I'm a twin – second to arrive – and my mother breastfed us together. But my earliest memory is the smell of tomatoes. My parents had a vegetable garden and took us in our cots in the truck to deliver produce. Even today the smell of a tomato plant floods me with recollections.

Me and my sisters spent summers on my grandparents' chicken farm. In the morning my grandmother, who was very self-sufficient, used to beat us out of bed with a willow, saying: "We're gonna can preserves!"

I got fired from the Dairy Queen in Mesquite, Texas because my ice creams were too big and I'd give away too many french fries. I'd thought it was good business.

My mother always used to make us eat before we went out so we'd act like ladies and not look like pigs. When I moved to Paris at 16, I held a dinner party in my first apartment and served only red wine, french fries and mashed potatoes. Unable to cook, I relied on people taking me out. When I was 17, I was at La Coupole brasserie and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir asked me to join them at their table. They were fascinated that I'd watched their programme on existentialism back home and wanted to understand nothingness and being.

One of my sisters gave me a special apron that I've worn for cooking. When you unzip a little panel in the front, a stuffed cock comes out. It's the sort of thing Andy Warhol would have enjoyed. We were close friends for many years and I thought he was a generous, gentle, sweet guy. In the cupboards of his kitchen there were just lots of cans of Campbell's tomato soup – it's all he ate at home.

Mick [Jagger] and I were served omelettes in Bali which had psychedelic mushrooms in and made us have a really terrible, vomiting, paranoid trip. Worse was when I was 12 or 13 and my sisters and I were out with some cowboys who castrated steers. As a joke they said: "Try these Rocky Mountain oysters." The taste was horrible. I still cringe when I think of eating bovine testicles.

The only time I label food in the fridge with my name is when I'm given a big pot of caviar. I write "This is Mum's. DO NOT TOUCH", yet it always disappears. I particularly liked caviar – and liver and chocolate – when I was pregnant. During one of my pregnancies, when we had a gourmet chef, I spent the last month in bed and totally chowed out. It was heaven just lying there and waiting for the next yummy tray.

I've never stolen food but every summer I think about it. My neighbour in France has a huge fig tree and when it's full I sit there on my side of the fence thinking, "Hmm."

There's all that brain work involved, remembering all those lines in a script. I find I have to eat a lot of fish, late – but not too late – in the afternoon. Doing theatre you need to be like an athlete in training.

Despite what Bob Colacello claimed, I don't think I ever said 'Ah want to marry a millionaire, so ah can have caviah any time of the day or night, and take nice long champagne baths'. I certainly wouldn't bathe in champagne.

I was my thinnest when doing 35 fashion shows a week in different countries, because I didn't have time to eat. I've never bought the idea that models in fashion magazines cause readers to have anorexia and bulimia. And you can't be a model if you've got those conditions anyway, because you'll get acne and hair all over your body. None of my girls have ever dieted.

If wooing someone I'd fry chicken with sesame seeds. Back home they call sesame seeds 'man manner', they say that's the secret.

I had a cook for 25 years and then she retired. It felt terrible, scary, traumatic, devastating even. Then I got a wonderful gourmet cook in for a year, but the food was just too rich for the children and I put on lots of weight. So in the last two years I've started cooking. When I make boeuf bourguignon and lamb tagine for my closest friends and they eat thirds and clean the platter it's the most delightful thing ever.

My Life in Pictures by Jerry Hall is out now