Hungry: The highly anticipated memoir, from Celebrity Masterchef’s new judge Grace Dent

by Grace Dent

Softening an onion will be a lesson that lasts a lifetime. It will be the genesis of shepherd’s pie, frittata and a thousand restorative soups, stews and curries. Decades later, I will attempt to teach highly intelligent, otherwise practical friends to cook and realise that the fine art of onion softening is almost unteachable. It is a deeply mindful act that needs to be carried out absent-mindedly.

our eccentric great-uncle, John, in the days before refrigerators, used to make his porridge once a week, pour it into a kitchen drawer to set, then cut a slice out of the coagulated lump each morning. By Friday, Uncle John’s breakfast would inevitably contain a beetle or two, she admitted.

They were exactly the same as big packets of cereal … but smaller. Our tiny minds were blown. ‘Can we have the mini-cereals, Mam? Can we?’

I would give anything to go back there for just one normal evening. I was loved and I was never hungry,

‘Two tins of peach slices,’ she’d say. ‘And a tin of Tip Top.’ Back I came, with an extra Heinz Treacle Sponge Pudding under my arm. The one you pierced with a tin opener, then steamed in a pan of boiling water. Sticky, satisfying, delicious. ‘Yeah, shove it in,’ she’d nod. That nod was the best thing ever.

I liked the methodology of filling the trolley, trying not to squash the bread or bruise the fruit.

If you could sweet-talk a Sara Lee gateau or a bottle of Bird’s Ice Magic onto that conveyer belt on a Friday, you were one of life’s winners.

don’t squash the bread, all the tins in one bag, go and find an empty box for the bottles of wine to stand up in. Afterwards, we’d ride home together eating warm reduced-price sausage rolls with a boot full of bags and clinking bottles.

We were, despite our faults – and I love to remember this now – a happy family. We weren’t perfect, but we had a laugh.

Festive whiplash, dragging you into a perfect memory you had no idea at the time was perfect. So cosily devastating.

My mother and I are arguing constantly these days. Our rows escalate rapidly, starting with a simple request from her to bring down the six used coffee cups now growing fungus under my bed and blowing up into full-scale, door-crashing spats.

We have fights where we both shout melodramatic things at high volume, for maximum effect: ‘I wish you’d aborted me!’ ‘Pgghghghg, well, I wish I had too!’ ‘I hate you! You’ve never loved me!’ ‘Well, I hope you still feel that way when I’m DEAD!’

It felt like a secret language requiring decades of experience, rooted in childhood, which I could never catch up on.

Being a woman, a wife, a mammy, was less about wearing lipstick and nice frocks and more about looking like, as Mam said, ‘the wreck of the Hesperus’, in a cardigan over loose pyjama bottoms. It seemed like a lot of being knackered and fighting with a bin bag and asking for jobs to be done again and again until you finally did it yourself.

I do not want to be a mammy, I thought. But, I am finding that, even if there are no children, someone in every home still needs to be ‘mammy’. There’s still the issue of the house. If both of you are ‘daddy’ then kitchen surfaces stay sticky and the fridge does not refill. Cousins are in umbrage about forgotten birthday cards not posted and the petunias you bought for the window box die. Loo paper inner tubes pile up on the bathroom floor and socks smell slightly of mildew because they lingered, damp, in the machine too long.

I’m furious about the bleak existential reality that everything we love and hold dear must grow old, fragile and die at some time, which I’ve sort of always known but have ignored all my life, but here it is in living colour – or rather, here it is in the greys and browns and sludge-like shades of NHS buildings and in the stench of disinfectant and in the chaos of lost admission notes.

I miss when he described stupid folk by saying, ‘He’s about as much use as a one-legged man at an arse-kicking party.’

Even with a head brimming with syrup and abject sadness, I need to go back out to work. I need the cash. Maybe that is, after all, the true meaning of being working class.