MY LIFE IN FOOD: TV presenter and author Dan Jones By Tom Parker Bowles For You Magazine Published: 08:00, 28 September 2024 | Updated: 08:00, 28 September 2024 e-mail View comments My first food memory is me being an incredibly picky child, only eating raw cucumber, raw carrot, corned beef, which will age me slightly, and Bovril sandwiches. It was all unbelievably salty: beef and raw-vegetable based. When I was young my dad worked a lot so my mum cooked.
She wasn’t keen but she could provide children’s dinners. As we got older I saw my dad a lot more because he started working for himself. He’s an extremely good, self-taught cook, so there was a kind of transition when I became a teenager, where he would do most of the adventurous cooking.
He still does. My father has a library of cookbooks and would run through national cuisines. He’d have a Greek phase, an Italian phase.
He liked ‘project’ cooking. When I was about ten we would pick mushrooms on autumn Saturday mornings while walking the dogs on Kirtlington Park polo fields in Oxfordshire. I remember the house smelling of mushroom soup afterwards, something I disliked intensely.
But my father was proud of, and also confident in, his mushroom knowledge. He knew that he wasn’t going to ‘ Phantom Thread ’ us and poison the whole house. Potato smileys were a staple at secondary school and there was a competition to discover who could eat the most.
I think I clocked 41 one day. Dan loved visiting Tokyo’s old.
