I have filthy habits. They’re not unusual habits, or even unusually filthy. You probably have them too. But in the right environment, they can look so terribly, terribly wrong. That environment is a TV studio. Recently, for reasons I must for the moment remain coy about, I found myself cooking against the clock before a phalanx of TV cameras. I should have been focused solely on the tasks at hand. Instead, the words banging around inside my head were: whatever you do don’t lick your fingers. And don’t lick that spoon you’re stirring the pot with. And for god’s sake wash your hands after handling ingredients.

At home, that voice is never in my head. I break all these rules while cooking, and more. While I know newspaper columnists often mistakenly think they are merely giving voice to something that is a shared experience when it really isn’t, on this I’m sure I’m in very good and very extensive company. The fact is, home cooks are not the same as the people who get paid for it, and hooray for that. Professional kitchens have important personal hygiene rules, and 19 different colour-coded plastic chopping boards. In those places it’s a new spoon every time. Or, at least, it should be.

In the domestic realm we double dip. And triple dip. And lick again. Here, taste this, we say, proffering the edge of the mixing spoon we ourselves licked only a moment before. We don’t even think about it. Or at least, I don’t. Once, during lockdown, I cooked a dish from the Gavroche cookbook, supervised via Facetime by the great Michel Roux Jnr. As I was enriching the bechamel for the souffle suisse I heard him bark, “Oi chef, did you just lick your fingers?” I felt like an adolescent boy who’d just been caught being, well, very much an adolescent boy. I’d been caught in my own damn kitchen.

Fastidiousness around food is unsurprisingly personal. Not long ago, for example, the media was filled with images of people blowing out birthday cake candles. They were illustrating reports of advice from the head of the Food Standards Agency that bringing cakes into the office to share with colleagues was an unhealthy practice which should be stopped.

A friend of mine told me that all she could see in those pictures was people spitting on a cake that was to be shared with others. Whereas I just saw images of a jolly celebration. Another friend told me they were increasingly repulsed by the vogue for “sharing plates”, because it meant your dining companion’s saliva-slicked cutlery was interfering with the chargrilled tenderstem and such like.

It is, I think, all to do with context. Or to put it another way, nuzzling your lover’s sweet-smelling, newly washed hair can be a lovely thing. But if you found a strand of that hair in your soup you’d be disgusted. The domestic realm is where we share so much with our loved ones, including terrible in-jokes, towels and, yes, mixing spoons. We just don’t want to be seen doing it.

I’m happy to say that I got through the TV shoot without licking my fingers or double dipping. But at the end, with time very tight, I started plating the elements of the dish with my hands. To be fair, if only to me, it’s not unusual to see head chefs do exactly that in restaurant kitchens. Not that it saved me from a terse interrogation. “Using your fingers, I see,” said the presenter, wryly. “I know where they’ve been,” I replied. It really was all I had. But yes, I had remembered to wash them first. Phew, eh.