Cooking is my escape, the place where I can make things better My passion for food ran alongside hers. She started collecting the Cordon Bleu partwork and I spent hours poring over them. I can remember rubbing my eyes, willing them to stay open, so that I could keep reading. The pictures (I still have the collection stashed in my study) are as powerful as scent in their ability to evoke the feelings they did then. Dinner parties with boeuf bourgignon (served on chunky Seventies ceramics against a background of hessian walls), mosaic-like terrines, crepes flambéing in copper pans... I longed to produce food like this, to light candles, pour drinks, welcome guests. I wanted to move on from the mechanics of cooking to the theatre of it. When, one memorable weekend, the fridge filled with stuffed olives (glamorous back then) and the flavoured butters my mum had made for a party, the house began to fill with laughter, the clinking of ice-cubes and the music of Frank Sinatra. I was enraptured. Food wasn't just about weighing and sifting and comfort; it was also about glamour and fun, entering a different world and reaching for the exotic. I was in a rainy provincial Northern Irish town, but that night it could have been Manhattan and food seemed central to the transformation. Books were big in my life, too. I carried four of them from the local library every week, but I especially loved those that had food running through them. A teacher introduced me to the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and I soaked up every detail of what they dried and cured and "put up" in this tough, rural American world: the pumpkins stored in the attic, the tangerines and nuts stuffed into the toes of socks at Christmas, the maple syrup that was tapped and boiled to a sticky toffee. Later, I started pulling the food sections out of magazines and eventually the walls of my teenage bedroom were hidden under a collage of paper. But it wasn't the usual pop idol pictures. It was poetry and photographs, much of it to do with food. A poem about wild strawberries was stuck behind my beside lamp. There were luscious photographs of old hand-cranked ice cream machines (and what they could produce); a big picture of a pea on someone's tongue (showing which parts of the tongue responded to which tastes); a handwritten version of a William Carlos Williams poem about eating plums (which is, of course, about more than just food). It's a cliché, of course, but every food lover has to have a formative visit to France. At 15, I had mine. Clothilde, my exchange partner, was as skinny and cool as Jane Birkin despite the amount of gâteau Saint Honoré she put away. She was gorgeous, but I was more impressed by what she could do with a pork chop. Marinating in olive oil and herbs, grilling to perfection, Clo did everything with knowledge and care. We spent hours leafing through ancient issues of Elle at her grandma's, looking for dishes we wanted to cook. We foraged for wild mushrooms, collected just-skinned rabbits from the farm up the road and made paper-thin crêpes. Her brother - my holiday romance - cared about food just as much as me. After we kissed, in response to that very female question: "A quoi tu penses?" he would always say: "A Roquefort." I concluded that the French were a properly civilised race. When I returned home I applied my new knowledge, made a lot of quiche and threw my first dinner parties. (Arriving at an early one, the young guests asked if we were going to celebrate mass. I'm not even Catholic but I had seriously overdone the candles.) France had upped the ante. I was changed forever. My love of literature got me into Oxford but it wasn't a happy time. There, cooking was seen as frivolous. My passion for it was a sign that I wasn't a serious person, certainly not a liberated woman (though there were delicious discoveries - I'd never tasted taramasalata before). A housemate told me that I shouldn't cook for my boyfriend because it was "imprisoning." I duly hid my love from most people but couldn't quell it. Raymond Blanc had just opened the Manoir Aux Quat" Saisons and my boyfriend and I made secret pilgrimages there at the weekends. We would gaze in awe as the Manoir glowed, read the menu on the wall outside, and return to our flat. I never wanted food to be the "new rock 'n" roll," but the change in our attitude towards it over the last 20 years has been a relief. I no longer have to apologise for my love of cooking. Moving to London - where I joined the BBC - had an even bigger impact than going to France. My flat was surrounded by Turkish and Greek groceries with their bouquets of mint and parsley, sesame-flecked bread and buckets of olives; and the Edgware Road, with its Middle Eastern cafés and hubba bubba pipes was only a Tube ride away. On a grey afternoon, I came across Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food. I'd never heard of her but I bought it, lay on the sofa in my basement and had afternoon tea with Claudia's aunts in Cairo, a place of tinkling glasses and silver dishes of pure colour, where the smell of musk, ambergris and jasmine hung in the air. I'd come to London but I felt the whole world was at my feet. With food, you could go anywhere while standing still. I got friendly with a bloke in the butchery department in Harrods who gave me cheap veal bones for stock (I sometimes carried as much as four kilos home on the bus). Nouvelle cuisine was in vogue so I duly bought hexagonal plates and reduced the resulting stocks to a dark stickiness. I still wanted to master French cookery but I was most fascinated by ethnic food, and everything was on my door step - I frequented a Vietnamese in someone's living room in Maida Vale, an Ethiopian place that had no cutlery, and would cross London to get the right sort of Spanish saffron. At the BBC, I made chat shows (with Terry Wogan, another greedy Irish person - how we used to bemoan the sad offerings in the green room) and eventually documentaries, but it wasn't until I met Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall that I produced cookery programmes. Before him, food programmes seemed unconnected to people - they were sets of demonstrated recipes - but TV Dinners, his series for Channel 4, was about people's passion for food, about how the dishes they cooked intersected their lives. For me it is this connectedness that is the key thing about food. Of course it connects you to the people you feed, but it also connects you to other cooks. I barely own a cookbook by a chef, but I have scrapbooks stuffed with recipes scribbled down by home cooks in some part of the world or other. These recipes are part of someone else's life that then become part of yours. When I start, late on a dark November afternoon, to make goulash, I wonder whether Eva, who I met in north-east Italy and who gave me her recipe, is making the same dish at the same time. That fills me with a kind of quiet joy. Food also connects you to the people who make it - cheese makers, bakers - and therefore care about it as much as you do. And food connects you to growth, to soil. In the same way that swimming in the ocean or climbing hills makes you feel both exhilarated and "earthed," the act of dealing with lemons, silver fish, muddy potatoes, warm oil, anchors me. The food writing didn't start until I had my first child and discovered that producing television programmes wasn't going to fit with being a mother. Since I had always devoured both words and food, I did what I was destined to do. Some have voiced concern that I am interested in food to an obsessive degree, and I have at times worried that cooking is my escape, the place where I can make things better. I certainly cooked my way through my divorce and, after an illness in my twenties, recuperated by writing menus for a fantasy restaurant I was never going to own. Cooking comforts and excites, gives me private pleasure and provides pleasure for others. I'm glad I'm obsessed. It makes me happy. In bad times I remind myself: "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." And then I think, yeah, and lemon drizzle cake, lemon and honey marmalade, lemon meringue ice cream... and of course you can pickle them, too. Diana Henry has been 'The Sunday Telegraph's" food writer for 10 years Diana Henry's Last Supper First, seared scallops - for their buttery, almost vanilla sweetness - with bitter leaves and capers. Fresh pasta with white truffles next (that sounds grand, but if you've been to Piedmont in the autumn you'll know why). A good roast chicken is a wonderful thing when done well (and with a good chicken). Roast autumn vegetables and a pot of Dijon on the side, please. A 'chariot de fromages" as served in a good Savoie restaurant would be bliss next, followed by figs and pears (fruit puddings are my favourite) baked in Marsala. Heaven.