I never realised what a sex god and megastar Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is until I started mentioning to friends that he was coming to my house to give me a cookery lesson. Suddenly all sorts of people were unaccountably free on Wednesday afternoon and thought I might 'need a hand'; one of my daughters even volunteered to come and do the washing up! Then there was the strange harvest of kitchen implements that kept arriving on my doorstep - foodie friends had inspected my kitchen and found it sadly lacking in Hugh-worthy equipment so they each brought some favourite utensil, like pilgrims taking their rosaries to Rome to be blessed.

I should explain why he was coming. In my sixtieth year, I have started learning to cook for the first time in my life. I never needed to before because I was married from university to a brilliant cook who never even let me in the kitchen. When he died last year, I threw away most of his kitchen stuff and resolved to live on ready-made meals. But they did pall after a while, so I started reluc tantly opening cookery books. There was a Nigel Slater recipe for pak choi that kept me going for a while, and I even followed him into a pheasant, not entirely unsuccessfully. But like every other novice cook, I soon discovered that Delia was the one that worked; on the other hand, I often got so bored following her recipes and measuring fluid ounces (Hugh calls it 'cooking by numbers') that I couldn't be bothered to eat the stuff once it was cooked.

My learning curve seemed to be flattening when Nicola Jeal, the editor of OFM , mentioned my plight to Hugh and he very kindly volunteered to give me a lesson. He suggested I should look through his River Cottage Year to see what recipes might be appropriate for the season. Unfortunately most of them seemed to involve purple sprouting broccoli or bits of animals I hoped never to encounter. The one whose photograph entranced me was primrose and champagne jelly but then I reflected a) that it was not very versatile and b) I loathe jelly. I needed to learn something useful that I could live on all year. Friends kept pointing me at bits of road kill - 'Very clean cat in Dresden Road this morning, hardly squashed at all' - and actually I suppose I should have asked for a squirrel recipe and an air gun so I could be self-sufficient in protein and a hero to my neighbours, but in the end I opted for pancakes, to sighs of disappointment all round.

My foodie friends then went into fevered speculation about what sort of whisk Hugh would favour, in the course of which I learnt more about whisks than any sane person could wish to know. Apparently, there are labour-saving electrical whisks, slightly less labour- saving mechanical whisks where you have to turn a wheel, and plain whisks which come in several different shapes. The consensus was that Hugh would prefer a manly, non-labour-saving whisk, which was lucky because it was what I happened to have.

Meanwhile my editor thoughtfully sent round a bag of ingredients - plain flour, eggs, milk, sugar, lemons, toffees, red wine - which looked like a pretty revolting mixture to me until she explained the red wine was not intended for the pancakes but for refreshment. Actually Hugh, being an altogether good egg, arrived with a bottle of champagne.

He said he would show me how to make the batter and then we could talk while it 'rested'. 'Got a mixing bowl?' he asked. 'Er, not as such ,' I muttered, but I eventually produced a punch bowl that satisfied him. In the blinking of an eye, and without measuring anything or even mentioning fluid ounces, he poured a pile of flour into the bowl, and started whisking it with my manly whisk. This is in lieu of sieving it, he explains, because as he rightly supposes I don't have a sieve and anyway whisking is almost as good. Actually, he confides, it is quite a novelty for him making pancakes because at home in Dorset his wife, Marie, insists on doing them. 'She is French and the one way in which she asserts her cultural superiority is in the making of pancakes - she says I don't understand what a pancake is meant to be. So in order not to have too much comparison, I tend to make the little Scottish ones, drop scones. But for you I will make a normal pancake as best I can.'

He piles the flour into a volcano shape in the middle of the bowl, breaks three eggs into the crater, and then starts adding milk, saying some people use half milk, half water but he prefers all milk. 'My recipe is basically 250 grams flour, three eggs, and as much milk as it takes to get a paint-like consistency, then dribble in a bit of melted butter to give it a little richness, and a pinch of salt.' He urges me to have a go at whisking - it is incredibly tiring so I soon give up, and he concedes that there is nothing wrong with using an electric whisk, in fact his wife uses one, but he quite likes the exercise.

'Now I'll just add about 50 grams of melted butter - just a gesture really - which isn't in a lot of recipes but it is in some French ones. Do you have a saucepan?' 'Of course I do,' I say huffily, and then watch with bemusement while he switches on the gas ring and fills the kitchen with gas. 'It doesn't seem to light,' he remarks after a bit. 'Well, you haven't put a match to it,' I tell him. 'Oh, you use a match, do you?'(Duh!) So then he lights the gas, melts the butter and adds it to the mix, whisking all the while. 'Now,' he says, 'we must leave it for half an hour, because whenever you add liquid to flour, you should let it rest.'

I am ready for a rest myself - five minutes whisking and a near-gassing is quite enough excitement for one day - so then we get stuck into the champagne and chat about his strange career. He is 39, and comes from a long line of clergymen and lawyers but his father broke the mould by going into advertising, and then 'down-shifting' and moving to the country when Hugh was about five. Hugh was sent to boarding prep school and then Eton, following his father and grandfather, but says he can't see himself sending his sons (Oscar, five, and Freddy, one) to Eton and there is no way he would send them to boarding school at eight.

His mother started him cooking very young, just to keep him occupied on rainy days. 'But I got relatively sophisticated quite quickly and, once I could read, I would read my mother's recipe books. To begin with, it was all puddings and cakes and sweets, and I would make fudge, toffee, nougat. Then I worked out how to dip them in chocolate so I used to make these elaborate boxes of chocolates and sell them to my parents' friends.' By 11 or 12 he was making fudge ice cream and selling it at £10 a pint - 'I made a bit of pocket money doing that, definitely'.

He did a lot of cooking for his friends at Eton, and again at Oxford where he started reading theology but quickly got depressed - 'It was real Bible bashing' - and switched to philosophy and psychology. He still had no idea what he would do for a living, but he thought he might like wildlife conservation so he went to Africa and travelled round all the southern game reserves, learning useful skills like how to marinate ostrich in Coca-Cola and wart hog in Bovril. But unfortunately he was repelled by the internecine rivalry of conservation politics - 'people who ought to be on the same side constantly squabbling with each other' - so that idea petered out.

He was back in England, jobless, at 24. A friend who was waitressing at the River Café said Ruth Rogers and Rose Gray were looking for kitchen staff, so he went to see them, cooked them a lemon tart, and they said he could start work the next day. 'I think they could see straight away that I was very passionate, quite well informed, and ready to learn, although I'd had no formal training.' He loved his time at the River Café, and still sounds wistful talking about it, but unfortunately he was sacked after eight months.

'It was the absolute heyday of the River Café, three months' waiting list, and a tremendously good vibe. It was the most talked-about restaurant in London, and the greatest place to work. The restaurant was not allowed to stay open after 11pm - financially a problem, added to which at 11 we, the staff, would crack open the prosecco, have the most wonderful dinner, and stay there till one or two in the morning. That culture suddenly came to an end and there were rumours that there were going to be staff cuts. I rather arrogantly thought that I was not in jeopardy. I knew very well that I didn't have the speed, skill, discipline or tidiness of my fellow chefs, but I was very fond of Rose, who was looking after me, and I thought of myself as the indulged one who fitted in because I understood the food and shared the passion. So it came as a terrible shock when I was told "someone's got to go and I'm afraid it's you". I'd probably just been having too good a time. I wasn't a slacker and I didn't get drunk on the job but I just wasn't up to speed really.'

This was a mortal blow because he had begun to harbour fantasies of being the next Marco Pierre White. 'So then I had to face up to the stark reality that River Café was clearly the most relaxed kitchen in the whole of London, and the alternative kitchen culture one kept hearing about was the Michelin-starred hothouse with young chefs working absurd hours, and being branded with frying pans and having knives thrown at them, and I just thought "well, if you can't hack it in the River Café, you're never going to hack it under some megalomaniac monster who's looking for his third Michelin star with a meat cleaver in his hand".'

He went off to Provence to lick his wounds and to cook for the food writer Quentin Crewe while he decided what to do next. He realised that even if he couldn't be a chef, he could write about food, so he came back and started freelancing, for Punch, the Evening Standard , the Sunday Times. (He is still fondly remembered by some editors for his startling chutzpah in demanding top dollar fees while still completely unknown.) He wrote a book called Cuisine Bonne Marché, which he now describes as 'confused' but it led to his first television appearance on Channel 4's Food File. He had to talk about offal in Smithfield Market while butchers threw chops at him - not in jest either, he claims, they probably sussed him as a toff. Anyway it got him a commission to make his first Channel 4 series, A Cook on the Wild Side, in which he drove around Britain picking up roadkill and eating the hedgerows, which earned him his nickname of Hugh Fearlessly-Eatsitall.

I wondered whether he gave any thought to his appearance when he started doing television? 'No, not at all. I always had a slight vanity thing about my hair which was, when I was quite lean and fit and at my fighting weight, short, but if I started getting a bit jowly, I liked having longer hair to hide it. And for the past 10 years I've just been getting jowlier and jowlier so I never think I'd like to have short hair.' The problem nowadays, he says, is getting his hair cut discreetly so that it doesn't break the continuity, but he has found a barber in Bridport who will take an inch off all round without any attempt at 'styling'. Unlike most television presenters, he is genuinely unbothered about his image.

His fame or infamy increased a hundred fold in 1998 when he cooked a human placenta on TV Dinners . He made it into a pâté that was much enjoyed by the baby's family and friends. But it caused huge outrage in Daily Mail -reading circles who seemed to equate it with cannibalism (I don't know why, nor does he) and he got fed up with being known as the Man Who Cooked the Placenta. 'I still think it was a good programme, but for a long time it overshadowed everything else I did.'

It was River Cottage that saved him, the four-part television series he made there and the River Cottage Cookbook which won every award going. He started as a part-timer, renting a weekend cottage in Dorset with some friends, but then moved into River Cottage and started growing vegetables and raising livestock and filming their progress from field or garden to plate. One particularly memorable one showed him feeding his pigs, calling them by name (one was Delia), petting and tickling them - and then taking them to the abattoir and making them into hams and bacon and salami. Again, it caused outrage among the squeamish, but this was exactly the point he wanted to make - food does not drop from the sky magically clingfilmed on to supermarket shelves - it has to be grown or raised and how this is done has much to do with its ultimate taste.

He was very happy living and filming at River Cottage but his wife never liked having cameras around. So three years ago they bought a 40-acre farm a few miles away, and gave up the cottage. For his next television series, he is making a new base - converting a nearby dairy barn into a sort of community food venue where he can grow vegetables and team up with local food producers. He is determined to stay in the country because 'it gives a much longer-term perspective to the cooking. You can be in the kitchen rustling up some pancakes and then you're going out and dealing with an animal that you're not going to eat for a year and yet it's all laid down, like good wine, and basically most of what I'm going to eat in the next year is growing or living around me. That is quite satisfying and I can't imagine breaking out of that now into a more urban way of eating.'

He still comes to London a couple of days a month because he is co-owner of a television production company, Keo Films, which produces not only him but adventure programmes such as Extreme Weather. And, of course, he still has many friends in London. But going to dinner with them is always a bit tricky because, he admits, he can't stop interfering. 'It happened again last night. I went round to dinner with my partner and I was suddenly saying "why don't you put a bit of that in?" It is a sort of bizarre compulsion, very, very hard to control. I struggle not to be a tyrant in the kitchen, but I interfere with other people's cooking and my wife finds that annoying, understandably. I wish I could be more disciplined so that I don't stifle her cooking. I wish I could go back in time and somehow have been less of a bully in the kitchen.'

'Well, you let her cook pancakes,' I tell him, and then we both gasp with horror - the batter has been resting so long it has probably gone into a coma. In truth, it does look a bit blue but it revives when he whisks it. Much to my delight, he chooses my non-stick frying pan in preference to all the borrowed stainless steel ones, and says it's the best because it's the biggest, though the ideal pancake pan should have a very low lip. First thing he says is to get the oil really hot - sunflower oil, not olive - then use some kitchen paper to wipe most of it away till there is just the merest smear on the surface. Then pour in a ladleful of batter, and tilt it round so it fills the pan. He pronounces the batter good because it produces speckly pancakes 'that lovely lacey pattern means you've got the right amount of butter and egg. If the pancake is uniformly brown it means you haven't got enough egg. I heard someone on the radio saying, as if it was beyond dispute, that the lacey side was the pretty side that should always be served up, but for me I've always liked the spotty side more.'

Now for the toppings. 'Do you like very gooey, greedy things? he asks, 'because I'm going to make a toffee sauce.' This consists of opening a packet of toffees (should be Callard and Bowser), putting them in a saucepan with enough milk to cover them and slowly heating them till they melt. Then, he says, slice some bananas on to the pancake and cover with toffee sauce. Oops, no bananas, but luckily the photographer has arrived so he is sent to the shop, while Hugh discusses the knotty question of folding versus rolling. His wife, he says, being French, thinks pancakes should be folded into a sort of triangle shape, and eaten from the top to catch all the juices in the bottom, but he prefers rolling.

By now we have stacks of pancakes and it is my go. Hugh says he will try not to interfere but of course he does: 'start tilting the pan, now start pushing at the edges to loosen it, now toss and... Oh well, try again.' After 10 minutes or so, I am catching almost as many pancakes as I toss - the ideal movement seems to be a sort of fierce shove forwards though they never land flat like Hugh's. But anyway they all taste good, and what with the photographer slicing bananas, Hugh administering toffee sauce, and me remembering some ice cream in the fridge, we manage to have an absolute pancake orgy - though I still think sugar and lemon is the best topping.

Suddenly Hugh remembers his train and says he must dash - with any luck, there will be supper waiting for him at home. Doesn't he ever get sick of cooking? 'No, I never get sick of it. I never start cooking and think "oh why did I bother, it's such a bore?". Once I'm up and running, it's always a nice thing to do. It's just my thing; it's something I feel comfortable, competent and relaxed doing - it's a stress-free time.' I wish I could say the same. I had a merry evening after Hugh left, chucking pancakes round the kitchen, but the next day, after I cleared up the mess, I thought maybe it would have been easier to cook the Dresden Road cat after all.

Hugh's regular column returns next month