Tea at Fortnum’s Fountain

The food you experience in childhood always remains the food you return to for succour and comfort. Obviously I am not referring to school food here. Things like the pudding we christened ‘Purple Puke’ that we imagined grew under the school quad and Manchester tart, which was a heinous concoction of grey margarined pastry, turnip jam, cornfloury custard and a dusting of toenails on top, the hideous, desiccated coconut flakes that stuck in teeth and craw.

But those earliest taste memories are really not about expensive, luxurious ingredients. They are about the simplest of things that make home seem like home: eggy bread for breakfast with a lacey frill of egg around the more squelchy, golden middle; airy puffballs of Yorkshire pudding with bloody gravy from the beef sogging into them on the plate; the first sweet peas from the garden drowning in cream and butter and mint; crumpets with far too much butter; soggy fat chips doused in watered down malt vinegar and salt from the chip shop where I changed buses on the way home from school; vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce poured on top that sets as you watch it like ice on a pond, the ice cream turning to milky liquid; doughnuts with a burst of jam, doughy-middled and crisp skinned, the sugar gritting your mouth and teeth.