Appetite: A Memoir in Recipes of Family and Food

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But these recipes at the close of his chapters are moving – testimony to a time when mothers knew how to cook, and did, and fathers liked food plain rather than fancy, even though his parents had lived in the US with Balls senior’s job as an academic, and were later to spend time in Italy.

Witty, reflective and engaging Ed Balls peels back the politicians' thick skin (and smashes their protective shell) to reveal that underneath lie real-life human beings. When Peter Mandelson invited the young Balls to his flat to plot his future political career, he served just a soup and a salad. He’s dealing with the hard-left infiltration and the antisemitism, the disconnect that happened after the Brexit referendum. After reading this book though I don’t feel as if I know him any better as there’s nothing very detailed. I haven’t actually tried his revolutionary sounding sponge cake which uses double cream rather than butter; let’s keep an open mind here.Ed is around the same age as me - just a year older - and we share a number of similar memories of childhood in the 1970s. I’ve saved some of the recipes to try: including the baked chocolate mousse, the custard (I’ve never actually made custard from scratch, so when it comes around to apple picking time I might make a crumble and serve it with homemade custard, instead of my usual extra thick double cream.

This is more like Yvette’s kitchen,” he adds, throwing his wife, Yvette Cooper MP, under the slovenly bus.Pleasantly surprised by this sweet bio, which combines a rather readable account of EB's time in Parliament and his upbringing with the dishes that defined each time of his life along the way. I was moved to tears several times, especially when the author talked about his lovely relationship with his parents and his mum's fight with dementia. Then last summer, after Covid torpedoed a documentary he planned to make about Trump’s America, he entered – and won – the BBC’s Celebrity Best Home Cook, beating a group including the comedian Ed Byrne and Rachel Johnson, journalist and sister of Boris, for the approval of Mary Berry.