ambling out of the Gliffaes estate across the A40, and he would take it into the shed where it would hang until ripe enough to pluck and casserole it. On a very cold December night, he might pick up a hare from Vin Sullivans on his way home, and hang it in the shed for a fortnight. A graphic kind of man, he would tell me in great detail how a hare could only be hung when the last of the flies had gone for the winter. Just one could crawl inside the anus of a hare and lay sufficient eggs to eat it from the inside out. He would eventually gut the hare, taking care not to break its rib cage and collect the blood for the gravy.

Such an earthy attitude to food fired my imagination (and made me turn vegetarian for a few barren years), but when he tells me now about the tripe he and my mother would cook, the sweet milky smell floods back into my senses, along with the leeks and peppered mash that they would serve with it “You can’t buy tripe these days,” he tells me. “Or tongue. Bloody health and safety rules. I was only thinking today that I should go up to Mr George in Talgarth – he runs the abattoir up there – and see if I can get some from him. I should take you and the kids there next time you’re down”.

The idea of my taking the girls to an abattoir is laughable. Thirty years on from those Abergavenny days, my eleven-year-old has just announced that she’s converting to vegetarianism after watching Jamie Oliver slaughtering a lamb on TV. And my eight--year-old is considering her position. Their attitude to my stories of cooking rabbit with Jamie’s mentor, Gennaro Contaldo the other day, reflected their differing stance on food; Elly blanched when I told her how we had chopped the head in two to look at the brains, cheeks and tiny tongue that Gennaro swore tasted so sweet with garlic and red wine, while LouLou took it all in silently – particularly the bit about how it’s important to keep the head on a rabbit at market to differentiate it from a cat. Skinned, they look identical.

After a few moments, she was on the phone to Grandpa to ask if he had ever eaten rabbit. It’s a regular call; she and her elder sister have always been fascinated by Grandpa’s stories of eating snails, frogs legs, brains on toast, heart and tongue jelly, and even if she knows she’s unlikely to eat it herself she knows there will be a good story in it. He didn’t disappoint, with tales of how his mother would go to Cardiff market and bring home a basket full of rabbit heads for the family which she cooked in onions and served up with mashed potatoes.

My children have, at best, a voyeur’s relationship with real food. I write about it and we cook a lot and talk about it, but we buy from supermarkets, and trips to local farms have been more for the climbing frames and tractor rides than to meet the pigs who become their packed lunch a couple of months later. I’ve become so used to doing the weekly shop silently, alone in the crowd of other foodies who have sold their soul to Sainsbury’s when the day became too crammed, that I’ve forgotten the banter that comes with popping into the local butcher or baker, and to be honest, I’m frightened of going back there.

My husband comes from a good Jewish family, but of the two types of Jew, mine’s the Ashkenazi whose ancestors thrived on dumplings. Just thinking of the Sephardic feasts that might have been laid upon my mishporcha’s tables had I chosen a swarthier Jew, makes me faint with hunger. Instead I get to eat a lot of salmon. But give Jed a market in the Mediterranean, and he becomes fluent in the global language of the shrug and the smile and loves nothing better than finding the ingredients for that night’s meal. With such promise in the man, it’s time to introduce him to Sussex.

For the sake of the children, and to see if anyone other than celebrity chefs can find the time, the confidence and the produce to make it worth their while shopping locally, I shall let go of Uncle Sainsbury’s hand. Venturing deep into the forests and farms of Sussex, to the weekend farmers markets and daily open markets, we shall transform our shopping habits, measuring air miles and car miles, time and patience.

And we’ll watch our 11 and seven year old girls mature into … what? Carnivores or vegetarians? Foodies or food haters? Will they cook more or less? Will their children shop like I did or like I do? And will our experiment be an inspiration, or confirmation of the power of the supermarket.