When the word came down that I was to lunch Ed Balls at the Moo Cafe at Farmer Copleys in Purston, near Pontefract, I was delirious with happiness. For one thing, there was the comedy value of the phrase "meet me at the Moo Cafe", especially when placed next to the words "Ed" and "Balls". For another, there was the fact that, according to the Farmer Copley's website, one of its attractions is a fiendishly tricky corn maze. For almost a fortnight, I was sustained through every work crisis by a delightful vision of me chasing the shadow chancellor briskly around this leafy labyrinth as I shouted questions about growth theory and the best way to braise a pheasant (Balls is, or so we are led to believe, the nearest thing politics has to a foodie right now).

Alas, now the day has dawned, I find that the maze is closed for the winter, and I will have to waste a gift of a metaphor. But on the plus side, the Moo Cafe, which perches on the edge of his Morley constituency, is much better than its name. I'm having haddock, fresh from Whitby this morning, in a mornay sauce with crushed rosemary potatoes and peas, and it's delicious. Balls, meanwhile, is having a handsome-looking pie with mushy peas, and mint sauce. Also, a man-of-the-people cup of tea. "These pies are fantastic," he says. "They sell them frozen in the shop. You should buy one and take it home, though the thing to do is to buy extra gravy. You do need the extra gravy." Hmm. I don't think it would be wise to attempt to transport frozen goods back to London. "You'll be fine," he says. "There's no way it will thaw out in that time." I point helplessly to my shopping bag, which is already full of liquorice (we are in Pontefract, after all), a couple of Mrs Botham's excellent cakes (also from Whitby), a box of duck eggs, and two bags of brandy snaps from Wright & Co of Brighouse, Leeds. "Honestly," he says, exasperation at the edges of his voice. "You will be FINE. Just buy one." Poor Ed. The defrosting of pies, the double-dip recession; if only people would listen.

Is the Moo Cafe a regular haunt? "I've been coming here for a decade," he says. "It started as a tiny building with a butcher's counter. Since then, it has expanded regularly. I visit the farm shop every week. The beef is all their own, and it is fabulous. I've never had a better piece of roast beef. Sirloin. Roast it flat, not rolled. A bit of mustard on top, Yorkshire puddings. You need a good tin for those. My in-laws have a caravan on the edge of Windermere. On wet days we go into Bowness and visit Lakeland, which is a treasure trove. I bought a special deep tin for Yorkshires there." Not that it will last: Balls gets through tins faster than a special adviser through BlackBerrys. "There's this mythology about tins, that they get better over time. Mine die after about a year."

This thing for cooking: is it a new interest, or an old one? And why is he suddenly so keen to talk about it? Is it just a way of making himself seem nicer? "I started at about nine or 10," he says, completely ignoring the part of the question about his image. "It was quite furtive. I used to do it while everyone was out. The first book I used was Mrs Beeton: she had a one-egg omelette for invalids, so I did that. Then there was cubs and scouts, where I did the cooking badge." At Oxford, he lived in college for all three years of his degree – a perk of being president of the junior common room – so he wasn't able, unlike the rest of us, to devote every evening to concocting a variation on a theme of pasta-tuna-slop. But things perked up when he moved to edgy Dalston, in east London, where he and the woman who would later become his wife (Yvette Cooper, whose constituency we're now sitting in) rented a house. "That was when I really got into cooking," he says. Not that he and Yvette stayed home every night, you understand. Among their haunts were the Turkish Mangal 1 Ocakbasi and – who knows why? – an Indian restaurant so awful "you knew the food had come straight from a warehouse in Bootle". It looked, he says, like a newsagent's with a table.

Is he the main cook at home? "Yes, Yvette doesn't really do any. I do the shopping and the cooking." Is she appreciative? "Ha! No, I sometimes think she is a bit blasé." Apparently, her father – Tony Cooper, a former leader of the engineering and science union Prospect – is also an excellent cook. "He always used to do Christmas. He's the kind of cook who plans for months for something like that. On one occasion, he served up this sorbet between courses. Supposedly, a cheese sorbet. We all ate it, thinking: what is this? A few months later, he called to say he'd found the sorbet in the freezer, so God knows what it was that we ate."

Being able to cook is, as he admits, a useful skill for a politician. He recently made a pie for a fellow MP to auction for charity. And what about the lasagne parties that he and Yvette held a year ago for 45 Westminster colleagues? Very smooth. Naturally, Balls is adamant that these gatherings didn't have a sinister side (sinister for Ed Miliband, I mean). On the other hand, no one can say that he didn't take them extremely seriously. When I wrote about them in my OFM column – lasagne, I noted, is the ultimate New Labour dish – he sent me a long and detailed email in which he provided full details of his lasagne recipe: if you're interested, it involves lean beef, chicken stock, carrots and dried oregano. "Yes," he says. "And when my email arrived, did you think: 'Oh, my gosh, here's a mad person', or did you realise it was me?" No, I realised it was you straight away, I say – which is true. The control freakery seemed entirely authentic, and also, he failed to reply to my reply, in which I told him that lean mince doesn't have any taste. His eyes widen, all innocence. "Didn't I reply? That's odd."

He also cooks in his constituency. There is a delivery day, when local party workers shove leaflets through letterboxes in exchange for lunch. Last time he did spaghetti bolognese. The annual Morley Labour dinner, meanwhile, is attended by about 90 people. "Last year, I did this chorizo and black bean casserole from the Leon cookbook; you dump cabbage in at the end, and it's really good." There were a lot of onions to be chopped, but luckily, his assistant brought her own knives, the ones at the Labour club being so very blunt. Really? I say. You'd think they'd all be terribly sharp. But if Balls gets the joke, he's not showing it. Above the clatter of cutlery, I hear the rasp of the Yorkshire equivalent of tumbleweed – a giant stick of rhubarb? – blowing across our table.

We order pudding: a slice of trembling speckled-with-nutmeg egg custard each. Is cooking going to be a part of his future? When it all goes wrong in politics is he going to bag himself a berth on Celebrity MasterChef? Or perhaps he secretly longs to open a restaurant? "The thing about politics is to plan 10 years ahead, and assume every year is your last," he says, Confucius-like and smiling. (He's quite scary when he smiles.) "I would love to go on MasterChef. But while I really like cooking, I'm doubtful anyone would ever want to pay for what I'd cooked." He puts down his spoon. "We should have gone for sushi or something," he says, arranging his tie to hide a splattering of gravy. "I'm quite sure this food is just reinforcing all sorts of stereotypes about me."

What on earth does he mean? I assume he is acknowledging that most people think of him as Labour's bruiser, pies and custard tarts being just the thing to fuel a little internecine war. But on the train back to London, I see that this is unfair – or at least it is to the Moo Cafe, where the food, I have to say, is generous, honest and, above all, unexpectedly good.