I was 11 years old the first time I ate alone in a restaurant. It was the dining room of a wooden-framed hotel in an unglamorous Swiss village close to the Italian border, and I wasn't even meant to be there. I was staying down the road at another hotel, with a group from my school on a skiing trip, and had to pass it every day as I trudged back from the slopes, bruised and humiliated. The place where we were staying was an unlovely, grey, modern block that smelled of mothballs. This hotel was built from heavily carved and darkly varnished timbers, and looked like a stately galleon afloat on the oceans of that winter's snows. By the front door, under glass, was a menu written in an expansive italic font. Most of it made no sense to me. It was in two languages and I understood neither of them. There was one word I did recognise, a word no restaurant ever bothered to translate because the original French did the job: escargots.
I had first eaten snails in garlic butter at home in north-west London, where my mother prepared them from a do-it-yourself pack sold in the local supermarket. They came in a transparent plastic tube. At the bottom was a can of the naked snails, which looked like big, fat commas when they were pulled from the brine and laid out to dry; stacked above them in the tube were the creamy-coloured shells, patterned with swirls of brown and grey. Laboriously my mother poked the snails into the shells. She back-filled them with garlic and parsley butter, and then grilled them. They were cooked often in our house in the 1970s and I loved the hot, salty, garlicky melted butter and the dark, rubbery prey that bathed in it.
Now I was in Switzerland and, having been surprised to discover that skiing was not a sport for an overweight boy with weak ankles and fallen arches, I was horribly homesick. With the twisted logic of the 11-year-old, I concluded that eating something French would make me feel better about not being in Britain.
That evening, after we had been served dinner at our hotel - a grey soup of some kind, some greyer meat and vegetables - I slipped away in search of Technicolor. I cannot imagine what the staff made of the prepubescent English boy sitting alone in the almost deserted dining room, round belly to the table's edge, humming to himself as he set to work, expertly, with the spring-loaded escargot tongs, a spiked prong and an arsenal of fresh, crisp bread. I know I was happy. The snails came on their own ornate iron stand, complete with inbuilt meths burner, and as the flame guttered underneath, the generous slick of butter from the shells became so hot in each dimple I could fry my bread in it. This I did until all the bread and all the butter were gone. I paid and left, absolutely clear in my mind as to how I would be spending my evenings on this trip from now on.
I returned the next day, and the day after that (once with a friend), until on the fourth night the waiter didn't even bother to bring me the menu; he just presented me with the snails. I had emptied all the shells and was busy frying my bread when I noticed wisps of smoke lifting from the plate. I liked my bread really crisp and on this evening had turned the flame up as high as it could go without, for a moment, thinking there might be consequences. Within seconds of the smoke appearing, the butter ignited, producing an impressive cone of flame at least a foot high, which burned enthusiastically on the ponds of dairy fat.
I must have sat rigid with terror, because I have no memory of the waiter advancing upon me, only that he was suddenly at my side. This was a dangerous moment. The only thing that wasn't immediately inflammable in that restaurant was the cutlery, and the inferno on the table in front of me posed a real threat. The waiter didn't flinch. He opened the window next to me, picked up the burner from the base and heaved it out into the snow. He wiped his hands on his apron, closed the window and we agreed it was time he brought me the bill. My adventure was over.
Walking back to my own hotel that night I was disappointed, because I knew I couldn't return. Nevertheless I was comforted by the knowledge that my family would be impressed by what had happened. As far as my parents were concerned, any 11-year-old kid could learn to ski. But ordering snails in a restaurant! All by himself! That was a different matter entirely.
This is how it had always been in my family. My parents were both children of the Depression, knew what it was to go without and were not about to revisit the experience, either on themselves or their kids, so ours was a house of plenty. I always said that my Jewishness was only defined by my love of chopped liver, and it's true that there was no room at the Rayner house for ritual or faith. The Jewish God was far too picky an eater to be given space at our table. Forgo sausages and bacon? Reject shellfish and cheeseburgers, all in the name of mumbo-jumbo? Don't be ridiculous.
Yet there was, I think, something fundamentally Jewish about our way with food: the noisiness of the dinner table, the stomach-aching generosity, the deep comfort we sought from it. Food was what we did. Long before anybody had thought to initiate a debate on the importance of allowing small children into restaurants, my parents were taking all three of us out to eat on a regular basis. By the time he was four my brother was so good with chopsticks the waiters often assumed he had been raised in Hong Kong, and I had developed a taste for chicken with cashew nuts in yellow-bean sauce, and for deep-fried seaweed scattered with golden crumbs of dried scallop - dishes that were rarely found outside of Chinatown back then, let alone outside of London.
Unsurprisingly the story my parents most like to tell about me involves a rebellion at the kitchen table. It was a hot summer's evening in 1973, I was six years old and for dinner my mother had decided to serve salad and a slab of mahogany-brown smoked mackerel, with a brutal cure and slimy skin. I hated smoked mackerel and said so. My mother told me that if I didn't like it I should leave the table, so I did.
A quarter of an hour later, when I hadn't sloped back to my chair and my plate, they came looking for me. I was nowhere to be found and my parents became worried until, looking out of the window, they spotted me on the pavement in front of the house. I had known exactly how to respond to this challenge of theirs. After all, it was a time in Britain of great industrial strife and protest. Pictures of it were on the television news every evening. Taking my lead from those images, I had gone upstairs and found a piece of the card round which my father's shirts were folded when they came back from the laundry. To that I had taped a ruler. I had then scrawled a message on the card and was now to be found picketing the house with the placard held high, bearing the legend, 'I want proper dinner'.
My parents laughed. As I recall, they also congratulated me on my initiative, though they still insisted that I come back inside to the kitchen table from which I had fled and eat what I had been given. I did as I was told. Despite its repetition, I like this story. It's the sort of story that should lie in the history of someone who later became a restaurant critic.
When I was 13 years old I was bar mitzvahed and, though I recall none of the Hebrew I read that day in synagogue, I do remember the dessert that we ate at the party afterwards: it was blintzes stuffed with thick, sweetened cream cheese. My mother, to be fair, was so antagonistic towards any form of religious observance she would quite happily have forgone the whole affair.
However, my father, though no great believer, insisted that we would only regret that which we hadn't done. He told us that afterwards we could decide for ourselves if we wanted to take Judaism further. He was the one who made sure I got to Hebrew classes and who, pressing into service his experience in the menswear trade, chose my outfit for the big day: houndstooth trousers, white ruffled shirt, black velvet jacket and a flowing red silk cravat held in place by a silver ring. It was not a good look for a fat 13-year-old.
It is curious that it should have been my father who took responsibility for my Jewish education because, while he gave me the knowledge, it is actually from my mother that I take almost all my Jewish identity, though only because she fed me. I have always thought that I am almost entirely Jewish by food, and have long joked that I worshipped at my mother's fridge. She made a mean chopped liver, and there was always matzo in the house to spread it upon, not just at Passover. She knew how to boil a fowl to make the most soothing of chicken soups, and liked to fry eggs with wurst, a kind of beef salami, which always stained them pink. Most of all she made gefilte fish, both boiled and fried. The boiled, which she loved, I hated. The mix of sweetened white fish (in some recipes ground almonds are added, giving an unpleasant crumbly feel) would be formed into balls, boiled, then allowed to cool and served with a clear fishy jelly. I thought it was disgusting, a creation that should go from pan to bin without troubling the plate. Her fried gefilte fish, though, was something else, the crisp, salty exterior giving way to light, fluffy insides. The only peculiarity was that my mother insisted it should be eaten cold rather than hot. This was a relic from the days of observance that she so firmly rejected. Fried gefilte fish would have been made in advance of the Sabbath and then eaten cold when cooking was forbidden. We ate bagels and onion platzels, garlicky new green pickled cucumbers (which she sometimes made herself) and salt beef, which ideally came with its own ribbon of amber fat.
When I left home, and moved even further away from my roots, I came to think that the only thing which defined me as a Jew was my love for these dishes. My wife, Pat, who is not Jewish, hates this stuff and says I would too, were it not for the cultural attachments. She also says that Jewish cuisine is an oxymoron. On this we are agreed. The word 'cuisine' suggests finesse, and if there's any finesse in Jewish food, it isn't being done right.
Most Christmases when I was growing up, my mother made chopped liver in the Jewish Ashkenazi style, to be eaten on shards of crisp matzo before the roast-turkey lunch. This outbreak of ecumenical feasting made a lot of sense. Almost all the people in our house on Christmas Day were Jewish, and the terrine of rich, grey chicken livers scattered with crumbled hard-boiled egg gave us a shared, if unconscious, reference point. It provided a necessary culinary grounding before my mother, Claire, assaulted us with the roast bird. And the sausages. And the bacon. And the potatoes. And the pickled red cabbage. And the Brussels sprouts mined with chestnut shrapnel. And the bread sauce and the gravy and the Christmas pudding and the jelly and the fruit salad and the cream. If anybody pointed out that chopped liver followed by Christmas roast turkey was a culinary non sequitur, we would always roll out the same lame joke: Jesus was a nice Jewish boy and what better way to mark his birthday?
Our Christmases were never for extended family. My father was an only child, my mother's siblings lived in Canada or the US, and she had long ago broken off all contact with her own parents after a miserable childhood she was determined not to revisit. The only relatives were my father's parents, and my mother disliked them intensely. Later, Claire told me that the enormous Christmases she threw - one year 28 of us sat down to be fed from a turkey the size of a small horse - were designed specifically to hide her mother-in-law away in a crowd. This, I understood. I didn't much like my paternal grandmother either.
But it was also, I think, a function of my mother's habit of collecting people. She had a fascination for those who, unconnected by blood, nevertheless created networks that mimicked family just as she had done when she was a nurse, hence many of the Jews who joined us for lunch were also either gay men or actors. Or gay Jewish actors. They were all keen to be collected. By the mid-1970s Claire was famous as one of Britain's leading agony aunts. She had a weekly problem page in Britain's biggest-selling daily newspaper and a slot answering viewers' queries on a BBC daytime television programme, among other things. She had made her name offering up no-nonsense advice on health worries and sexual dysfunction by insisting that there was no problem, however personal, that could not be discussed, and many of her friends took her at her word.
I remember during one of those long Christmas lunches, my mother telling the story of Larry, a neurotic New Yorker who telephoned after midnight in much anguish. 'Claire,' he said, 'one of my testicles is missing,' as if she was so blessed with wisdom she might instinctively know where to lay her hand upon it. She sighed deeply, told him she was sure it would be back in place come the morning and went back to sleep. It was.
Looking back, I see now that, however random it might have appeared at the time, there was nothing happenstance about the cast list at these Christmas lunches; like my family, the guests were all regulars of a particular London restaurant, merely relocated to the suburbs for the one day of the year when it was closed. The restaurant was called Joe Allen, and it was where I fell in love with eating out.
Joe Allen opened in January 1977, on the sort of grim, narrow lane just back from London's Strand that you might visit if you specifically hankered after being mugged, and was marked by its ostentatious lack of ostentation. The doorway, in a street with no other shops or restaurants, was indicated only by a small brass plaque. You had to know it was there. It also demanded insider knowledge once you sat down.
Newcomers were easily spotted. They were the ones asking the white-aproned waiters - usually unemployed dancers - for a menu, before being directed to the blackboards hung high on the walls above the half-open kitchen (a standard feature of gastropub Britain today, a revelation back then). Then there was the Joe Allen burger, one of the best in the city. It was never listed on the menu, but regulars knew it was available if wanted. In short, Joe Allen had all the qualities of a members-only club but without the fee. Like the original in New York, the London Joe Allen had quickly become a favourite with theatre people. The bare brick walls were hung with framed theatre posters from both sides of the Atlantic, and late at night, after the curtains had come down across the West End, it was common to see the very people given star billing in those posters sitting beneath them eating supper and pretending to be nobody. Everybody from Elizabeth Taylor to Al Pacino, Laurence Olivier, Elaine Stritch and Princess Margaret had eaten there over the years, and it was soon regarded as the place for celebrity-spotting, though the restaurant had a way to make sure its starry clientele went unmolested. The space was divided in two by an arched wall. If you were a regular or a face (or both), you got to sit on the left-hand side, nearest the kitchen.
Everybody else went to the right and had to gawp through the arches. My mother's notoriety, and my parents' regular custom, guaranteed our family a table on the left-hand side, plus a welcome from pianist Jimmy Hardwick, who had been hired simply to play the live music necessary to secure a late drink licence, but who had become a feature of the restaurant. He had a talent for segueing seamlessly from whatever he was playing at the time to the big number for whichever musical star had just walked through the door or, in my mother's case, 'Clair' by Gilbert O'Sullivan. My parents table-hopped or else we were joined for coffee by the perma-tanned stars of daytime television whom my mother had met on the celebrity circuit. It was glamorous, cheesy and very, very camp.
As an 11-year-old boy, I loved it all. More than anything else, I loved the menu of American bistro food: the buffalo chicken wings, with their cayenne-boosted spicy marinade that made my lips tingle; the spare ribs with the cornbread, rice and black-eyed beans; the garlicky Caesar salad dressed with freshly grated parmesan rather than the dusty old ground stuff that tasted of vomit, which was what passed for parmesan in the rest of Britain at the time.
I liked this food too much and eventually it was my undoing. My parents took us to Joe Allen so regularly that, by the time I was 16, I felt relaxed enough to go without them. I liked the fact that I could phone up and get a precious, hard-to-land table at short notice; that, when I walked in, I would be recognised by the maître d' and the piano player. I must have been a truly repulsive adolescent. Certainly, I was convinced that if I were to take girls there, they would be so impressed by my uncommon maturity and sophistication they would immediately want to snog me.
Perhaps they would have done, were it not for the fact that appetite would then take over. I would do the bit with the maître d' and the hearty hellos with the piano player. Then I would sit down and order the spare ribs, and when they arrived would grab them with both hands until sauce was smeared across my fat cheeks and dripping off my ears so that no girl, however desperate or impressed, was going to shake my hand let alone kiss me. My wife later told me that, in my early twenties, I did exactly the same with her. 'But by then I'd already snogged you, so it wasn't such an issue. Luckily for you.'
In 1976 my mother was invited to present a new cookery programme for national television. That was the year family mealtimes became unreliable. The 30-minute show went out on ITV, one of only three channels then available to British viewers, and was called Kitchen Garden. In the first half a gardener gave the viewers tips on how to grow that week's chosen vegetables. In the second half Claire demonstrated how to cook them.
It must have been curious for the great British public to witness my mother's sudden reinvention as a celebrity chef. Of course, she was already famous by then, but more for her tips on sexual health than great ideas for dinner. Now, in addition, she was going to be supplying Britain with handy recipes for ratatouille.
I turned 10 that year and at the time none of this seemed odd. My two older siblings and I were used to our mother taking on new challenges. She had started her career as a nurse in the 1940s, an escape from that miserable childhood, and risen to the level of sister before trying her hand at freelance print journalism while on maternity leave to have my sister. She never went back to nursing. One-off articles led to offers of health columns. She became a consultant to a BBC television medical drama, Emergency Ward 10, and then a pundit on television.
Contracts for books about health and motherhood led to the suggestion that she try her hand at fiction and she eventually became a best-selling novelist too. Now she was going to be a TV chef. I well remember coming into the kitchen one afternoon, in our house in the cherry-blossom suburbs of north-west London, to find her standing over a box of vegetables, peering at its contents suspiciously.
She told me distractedly that she was experimenting, which sounded improbably exciting. What I didn't realise was that I too would be part of the experiment, for she needed people on whom to test her recipes - and who better than her husband and kids? Looking back, I see now that this was just the way things worked in our house. My mother's career was the family business, and we were all employees in it. In 1972, after the success of one of her novels, my father, Des, resigned his post as a PR man in the womenswear business and combined his flourishing career as an artist with the job of agent and manager for my mother.
There were jobs for the children too. Claire received around 1,000 letters a week from her readers, a damburst of angst flooding into the house from the four corners of the nation, and she ran a team of secretaries to help her reply to them all. At an early age I was an expert on the symptoms of the menopause, could rattle off tips for long-married couples who wanted to rekindle their lovemaking and knew a use for live natural yoghurt that should never be described in a book dedicated to the enjoyment of food.
The new task would eventually seem more onerous than any of that. My mother, it should be said, was a very good, if instinctive cook. To accommodate her working life she had developed a strong line in casseroles, mostly involving chicken or lamb, which could be put together in the morning and then slow-cooked for dinner that evening.
She made terrific creamy soups with dumplings, and on winter afternoons there was tea in front of the fire, with crumpets and slices of sticky malt loaf with a generous smear of butter. Now, with the contract to present Kitchen Garden, we were in the land of the vegetable and therefore our satisfaction at the table was far less certain; dinners became a time of nervous anticipation, and praise quickly given, whatever we thought, for we did not wish to damage her self-confidence. She was the one putting food on the table, if at times all too literally.
'There weren't food economists on the show,' she told me, when we finally discussed it. 'It was only me.' One day that box of vegetables simply turned up at the door. 'And they said, "Cook these". There was kohlrabi and salsify in there, things I had never seen before. I had to guess what to do with it. And for the first time I had to do weights and measures. Up to then I used to do a handful of this or a handful of that.' There were three series of Kitchen Garden altogether, out of which came three short books, eventually combined into one longer volume. On the cover of the latter my mother, today in her mid-seventies, is wearing a floral apron and is obviously just a few years older than I am now. With her is the gardener, a jobbing TV presenter called Keith Fordyce who made his name on the seminal BBC show Ready Steady Go! Part of the idea behind the programme was that it should be presented by people not normally associated with either cooking or gardening and so here they are, in an orchard, positioned around a barrowful of fruit and vegetables. My mother has a tense grin on her face, which, to me, says, 'What the hell do you expect me to do with all of this?'
Browsing through that compilation now is to revisit those days when my mother was experimenting on the wilder shores of vegetarian cookery. I remember fondly her peppery cabbage soup made with milk, and less happily a Chinese cabbage chop suey with a sauce that was thickened with cornflour. There was that lush, satisfying ratatouille, which, because of its amenity to slow cooking, had long been a part of the family repertoire, and courgettes hollowed out and stuffed with an irresistible mixture of breadcrumbs, anchovy fillets and olives.
Because of my mother's medical background, she was always keen to experiment with the latest innovations in diet, and we became one of the first households in Britain to use low-cholesterol butter substitutes. Olive oil as a cooking medium arrived early. And long before The F-Plan Diet was published, my mother came up with a weight-loss regime based on fibre for one of the weekly women's magazines for which she wrote. Each morning she drank orange juice with a bran tablet dissolved in it, which turned the liquid sludge-grey. For a while she even suggested we all do the same and told us how good it would make us feel, but we were wise to her by then. We had been guinea pigs for long enough. We knew where a willingness to please might get us. We all said no.
· Share your own childhood food memories on Jay's blog post, here
· The Man Who Ate the World is published by Headline at £16.99. To order a copy for £15.99 with free UK p&p go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885
