Many fine European grapes have been marginalised by the most popular varieties like chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. It's time to rediscover them

For 30 years or more, from the 1970s to the beginning of this century, the invasion seemed unstoppable. Everywhere you went in the wine world, old stocks of vines, many unique to their area, were ripped up and replaced by a handful of what became international varieties. The big five – chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, cabernet sauvignon, merlot and shiraz/syrah – were the most aggressive, sweeping through vineyards.

When the winemakers of California set out to challenge on the world stage in the second half of the 20th century, they fixed their eyes on the country perceived to be the best at making the stuff: France. So they planted varieties from the top French regions – most notably Burgundy's chardonnay and Bordeaux's cabernet and merlot – and, rather than focusing on the region, as Europeans had done, displayed the names of varieties prominently on their labels. As sales from California and then the rest of the New World took off, and as punters began asking for wines by grape variety, struggling growers from the Old World began to follow suit.

The trouble, these producers believed, was that the magical effect on sales only really worked for that handful of varieties. If you were Portuguese, and you wanted to make one of these newfangled varietal wines, there was no point using fernão pires or bastardo since nobody outside your region had ever heard of them. Far better to go with the flow and plant chardonnay or cabernet, even if they weren't all that comfortable in the local climate and soil. At least buyers would spot something they recognised.

Slowly a backlash developed: in Europe, advocating native varieties became radically chic, the use of near-extinct grape varieties such as the Loire's romorantin an act of resistance. Pragmatism also played a role: if you were a new producer in New Zealand, you might have a better chance of making a splash in a small pond of grüner veltliners than in the more crowded one containing thousands of sauvignon blancs.

The result is that vine diversity is healthier than it has been in decades. The big five still dominate (sauvignon and chardonnay, either on their own or as part of a blend, account for more than 260 wines on Tesco.com, the next biggest white grape, sémillon, has just 37)but the list of well-made alternatives has expanded rapidly.

The best varieties have their own distinct character. If you like the weight, clarity and complexity of good chardonnay, you'll love the great white Galician hope, godello. Fans of cabernet may feel an affinity for the sturdy structure and perfumed, dark fruit in Portugal's touriga nacional. Sauvignon blanc lovers can find their verdant refreshment in Mediterranean vermentino, and more tropical tones in the gros manseng of southwest France. Syrah/shiraz drinkers can get some of its peppery spiciness in Austrian zweigelt ; and many examples of the Sicilian nerello mascalese have something in their fragrance and texture that brings to mind pinot noir.

Of course, obscurity is no more reliable an indication of quality than popularity. But while many rarities may not be capable of the same levels of greatness as the best wines made from international varieties, I'd rather have a good example of bastardo than yet another mediocre, bastardised cabernet.

Six of the best local grapes

St Tamas Mád Dry Furmint Tokaji, Hungary 2012
(from £13.99, The Solent Cellar; Worth Brothers)
Furmint, best-known for its role in the classic sweet wines of Tokaji, also makes for some excellent, dry (in this case just off-dry) whites in Hungary's vastly improved post-Communist wine scene, as this headily peachy, rich but fluent example proves.

Vesevo Beneventano Aglianico, Campania Italy 2010
(from £10.45, Liberty WinesRannoch Scott Wines; Nickolls & Perks; Valvona & Crolla)
Though the variety is only just starting to creep into UK supermarkets, aglianico is highly regarded in Italy, where the paradoxical mix of structural heft and aromatic refinement in wines like this draws approving comparisons with the much pricier reds made from nebbiolo at the opposite end of the country in Barolo.

Luis Pato Vinhas Velhas Tinto, Bairrada, Portugal 2010
(£19.95, Corks Out; Philglas & Swiggot)
Portugal is second only to Italy for diversity of native varieties, and Baga, from the central region of Bairrada, is one of several now showing its potential. It can be rough, tough and rustic, but in the skilled hands of Luis Pato, this red is pinot noir-like in its cherry-scented silkiness.

Domaine du Cros Lo Sang del Pais, Marcillac, France
2012 (From £7.95, Les Caves de Pyrene; The Wine Society; Corks of Cotham; Joseph Barnes; Bottle Apostle)
The fragmented patchwork of appellations in France's southwest is home to an electic range of varieties rarely seen elsewhere in the world. From the tiny Marcillac appellation, this red uses mansois (aka fer servadou) for a crunchy, spicy red-fruited thirst-quencher.

Semeli Feast White Moscofiliero, Greece 2012
(£8.50, Oddbins)
Another trove of the indigenous, Greek wine has never quite caught on in the UK. But wines such as this evocatively aromatic dry white made from moscofiliero, with its notes of white flowers and exotic fruit and its crisp, zesty palate, is a good alternative to sauvignon blanc.

Prince Stirbey Tamaiosa Romaneasca Sec, Romania 2012
(£9.50, The Wine Society)
According to the Wine Society, the Romanian native tamaiosa romanesca is part of the muscat family of grapes, and, with its floral-grapey lift and subtle pink grapefruit tang, this distinctive dry white is comparable in quality to dry muscats from Alsace.

From PG Wodehouse and Churchill to Lily Allen, the British have long been obsessed with pigs. Here, four owners explain the attraction

According to the encyclopedia, the pig is "of the genus Sus, within the suidae family of even-toed ungulates". That sounds pretty close to the last word. However, once you've met a few English pig-people you realise that it barely scratches the surface. We're talking obsession here in pig world. George Clooney keeps a pig, as do Paris Hilton and Lily Allen, but it's not until you encounter the Berkshire or the Middle White that you really begin to qualify as a friend of the English suidae family.

The English pig has pedigree in literature and if there is a prose poet of the pig, he must be PG Wodehouse. His Berkshire sow, the Empress of Blandings, made her debut in a 1927 story, Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey! After that there was no hope for the author of The Inimitable Jeeves. When Wodehouse lifts his pen to salute the Empress, he goes into another, more poetic dimension: "The Empress could have passed in a dim light for a captive balloon, fully inflated and about to make its trial trip."

To the outsider, these animals are just pigs. Step inside the pig pen, however, and you find, among the prize breeds, the Gloucester Old Spot, the Berkshire and the Tamworth, followed by the more commercial Middle White, the Large Black and the Large White. As a grownup pursuit, pig breeding falls somewhere between stud farming and bee-keeping in seriousness.

Sue Fildes (pronounced: Files) has a lovely hillside smallholding in Devon, overlooking the river Dart. She breeds Berkshires, and writes a column in Pig World. One of her sows, Dittisham Lady 36, won the Champion of Champions prize at the 2009 Newbury Show. Since her husband died six years ago, she has been alone with her pigs and attributes her wellbeing to their company.

Do pigs really make one feel better? "Ooh yeah!" she exclaims. "Pigs give you a purpose in life." It's more than just the pigs. "Pig people are the nicest in the world. So sociable and friendly. It's a wonderful experience to show a pig in competition." Fildes shows her prize pigs at West Country fairs. "Pig-keeping is infectious," she continues. Like Lord Emsworth, she keeps a shelf of pig manuals, though has never, she admits, read Emsworth's vade mecum, Whiffle on The Care of the Pig.

Sue Fildes watched a bit of this year's BBC Blandings series on TV, and can't get over the fact that, although the Empress is a Berkshire, the film-makers selected a massive Middle White sow (more than one, actually) to play the pig. "That was a bit of a scandal," she says. "It caused a lot of ill-feeling in the pig world."

"Ill-feeling" is not a mood pig people like to nurture for long. Inspired by their greedy, grunting, easygoing, bristly companions, they prefer to look on the bright side. "It's so very English to keep pigs," says Fildes. "If you have an acre or two of land, the first thing we all want to do is have a couple of pigs. Yes, the English dream is to have a pig. And if you have a pretty pig, it doesn't get better than that."

Just outside Arundel, West Sussex, lives Suzi Westron, whose prize Berkshire sow Louise won the Breed Champion trophy at the Great Yorkshire Show last month (Louise was formerly "Young Pig of the Year"). Westron got into pig-rearing by chance. She and her husband Stewart maintain a family dairy farm, and have to be careful with money. "I said to my husband," she remembers, "'Why don't we get a pig? Then we can eat it.'"

This was about 10 years ago. Soon after, she spotted a Berkshire sow at the Royal Show, and fell for it. "It was all about promoting the breed," she says. For the Westron family, it was win-win: "We had plenty of food in the freezer, plus we were keeping the Berkshires going." Westron is devoted to porcine and human welfare. She works nights at the hospital as a healthcare assistant, and keeps pigs by day. Now, at any one time, she will have up to 70 Berkshires in her yard. At first, she found it hard to send her pigs to the slaughterhouse. "When I sent off my first two, I cried my eyes out." There is, she says, something very amiable, contented and engaging about a pig. "They're chatty. Friendly. They do love a scratch. You feed them once a day, and they sit around like statues, adorning the landscape. We had a fellow who bought one of our pigs. His wife didn't see him for three months. He'd spend the whole day down at the sty."

Now the Westron family takes a more hard-nosed approach. "We're definitely running a meat paddock," she says. "I call it our piggy bank. I do love them, and I look after them. It's a good short life they have." Suzi, unlike many pig farmers, makes a point of accompanying her pigs to the slaughterhouse. "It's very quick," she says of the killing.

Her pigs are privileged, and free to rootle where they please. But in the mass market, the life of the pig is nasty, brutish and short. It's this cruelty that exercises Tracy, Marchioness of Worcester, who keeps two Kunekune pigs at home (just outside Badminton). Before her marriage to Harry Worcester, Tracy Louise Ward starred in Cat's Eyes and reached what she calls "the peak of my stage career" playing Miss Scarlett in Cluedo. Now, she's a committed member of the ecology movement, and says: "We are fighting against the corporatisation of agriculture, using the pig industry to highlight the issues." Tracy Worcester has made a campaigning video, Pig Business, an exposé of factory farming in the US and EU. Currently, she is leading the campaign against a 25,000-pig factory farm in the village of Foston, Derbyshire. She is passionate about pig welfare. "My pigs are free to roam, but the sow in the cage is suffering." She reels off a catalogue of atrocities, from conditions in factory farms, to the horrors of the slaughterhouse. She likes pork, but says she doesn't want to eat an animal that has felt pain in this way.

Encouragingly, she believes that, with a few glaring exceptions, pigs in Britain are farmed humanely. "Buying British is the first step. Things are better here." We go out to feed Ping and Pong, her Kunekune which are rooting about in a walled garden. The moment they see the bucket of kitchen waste their low-key, contented grunting becomes a high-pitched squeal of excitement. As she tips out the organic swill, Worcester describes the pig industry's misguided quest for a "Frankenstein monster" pig that will yield three or four more piglets per annum, and generate more pork and bacon. Stressed pigs, she concludes, "don't taste as good".

Which brings us to the pig on your plate. Rare breed pork tastes better, with a fuller flavour than commercially produced pork, and the qualities of the Berkshire are renowned. Mrs Beeton described it as "the most esteemed of our English domestic breeds". For a while, the Rare Breeds Survival Trust classified the Berkshire as "vulnerable". Not any more. Berkshire breeders refer with satisfaction to "the Emsworth paradox" – eager consumption of rare pork in restaurants sponsors the breed's survival. Pork's route to the plate, though, is not without its anxieties, even among smallholders.

Zam Baring, a TV producer who has worked with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, keeps a Middle White named Suzie. He admits to an Emsworth-style relationship with his sow. Baring says Suzie is "intelligent, with a sense of humour. I think she knows who I am. Yes, I like to stroke or tickle her. She makes a special snorting sound that I like." But as food? "No, I don't think I could eat her."

And yet it's the homegrown black pudding, the wind-dried ham, salami, pancetta and pork shoulder he gets from Suzie's litters that excites Baring's special interest. Finally, an irony of pig-loving, there's something about a pig that allows us to bring him into the food chain. It's as if the animal acquiesces in its fate, with stoic equanimity. Baring says, quoting Winston Churchill, one of many celebrity pig men: "The cat looks down at humans. The dog looks up. But the pig looks you in the eye." In the peculiar hierarchy of English life, the pig is our equal, the companion to the Common Man. OFM

Opening a restaurant is hard enough without complications. But when you are in a couple, and one of you nearly dies … Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick talk about love, life, good food and broken bones

Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick first met in the kitchens at the Connaught hotel in London in 2002 where she was head chef and he was there as a willing junior. He was only meant to be there for a couple of weeks. In the end, he stayed for the best part of four years.

"She fancied me," Borthwick says by way of explanation.

Hartnett rolls her eyes. "I'm saying nothing," she replies. "I was professional to the end."

Hartnett, 44, went on to open the Michelin-starred Murano in Mayfair and start a mini-empire in the mould of her one-time mentor, Gordon Ramsay. More recently, she launched the restaurant at the Lime Wood hotel in Hampshire, and is planning a new restaurant on the site of the old Petrus in St James Street, but on 1 October will open the Merchant's Tavern in a former Victorian warehouse in Shoreditch. The head chef? None other than her 32-year-old boyfriend.

"Essentially, it's Neil's restaurant," Hartnett explains when we meet in Murano. The interior is exquisitely decorated in shades of muted grey and green. Today, they are seated on the sort of padded leather banquette one imagines was made from the skin of ostriches bathed in champagne. Both are wearing chef's whites – but only Hartnett's are embroidered with her name in blue cursive.

"It's the same as what Gordon did with me and Jason [Atherton] and Marcus [Wareing]," she continues. "They will write the menus and I will influence them because my name's attached to it … but it's Neil's name above the door."

Borthwick has his own impressive pedigree. He was born and raised in Falkirk and started working in the bar of a local hotel at the age of 14. He went to catering college in Glasgow, got his first job in Gordon Ramsay's Amaryllis and, after his stint at the Connaught, took off to France for three years to work for Michel Bras in Laguiole where he was taught the precise, inventive cuisine that has made Restaurant Bras into one of the top gastronomic destinations in the world.

Borthwick worked his way up to sous chef. He says he loved the work-life balance in France and became fluent in the language: Hartnett used to visit him as a friend for long weekends to sample the local restaurants, taking advantage of his French to order the best things off the menu.

Bras wanted him to move to Japan to be head chef at his restaurant there but Borthwick felt "it would just be doing his food again and I thought it would be a long way away." By this stage, he and Hartnett were a couple. He returned to the UK and got a job at the Square, under Philip Howard, just down the road from Murano. Soon, the two of them were living together in Hartnett's house in Spitalfields.

Despite the hours and brutal pace of life as a top chef, they make an affectionate couple who seem to like nothing more than teasing each other. When I ask Borthwick to say something romantic, he looks mildly taken aback.

"Angela makes a lovely bowl of pasta," he says. "Is that romantic?"

Their interests are complementary – she's an Arsenal fan, he supports Spurs – and they have the same taste in food.

The modern European menu at the Merchant's Tavern will reflect this unfussy approach. "As much as I've worked in three-Michelin starred places where things have to be exact, I'm not going to shout about something if it doesn't look perfect," says Borthwick, "because it doesn't taste any better."

But what if he does something wrong? Isn't it going to be hard for Hartnett to tell off her boyfriend?

"The chances of that are minimal," jokes Borthwick. "Very minimal, obviously," Hartnett says drily. "You have to have ways of doing things ... [but] I'd pull Neil aside and say, 'By the way, this isn't quite right.'"

She cracks her fingers menacingly. Borthwick doesn't seem remotely perturbed. "It's like Alan Sugar on The Apprentice," he says. "The entrepreneurs would be mad not to take the constructive advice."

They both laugh.

The most extraordinary thing about their story is that it almost had a very different ending. One night last November, Hartnett was woken by two policemen knocking on her door at 1.30am. They told her Borthwick had been in a cycling accident and was now at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel. The police had his phone and her number was the last one called.

The police were able to tell Hartnett that her boyfriend was alive but, other than that, they had no further details. In the grip of shock, she remembers making small talk about the policemen's shoes, "because you do, don't you?"

When Hartnett got to the hospital, she found Borthwick in an induced coma and a team of neurosurgeons trying to ascertain what damage had been done to his brain. "They couldn't answer any questions," she says now. Those first few days of uncertainty were, she admits, "horrible".

"The first feeling is shock," she says. "I've never experienced anything like this. My father died when I was young [Hartnett was eight], my grandmother died but I've never had someone physically ill like that in front of you."

"My brother said: 'You're very calm,' and I said: 'This is the easy bit. The hard bit will be when he comes out and can't move his legs or taste anything.'"

Borthwick can't remember the specifics of what happened. He recalls the day leading up to it – he had been out for a lunch with friends, then went home to pick up his bike to meet another mate in the evening. He was only going a short distance and for some reason he didn't wear his helmet or his cycling kit. It was on City Road, a few minutes from their house, that the accident happened. Witnesses said they saw the bike "wobble". Borthwick thinks his feet might have slipped on the pedals. He fell awkwardly.

Borthwick suffered what the doctors described as "a severe knock to the head" which doesn't quite seem to do justice to the seriousness of the injury. Hartnett talks about it like an internal bruise: "When you bruise yourself, the bruise expands. But if it's in your head, the bruise has nowhere to go."

At one point, a female surgeon described Borthwick's brain to her as "like a crème brûlée". It was only later that her colleagues pointed out she'd been talking to a Michelin-starred chef.

"People slag off the NHS but you can't imagine how faultless they were," Hartnett says. "If a restaurant could run like a high impact unit it would be staggering. Neil had 24-hour care."

Borthwick was kept in a coma for five days, "basically," he explains, "on the same drugs that Michael Jackson had paid his doctor to give him."

He had weird dreams, involving a bet he'd failed to place on the outcome of the Ryder Cup, but even when he was unconscious, he retained his fine-dining palate. Borthwick kept trying to remove his intravenous drip so the nurses ended up covering his hands in what looked like a giant pair of oven gloves.

During that time, Hartnett set up a blog to keep friends and family updated on his progress. It was easier, she says, than answering the hundreds of texts individually and it meant that Borthwick's friends could post things, too – among them Michel Bras.

When Borthwick finally came round, doctors were astonished at his rapid recovery. From the neck down, he had sustained no other injuries. He immediately recognised people. Within 15 days, he was speaking fluent French and craving grilled cauliflower and turbot. The hospital food was supplemented by deliveries from London's finest restaurants: a chef friend sent him a plate of roast goose; his boss Phil Howard came with a plate of broccoli and vegetables.

"Neil was lucky," says Hartnett. "He was young and fit and had no other injuries, which was incredible."

Also, because he landed on the left side of his head, he found he could still perform tasks with his right hand without too much bother. He was home by Christmas.

But it wasn't all plain sailing. Borthwick had an operation to drill a hole in his skull in order to release the pressure. Six weeks ago, he had a second procedure: major cranioplastic surgery to put a plate in his skull. The plate was constructed of methacrylic resin moulded to the shape of his head and was fitted with titanium screws.

"It was made in Italy," Borthwick says with pride. "It's actually quite a nice shape. I'm going to make the spare one into a bowl for Twiglets in Charlotte Road." He's joking. I think.

In the aftermath of the accident, he was relieved to find that his palate wasn't affected but the motor skills in his left hand were still weak. For a while, Borthwick was worried he wouldn't be able to cook with his customary precision and delicacy. When he returned to work at the Square in the new year, he was "nervous" and found himself "in tears in Phil Howard's office about it… He's been a great friend."

In retrospect, Borthwick admits that he went back to work too early because he so desperately wanted things to be normal again. He started to suffer seizures and was forced to rest. "You slowly have to build up your stamina," he says. "That will come in time."

To look at Borthwick, you would struggle to know what he has been through. But he still hasn't been able to face getting back on his bicycle. Understandably, then, the prospect of opening a restaurant in under a month is enough to make him feel anxious.

And yet, when he makes me lunch, it's clear that he has lost none of his touch. The plates of food that come to the table are unfussy and delicious – tangy artichokes with a zesty pesto; glistening cod; the best lamb I've ever tasted and a honey tart with roasted apricots that takes me straight back to childhood (in a good way). When I tell him how much I enjoyed the food, Borthwick seems genuinely pleased. "My confidence is coming back but it's not quite where it was," he admits.

The Merchant's Tavern deserves to be a raging success, not just for its food but for the extraordinary achievement it represents in terms of Borthwick's recovery. He's come a long way – and he's got the Twiglets served in a skull-shaped bowl to prove it.

Deep-fried baby artichokes, cod fillet with peppers, courgettes and aubergine, and honey tart with roast apricots… Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick's recipes from their new restaurant the Merchant's Tavern, which opens 1 October

Deep-fried baby artichokes

Serves 4
baby artichokes 8
fresh mint leaves 200g
olive oil 200ml
red onion 20g, diced
Maldon sea salt a pinch
sugar a pinch

Take fresh baby artichokes and remove the outer leaves, close to the stem. Then peel the green flesh away from both the stem and the base of the artichoke.

Slice through the bulb of the artichokes, 1cm from the top, and discard the leaves. Set the remaining artichokes to one side.

To make the mint dressing, take 100g of fresh mint leaves and blanche quickly in boiling water, then refresh immediately in ice cold water. Drain thoroughly and then add the blanched mint leaves to the olive oil, before placing the mixture into the freezer. Leave for 20 minutes to set, then remove from freezer and blitz thoroughly with a hand blender.

Take the remaining 100g of fresh mint leaves and roughly chop, then add this to the mint olive oil with the diced red onion. Add salt and sugar to taste. The oil should taste of fresh mint, slightly sweet and with a hint of red onion.

Preheat your fryer to 160C then blanch raw prepped artichoke until soft and golden. Remove from fryer and set out artichokes on kitchen paper to drain – the artichokes should feel soft to touch.

Place the artichokes on a plate, drizzle over the dressing and serve.

Baby gem lettuce with brown shrimp, pickled cucumber and chive dressing

Serves 4

white wine vinegar 50ml
caster sugar 50g
table salt 5g
cucumber½, peeled and cut into small 0.5cm cubes
baby gem lettuce 2
peeled brown shrimps 100g
lemon juice of ½
chives 10g, finely chopped
Maldon sea salt a pinch
extra virgin olive oil 50ml

With the white wine vinegar and sugar, make a "gastrique" by bringing both ingredients to the boil, in a small saucepan and allow to cool.

Salt the diced cucumber and leave for 10 minutes to draw out the moisture. Squeeze through a cloth, then stir the diced cucumber into the "gastrique" and allow to marinade. (This can be done 24 hours in advance.)

Halve the baby gem lettuces lengthways then cut each half into three. Wash in cold water and then rinse in a salad spinner to dry. Cover with a damp paper towel and refrigerate until serving.

To make the dressing, drain the pickled cucumber, reserving the liquor. Mix the shrimps and cucumber with 30ml of the liquor and the juice of half a lemon then stir in the chopped chives. Arrange the gem lettuces on a serving plate and season with sea salt.

Mix the olive oil into the brown shrimp and cucumber mixture, then spoon over the lettuce.

Cod fillet with romano peppers, grilled courgettes and baked aubergine

Serves 4
cod fillet 4 x 120g, skinned
Maldon sea salt 100g
romano peppers 3
caster sugar 20g
extra virgin olive oil 50ml
sherry vinegar 20ml
good aged balsamic 20ml
black olives, pitted 10g, roughly chopped
round purple aubergine 1
lemons 1
courgettes 2
basil leaves 50g
pine nuts 50g, toasted
parmesan 20g
garlic 1 clove

Salt the cod fillets in the salt and leave for 20 minutes, then wash off and pat dry in kitchen paper. Scorch the peppers over an open flame until black all over and place in a bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave to steam for 15 minutes.

Scrape the burnt skin from the peppers and discard, cut the peppers in half lengthways and remove the seeds. Cut the peppers into strips and mix with the sugar. Heat half the olive oil in a pan over a high heat and add the peppers to caramelise, deglaze with the sherry vinegar and remove from the heat, and then drizzle in the balsamic and add the olives.

Wrap the aubergine in aluminium foil and bake in the oven at 180C/gas mark 4 until cooked, checking that it's cooked by inserting a small knife. Cut the aubergine in half through the root, and following the natural shape of the aubergine, tear into lozenges, drizzle liberally with olive oil, season well and add the grated zest and juice of one lemon.

Slice the courgettes lengthways into strips, rub in olive oil and seasoning and grill in a griddle pan on both sides and set aside.

Blend the basil with the pine nuts, parmesan and garlic and season. Add a touch of olive oil to loosen.

Pan-fry the fillets in olive oil until cooked, for 2-2½ minutes on each side, depending on the thickness. Do not overcook the fish – it should just flake when pressed gently with a finger.

Arrange the peppers, courgettes and aubergines on the four plates and place the cod fillets on top. Finish with a spoonful of pesto on top of each fish and serve.

Smoked haddock with jersey royals, apple and celery and a poached egg

Serves 4
small Jersey royals 500g, scrubbed
celery 2 sticks, peeled and cut into lozenges
granny smith apples 2, washed
lemon 1
undyed smoked haddock 400g, bones removed
butter
free-range eggs 4
white wine vinegar 20ml
chives 10g, chopped
frisee lettuce leaves 100g, washed and spun dry
olive oil 20ml

Cook the Jersey royals in boiling salted water until they are just cooked, remove from the heat and leave to cool to room temperature. Cook the celery in boiling salted water, drain and run under cold water briefly and set aside.

Cut the apple into batons of a matchstick thickness and mix with the juice of ½ lemon.

Cut the smoked haddock into 4 pieces and place on a baking tray with a small knob of butter on top and cook in the oven at 150C/gas mark 2 until they flake when pressed gently with a finger. Peel the skin of each piece and set aside.

Poach the eggs in water – a rolling boil – with the vinegar, ensuring the yolks remain soft. Drain the potatoes and place in a bowl with the apple, chives, celery and lettuce and the zest of 1 lemon.

Dress the salad and put in the centre of each plate, place the smoked haddock and then a poached egg on top and serve.

Roast leg of lamb with spinach, cauliflower and Ogleshield gratin

Serves 4-6
spring lamb 1 leg, 2kg, boned and rolled
garlic 1 head broken into cloves and peeled
rosemary 2 sprigs
vegetable oil 50ml
Maldon sea salt
English spinach 500g large stalks removed, leaves washed and drained
butter 20g

For the gratin
cauliflower 1, cut into florets, cooked in boiling salted water and drained
whole milk 700ml
garlic 2 cloves
bay leaf 1
thyme 2 sprigs
Maldon sea salt agenerous pinch
butter 50g
plain flour 50g
Ogleshield cheese 200g, grated

To prepare the gratin, boil the milk with the garlic, bay leaf and thyme and a generous pinch of salt, remove from the heat and leave to infuse. In a separate pan, melt the butter, add the flour, and cook on a low heat, stirring occasionally, without colouring, for 10 minutes.

Whisk the strained milk into the flour and butter to obtain a glossy smooth sauce. Bring to a gentle simmer and cook for 20 minutes over a low heat, stirring regularly. Add 120g of the grated cheese and whisk to combine.

Place the cauliflower in a gratin dish, pour over the sauce and add the remaining cheese.

Place the lamb on a roasting tray on top of the garlic cloves and rosemary, and rub with oil and season liberally. Roast in a hot oven for approximately 20 minutes at 200C/gas mark 6, until golden. Reduce the heat to 150C/gas mark 2 and roast for about 1 hour 10 minutes, until firm but slightly springy.

Place the gratin in the oven at 180C/gas mark 4 and allow the lamb to rest for half an hour. Meanwhile, cook the spinach in a hot pan with the butter, season and drain in a colander.

Pour the fat off the roasting tray and deglaze with water, scraping up the caramelised juices and garlic. Carve the lamb into 4-6 pieces, season with Maldon sea salt and freshly ground pepper and place on the serving plates. Divide the spinach between the plates and spoon over the cooking juices. Serve with the cauliflower gratin.

Honey tart with roast apricots and malt whisky creme fraiche

Serves 4-6
For the sweet pastry

cold butter 250g, diced into small cubes
plain flour 330g
caster sugar 175g
large eggs 2, beaten
lemon zest of ½

For the tart mix
golden syrup 120g
heather honey 105g
double cream 220ml
white fresh breadcrumbs 75g
eggs 2, beaten
orange 1, grated zest
lemon 1, grated zest
Maldon sea salt a pinch

For the whisky creme fraiche
creme fraiche 150g
Speyside whisky 30ml
lemon juice of ½

For the garnish
ripeapricots 3
flaked almonds 20g, toasted

You will also need
18cm tart ring

The day before, make the sweet pastry by rubbing the butter with the flour and sugar until you have a breadcrumb texture with no pieces of butter remaining. Add the egg and lemon zest and mix to combine; tip on to a floured work surface and work to a smooth dough, wrap in clingfilm and place in the fridge.

The following day, roll the sweet pastry to 0.5cm thick, dusting as required with flour to prevent sticking, and line the tart case, pushing well into the corners. Allow to rest for half an hour before baking blind at 180C/gas mark 4 until golden, and set aside to cool slightly.

Make the whisky creme fraiche by combining all the ingredients and refrigerate to allow to set.

Roast the apricots in the oven until soft – about 15 minutes. When they are cooked, cut them in half, remove the stone and skin and set aside.

Finally, make the tart mix by mixing all the ingredients together with a wooden spoon until well combined, then warm until tepid over a gentle heat, stirring all the time.

Pour into the tart case and bake at 180C/gas mark 4 for 15 minutes, checking it is cooked by shaking gently – there should be a slight wobble.

Garnish with the roasted apricots and flaked almonds.

Merchant's Tavern, 35-42 Charlotte Road, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3PE; merchantstavern.co.uk

The comedian on Crunchies, a proper cuppa and the taste of fruit bat

I remember watching my son learning to eat food for the first time. He'd squeeze it in his hand until the juice came out and mulch it with his fingers, put it in his mouth, then take it out to look again. All his senses were working.

When I was young there was a breakfast bar which connected our kitchen to the dining room, so the food passed through had a catering feel. I've retained a weakness for being served through hatches. As a teen I'd go to dedicated cider pubs in Bath where hatches opened to reveal lethal pints of homemade scrumpy.

I remember sharing a Crunchie with my mother while sat on the front step in the sunshine. The sense memories are very strong, of chocolate melting on honeycomb, of her looking glam, of the step's heat travelling through my trousers.

During a two-week trek through the jungle in Indonesia, I started to hallucinate, envisaging a satsuma. I subsisted on boiled rice and dried fish for days and days and days, augmented by a found tomato, which was delicious – its skin, its taste, its juice, everything about it felt like a rediscovery.

I've eaten fruit bat. The wings are a bit wingy – just membrane flapping.

I've also eaten dog. It was served to me as an act of generosity by people who had very little so I'd have felt ungrateful if I'd refused. I once refused whale in Japan, when I was 22, idealistic and gung-ho. It was at a feast at the home of a famous sushi chef, and I caused enormous embarrassment. I might still do that now, I don't know.

When writing a show, I get to a critical tipping point. Food is part of the process, especially fruit, as displacement activity. If wanting a struggle, a lychee. For energy, bananas. Grapes? Instant handy fruit, but I associate them with illness.

I've not been formally thrown out of a restaurant, but have left by, er, mutual consent. One night, after a gig, I knocked over a flaming sambuca which set alight the whole tablecloth, then the tablecloth next to it, and so on. I came close to torching the entire place. The owner said, "It's probably time to go," and I said, "Yeah, you're probably right."

After three OK cups of tea, it's the fourth cup that really hits the spot. I've taken many fourth cups out of the house, on walks, or into cars, because I just can't leave them behind. I don't want to be dropping down dead while thinking, "I left that lovely cup of tea steaming on the kitchen table and I walked away forever."

Bill Bailey tours the UK from 14 September

From herrings to havarti cheese, tested by Mikael Jonsson, head chef at Hedone

Crispbread

Peter's Yard
Artisan Swedish crispbread
200g, £3.50, petersyard.com
This looks and tastes more artisanal than the others. It's good, but could be more complex - bread should have secondary aromas.
★★★

Scandinavian Kitchen
Leksands Brungraddat
200g, £1.50, scandikitchen.co.uk
Half artisanal, as you can see by the burnt sides. Reminds me of home.
★★★

Lidl
Rivercote crispbread
250g, 59p, lidl.co.uk
What I ate as a kid – mass-produced crispbread. They're OK – cheap, tasty, they serve their purpose.
★★

Wholefoods
GG Foods Oat Bran Crispbreads
100g, £1.59, wholefoodsmarket.com
Lacks salt and texture – a bit like chewing on a Weetabix without milk. It breaks up inside your mouth. I don't like it.
★

Cinnamon buns

BEST BUY
Selfridges
Cinnamon swirl
£1.45 each, selfridges.com
This looks the best of the four. Nicely golden and crisp on the outside. There's a butter vanilla cream among the cinnamon sugar and it's soft inside.
★★★

Tesco
Cinnamon swirl
70p each, tesco.com
This is too dry for a Scandi cinnamon bun and the cinnamon flavouring is too powerful, but otherwise it's an acceptable pastry.
★★

Harrods
Cinnamon swirl bun
£1.85, harrods.com
Enormous! They are usually much smaller, but it does look impressive. To taste, the cinnamon is too aggressive and the texture too spongey.
★★

Sainsbury's
Danish cinnamon whirl
£1 for two, sainsburys.co.uk
It's never a good start when a pastry falls apart as soon as you pick it up! This is far too dry and the flavours lack subtlety.
★

Havarti cheese

Scandinavian Kitchen
Ulkjaer Havarti
500g, £5.50, scandikitchen.co.uk
Cheese is not one of Scandinavia's great strengths, but this one is the best of the bunch. It's simple and good with pickles.
★★★

Danish Food Direct
Havarti Fløde
400g, £4.39, danishfooddirect.co.uk
Havarti is essentially cream cheese with lots of fat. This is a really typical one. I'm not keen but this one's OK.
★★

Marks & Spencer
Sliced havarti
230g, £2.10, marksandspencer.com
This just doesn't taste like cheese. There's very little flavour and it has the texture of a pig's skin – partly because it comes ready-sliced.
★

Waitrose
Sliced Danish havarti extra mild
250g, £2.65, waitrose.com
Plastic, flat and soggy. To me, this is not what cheese is about but I guess it's OK for quick sandwiches.
★

Herrings

Danish Food Direct
Elsinore Herrings in Dill Marinade
275g, £3.25, danishfooddirect.co.uk
Nice texture and good firmness. Less sweet than the others. There's a bit of acidity and tasty seasoning.
★★★★

Scandinavian Kitchen
Abba Dillsill
240g, £2.75, scandikitchen.co.uk
A little too sweet for me but I like the dill and sweet pickle.
★★★

Selfridges
Klädesholmen Onion Herrings
250g, £3.29, selfridges.com
There's some nice spicing and seasoning here but I think the herrings were frozen before marinading which compromises the texture.
★★

Sainsbury's
Marinated Herrings
280g, £1.69, sainsburys.co.uk
Weird texture, very mushy, very white, very strange. Big departure from our homemade pickled herrings.
★

Meatballs

Scandinavian Kitchen
Per I Viken Farmor's Kottbullar
300g, £2.50, scandikitchen.co.uk
There's lots of meatiness and lovely seasoning here but the texture is almost like it's been cooked twice – it's slightly too firm.
★★★★

Ikea
Kottbullar
1kg, £4.30, ikea.com
Looks like a meatball should – both outside and inside. Good mass-produced meatballs – we ate these at school.
★★★

Danish Food Direct
Beauvais Kodboller
420g, £3.60, danishfooddirect.co.uk
These are tiny, which is off-putting. They look a bit like roe deer droppings, but they don't taste of much.
★★

Tesco
Swedish style pork and beef meatballs
350g, £2.20, tesco.com
Very industrial. It's meat but doesn't quite taste like it. I don't like the texture and it tastes bland.
★

Pickles

Danish Food Direct
Beauvais Sliced Gherkin
570g, £2.75, danishfooddirect.co.uk
Really good. There's a nice balance of sweetness and acidity and there is a generous number of lovely dill seeds.
★★★★

Sainsbury's
Pickled Gherkins in Sour Vinegar
675g, £1, sainsburys.co.uk
These whole gherkins are much bigger than any of the others. They have a good crunch and satisfying texture.
★★★

Lidl
Freshona sandwich gherkins sliced
530g, 99p, lidl.co.uk
Soggy – more like zucchini than a pickled cucumber.
★★

The Cooperative
Baby Gherkins in Sweet Vinegar
340g, £1, co-operative.coop
Small and crunchy but tasteless. I can't taste anything except for a kind of mild acidic water.
★

Gin, vermouth and Campari: some call it a negroni, I call this cocktail foul

I have a drinking problem. My problem is the things I am unable to drink: I cannot stand the taste of negronis. Yes, I know. First world problems and all that. Then again the first world is where I live, and right now, here in first world cocktail land, negronis really are the thing.

If the peach-red blushing negroni were a car it would be a gleaming vintage Mercedes convertible. That's too bloody small for me to fit into. Instead, it's a very bitter drink, probably invented in Florence around 1920 for a Count Negroni, made with sweet vermouth, gin and the foul, violent insult that is Campari. I'm meant to like it because grown-ups do. I don't. I don't like its bitterness in the same way I don't like having my corns sliced off. Drinking a negroni feels like punishment for a crime not yet committed.

Normally I admit to such matters of taste breezily. So shoot me, I say. I can tell you, for example, that I hate Heinz baked beans – too sweet, texture of coagulated fish slime – and be confident in my prejudice. But I fear this dislike of negronis, indeed of the entire bitters family, is actually a character defect. In the past I have accused others of having failed to attain full adulthood for not liking oysters or for ordering their steak well done; well my negroni thing feels equally like a refusal to slough off the itchy starter skin of childhood.

Here's the point: as a kid you are meant to acquire a taste for booze through hard work and bloody mindedness. I remember well my first teenage slug of beer and then staring at the glass, as if it had been an indecent proposal from someone you called uncle but wasn't.

That rough bitter hit – nothing compared to Campari, but shocking all the same – the burn of the alcohol, the whole complicated, gaseous business of getting it down you. But you push on because you know liking this stuff is the oily hinge between the infantile and the mature, and that somewhere in the glass probably lies a secret which has something to do with sex, as most secrets do.

As a kid my mother introduced me to the possibilities of drinking through a small glass of custard-thick advocaat with a depth charge of cherry brandy. She called it blood and pus, and thought this hilarious. It had infantile elements: the vanilla hit of the advocaat, the sweet shop fruit of the cherry brandy. But there was also the burn which was not pleasant. Still, I recognised it as something I would have to get to know.

In the 90s, when alcopops first rose to prominence, I wrote articles complaining that they made booze far too palatable. Young people of today: too lazy to endure stoically the suffering that becoming a drinker demands.

And yet the resurgence of the negroni has made me reconsider my own drinking career. It turns out I really am little better than those kids. I swear off the aromatics of gin in favour of the cold, formless punch of vodka, better still with a glug of lime cordial. Yes, I know: it's my own made-to-measure alcopop.

At 46 I had thought myself all grown up. But in the matter of the glass and the negroni that isn't in it, apparently I am not. I'm still a child. Oh, the shame.

In 2008, the Beach Boys founder member explained why crickets, birdsong and wind were his favourite sounds

Brian Wilson was sitting in the executive club room of London's InterContinental hotel in 2008, broad forlorn back turned against a bird's eye view of HRH's potting sheds and the Wellington Arch roundabout. "I like peace and quiet very much, I really do. The noise is irritating now, in this room." The young female entourage there with Nelson Mandela were making a fair racket at the buffet counter.

Wilson explained it was lack of sounds – "except crickets, birdsong and wind" – at his California home which helped composition. "At seven, I wash my face, have breakfast – an egg and Kellogg's corn flakes with skimmed milk and Sweet'N Low – and then I sit alone in my armchair, with a leg rest, and put my synthesiser on my lap."

I suggested, because he'd never actually liked surfing or beach life – and because there was a fruit display nearby – that his band might just as well have been called the Peach Boys. "It wouldn't have made much difference to our success," he said. But what about the lyrics? "This is one of the best interviews I've ever had," he deadpanned, pushing his bowl of nuts towards me. "So have some nuts and drink your tea." He recited the song "Tenderly". "...Then you and I, Came wondering by, And lost in a sigh, Were we...". I crunched nuts as he did so.

Back in the day he'd got Paul McCartney to crunch celery and carrots for the track "Vegetables". He'd become obsessed by veg and for a year ran the Radiant Radish shop, before a sedentary life and junk food brought him to "about 311lbs".

Wilson got a 10-minute standing ovation after his live Smile in London. So what length of loud applause would become boring? "Maybe half an hour," he said.

In this issue of OFM we look at the special relationship between man and pig, South America's star chef Alex Atala, and Angela Hartnett's latest venture with her boyfriend Neil Borthwick

I have adopted a rare breed pig, visiting it regularly, occasionally feeding it and giving it the odd hug and tickle. When I'm not around, it is in very good hands, but despite its placid nature, its black patches and floppy ears, I'm not remotely attached to it, and am thinking only of its belly, chops and crackling. The fact that I have had the chance to see this animal grow, scratch, feed and play football (OK, snout-ball) is partly due to the work of those dedicated people who have revived Britain's rare breeds. For this issue, Robert McCrum has talked to some of the country's pig breeders about their obsession with these beautiful, intelligent animals.

Farther from home, Allan Jenkins has been spending time with Alex Atala, chef-proprietor of DOM in São Paulo. Atala is doing for Brazilian cuisine what René Redzepi has done for Nordic. Together, Alex and our intrepid editor have gone deep into the Amazon, meeting the indigenous people who are working with this world-famous restaurant, helping to grow and source ingredients.

On our doorstep, Angela Hartnett and Neil Borthwick are about to open the Merchant's Tavern in London's East End. But this is not simply an account of yet another restaurant opening. This is the story of a friendship, a terrible accident, a coma and a long road to recovery. The restaurant is on course to open at the beginning of October.

Rachel Cooke tells us, brilliantly, of her life spent in restaurants, from early visits to Berni Inns (the Hereford branch being the highlight of my childhood) to the Quality Chop House. Jay Rayner has been visiting food banks in London and Hull, speaking to the volunteers who run them, and finding out why their use has tripled in the past 12 months. Oh, and he ponders my favourite cocktail, the negroni, and why he doesn't like it. Cheers.

The actor made his name in knockabout British comedies but he's now a fixture in Hollywood. So why he's growing his own carrots? "It's all about nutrition," he says

I'll admit it: I'm slightly disappointed when Simon Pegg arrives for our lunch and orders a mackerel salad niçoise. The waiter at Brasserie Blanc in Covent Garden gives us a quizzical look. "As a main?" he asks solicitously. Pegg nods. He's been off the booze for a few years now and asks for nothing more than a bottle of sparkling water as accompaniment.

The waiter is appalled. "Nothing else?" Pegg shakes his head.

In person he is lean and compact, dressed in a black T-shirt, with a selection of silver charms on leather strings hanging from his neck. At 43, Pegg takes care of himself – "It's all about nutrition" – and soon he is telling me how he grows his own vegetables at home in Hertfordshire.

"Lettuce, carrots, potatoes …" he lists, eyes gleaming behind Perspex-framed spectacles. "Tomatoes, pumpkins, all the herbs …" When Pegg's daughter Matilda was born four years ago, he and his wife Maureen realised they had "a blank slate. This little life had never eaten an E-number or anything remotely toxic. We had an opportunity to educate her about food."

It's not what I expected from a comedian who has forged a career portraying curry-chomping, pint-swilling suspended manhood. In Spaced, the cult late 90s comedy series he co-wrote and starred in, Pegg played a twentysomething stuck in a prolonged adolescence involving clubbing, casual relationships and sitting around playing computer games in his underpants with his mates. In the subsequent trilogy of high-grossing, critically acclaimed comedy films – starting nine years ago with Shaun of the Dead, moving on to Hot Fuzz in 2007 and reaching its culmination earlier this year with The World's End– Pegg wrote a succession of brilliant parts for desperate men who have never quite outgrown their childhood. Pegg starred in all three films with his best friend, Nick Frost.

"The man-child is a modern phenomenon which came about because the pressure on us to conform with marriage and children was lifted," Pegg explains. "Our parents got married at 22, 23 but by the time I reached that age, it was less incumbent on me to conform. Spaced came about from that: without a new set of criteria between 20 and 30, you fill your life with stuff you did as a kid – video games, comics, juvenile pursuits. It does create a reluctance to let stuff go, particularly with guys who are the children of the 70s and who were brought up with Star Wars. You also struggle to face commitment. I found when I finally got married and had the kid, that's when the world made more sense to me. It was, 'Oh, I see, that's what we're there for.'"

Pegg unabashedly describes Frost as his "rock". The two have been friends for 20 years, ever since Pegg's former girlfriend introduced them (she and Frost were waiters at the same north London Mexican restaurant). Pegg says he wanted Frost to be in Spaced simply so he could have an excuse to hang out with him more. For a while, the two of them were famously so strapped for cash that they shared a single bed. What was that like?

"Cramped," Pegg says, unfolding his napkin. "I'd recommend it. One of the worst things in the world is homophobia. There are a lot of guys who are worried they might be gay and I'd say a) don't worry about it. If you're gay, you'll end up having loads of fun and b) if you get into bed with your best mate and you don't want to have sex with him, you're not gay!"

In a satirical homage to Krzysztof Kieslow´ski's Three Colours film trilogy, Frost and Pegg decided to call their films the Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy (a Cornetto appears at some point in each film). Does Pegg have a favourite Cornetto? "Original," he says, sipping on iced water.

The salads arrive. I have been shamed into ordering something equally frugal involving broad beans. We munch our foliage dutifully.

To be fair to Pegg, he is here to promote a healthy-eating food app for children so it would be wrong for him to gorge himself on chicken nuggets. Henri le Worm is aimed at kids between two and 10 years old and features lots of games, recipes and interactive songs. It was developed with the help of Raymond Blanc and Pegg is providing Henri's voice. "The tough thing with kids is that mealtimes are quite boring," he says. "They're always diverted by something visually stimulating like a character like Henri."

As a child growing up in the Gloucestershire village of Brockworth, Pegg was never given junk food. But he can remember sampling his first McDonald's milkshake in London in 1983 and thinking it was amazing.

When he was seven, his parents divorced. His mother remarried and Pegg took on his stepfather's surname. He always loved performing and was encouraged by his mother, Gillian, a stalwart of the local am-dram scene.

In the past, Pegg has attributed his ambition to the feeling of being dumped by his father. (They now have a good relationship). Perhaps, as the eldest of four, he bore the brunt of the emotional fallout and acting became a means of socking it to the world – none of his siblings has become anything remotely approaching a movie star. We start talking about how difficult it must be when the brother of a famous film star is also an actor but has never quite hit the big time. Like Eric Roberts, I say, the elder brother of the more famous Julia.

"I used to travel to New Mexico every weekend with Eric Roberts," Pegg says, reaching for the salt and grinding copious amounts on to his mackerel fillet. "He's a really nice guy."

Later, when I ask about the annual cheese-rolling contest that takes place in his home town, Pegg launches into an anecdote about seeing a clip of it on American television and realising for the first time how "insane" it was. "I was in the Chateau Marmont," he adds.

These are the kind of things you can only say when you've become a bit Hollywood. Pegg has won parts in blockbusters including Mission: Impossible III (alongside Tom Cruise), Tintin (directed by Steven Spielberg) and JJ Abrams's lucrative Star Trek franchise. But when I ask him about his favourite films, he names the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, as well as Back to the Future and Gremlins, both of which he admires for being "beautifully structured".

He remains healthily aware that the hype of celebrity is "mostly bullshit", and balances it out by spending as much time as he can with his wife and daughter and their two dogs, Minnie and Myrtle. Pegg has an "M" tattooed on his right wrist. Does everyone in his life have a name starting with that letter? He grins, "Yeah."

His mother got a dog recently. "She called him Bertie…"

Did she not get the memo? I joke.

"…after her Dad," Pegg concludes.

Oh. He has the grace to laugh.

Pegg is more serious and sincere than I had anticipated. There's plainly a lot going on in his head. As he clears his plate of the final frond of lettuce and orders a double espresso, he treats me to a Marxist deconstruction of Star Wars – it was the topic of his dissertation at Bristol University – which involves a theory about the "infantilisation of cinema, arguably as a means of control, of keeping us in a state of arrested development".

So how does he square this with his role in Star Trek? "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," he says and flashes a mischievous grin that transforms his face. "I'm a massive hypocrite."

Henri le Worm: The Missing Cookbook (iTunes, £2.99) is available for iPad and iPad mini; henrileworm.com

So there might be a magic genetic bullet for obesity. I'm sorry, but that's just wrong

As a rule I try not to believe Daily Express headlines. Otherwise I would be constantly distraught by news such as: "SALT BANNED IN CHIP SHOPS" (it isn't), "EU WANTS TO MERGE UK WITH FRANCE" (it doesn't), and "EVERY 4 MINUTES A MIGRANT IS ARRESTED IN BRITAIN" (they really ought to leave that poor bugger alone). The Daily Express is where sanity goes to put its feet up.

A couple of weeks ago, however, there was one Express story I couldn't avoid reading: "GORGE ON YOUR FAVOURITE FOOD AND STAY SLIM".

Apparently the gene which causes us to store excess calories as fat has been identified. Switch that off and we can all lie face down in the Pringles for as long as we like. Now weirdly for a Daily Express health story, I imagine this one contains more than a sliver of truth: gene therapies are very much the thing, and given the scale of the obesity epidemic there are clearly oceans of cash to be made from coming up with a magic bullet.

As a man who has not so much battled his weight over the years as fought a long and bloody war full of scorched earth policies and spirit-sapping sieges, you might imagine I'd be all for this. Woo! And Hoo! Pop a pill and then gorge on what you like. Except I'm not thrilled by the prospect, not at all. It's just plain wrong.

There are two reasons. The first is moral. There's much hand-wringing over food waste and rightly so; all the food wasted each year in North America and Europe is equivalent to all the food produced in sub-Saharan Africa. That's clearly obscene. But those statistics do not take into consideration all that food wasted by over-consumption. And yes, I recognise that I am both prosecution and the accused; that I have eaten more than mine and a few other peoples' fair shares over the years. It's an issue. Given this, a drug that makes it possible to just carry on scarfing is not one of those things worth filing under the heading "good ideas".

But there's another point: if it's suddenly possible to eat anything without risk to your waistline then a huge chunk of the fun leaks out of dinner time. Sure there's a whole bunch of stuff you can eat until the well-marbled cows come home. I am told salads can be nice in the right circumstances. But the real pleasure of eating lies in the naughty; in those things which, taken in excess, are the most direct route to an aortic aneurism. I bang on about pork belly because I do really like it. But I don't eat it every day because that would be stupid and I do try not to be that. Which means that when I do get to eat it, there is the intense joy of delayed gratification.

I have other vices. I have vices like Greece has debts. Occasionally I eat pork scratchings and Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I have eaten the bacon double Swiss from Burger King and found it not unpleasant. Drunk, I have eaten kebabs from places that shouldn't be allowed to sell them, and opened a second family bag of Revels as dessert. I am not proud of these things, but I am honest. I have enjoyed the intense buzz of being very, very bad. And that's what the fat pill would rob me of: not merely the extra inches on my waist, but the true pleasure of the profane. I hope to God it never happens.

The dancer and Strictly judge on childhood food memories – and what she keeps in her BBC fridge

My earliest memory is of Weetabix. I lived on them. For my favourite meal, breakfast, I could get through six Weetabix, with milk and sugar, getting them perfect – not too dry, not too mushy. One day, before she went off to work, Mum poured on salt instead of sugar and I was devastated.

I was never allowed in the kitchen, sadly. I was a clumsy child, energetic and knocking into things. I'd spill things and get food down me, so Mum never wanted me in there. If I said I'd help, she'd draw breath. It was a reason she sent me to ballet classes – to control my clumsiness. And to sort out my bendy legs.

At 13 I started, late, at the White Lodge [the Royal Ballet's school in Richmond Park]. It was 15 to a dorm back then and the food wasn't great. I remember tongue sandwiches quite a lot. We used to head to Sheen for chips, and one friend, from up north, introduced me to pork scratchings.

Two months after I joined the company, at 18, we went on a tour of China, Japan, Thailand. I vividly remember packing my tour box – theatre make-up, ballet shoes, dance clothes and lots of Cup a Soups. They were still in Mao suits on bicycles in Shanghai and Beijing and food was boiled cabbage with stringy bits of meat for breakfast and these weird white balls for lunch.

I was performing Juliet [in Romeo and Juliet] in Buenos Aires and the rattling and crunching of popcorn in the stadium was offputting. The ballet is serene with many still moments, so constant popcorn doesn't really suit that.

I was never a dancer who was self-conscious about everything I ate. It was about having enough carbohydrates and proteins and eating at 2.30pm so you didn't get stomach cramps from nerves. But I never really thought about everything going in my mouth until I had an injury and was on the sofa, leg in a cast, feeling, "Oh my God, I'm turning into a couch potato."

When I began learning to cook after retirement from the Royal Ballet my cup cakes were the first thing my daughters appreciated. Now I have time I make everything for their parties. I loved how my grandmother in Australia made angel bread with hundreds of thousands, so I do all that now.

I associate Strictly Come Dancing with crème brûlée. I have a little fridge at the BBC that's full of it. I nibble constantly.

The compact edition of Darcey Bussell: A Life in Pictures (Hardie Grant, £16.99) is published next month

On a trip to Cairo, Anissa Helou shops in the abundant street market and learns how to make perfect koshari

Unlike Lebanon, Syria and Turkey, Egypt doesn't really have a restaurant culture although it does have an exciting street food scene. And it is on the street that I do most of my eating when I visit, albeit being careful as to which cart I stop at. However, on a recent trip to Cairo to research recipes for our London cafe Koshari Street, I spent an evening with Magda, a wonderful home cook. As I watched her prepare our meal, tasting as she went along to make sure the seasoning was absolutely right, I decided that Egyptian food at its best could rival the better known Middle Eastern cuisines.

Many of the dishes are shared with other countries but because Egypt straddles the Middle East and North Africa, there are noticeable differences. Magda's meal included a selection of vegetarian-stuffed vegetables, including vine leaves which were in season (so much better fresh than preserved), green peppers, cabbage leaves and both white and purple aubergines.

She also prepared stuffed intestines (mumbar) and the street food dish koshari. None of the dishes were new to me. Except for koshari, you find them throughout the Middle East, but some of her methods and combinations were a revelation. In Lebanon, we make vegetable stuffing with fresh tomatoes, dicing them into tiny cubes for the vegetarian version while crushing them for the meat dish. But Magda made a thick sauce with her tomatoes, cooking them down with finely chopped onions and olive oil before adding them to the rice and herbs, giving the final dish a richer texture and deeper flavour. Her seasoning also included chilli for added heat, another Egyptian touch.

Depending on which country you are in, some vegetables are stuffed and cooked together while others are done separately. No one in Lebanon pairs vine and cabbage leaves. They cook vine leaves with lemon juice added to the cooking broth, and prepare them either with meat or vegetables while they finish the cabbage, which they only stuff with meat, with dried mint and crushed garlic. Courgettes and aubergines are always paired and can also be done with meat or as a vegetarian dish.

Magda cooks her vine leaves in a separate pot but puts all the other vegetables together. I was intrigued to see her use white aubergines, which I had seen in the markets and are rare in Lebanon and Syria. Whenever people use them there, it is to make makdous, where the aubergines are stuffed with walnuts, chilli peppers and garlic, and preserved in olive oil.

As I watched Magda stuff the intestines – with a different rice filling where the tomatoes were fresh – I wondered if she had bought them from the jolly offal seller behind the Hussein mosque, a fabulous Fatimid building with minarets that tower over a lively food market running through a warren of narrow medieval streets.

Here, spice merchants mix herbs and spices on the floor of their stall, and pickle makers dip into huge vats to scoop out brightly coloured pickles which they bag up to send to neighbouring cafes or to sell in their narrow stall at the front. Meat sellers butcher carcasses right on the street. Some have beef, others lamb and a couple specialise in camel. Naturally the camel carcasses are the largest.

Greengrocers are scattered throughout with some specialising in one type of vegetable or fruit. One turbaned old man sells lettuce and mint while another stacks his watermelons in a neat pyramid. Some lanes open out to covered markets where vendors decorate their stalls with murals, some with suras (verses) from the Qur'an and images of saints.

Interspersed between all this abundance are the live bird sellers who kill and pluck your chicken, pigeon, duck or turkey on the spot for you to take home and cook.

Magda's stuffed intestines were our meat dish for the night and, again, she made hers differently, frying them after poaching to brown and crisp up the casing. Just as good as my mother's version which is only poached.

Egyptian food may not be as celebrated as other Middle Eastern cuisines, but prepared by the right cook it is delectable, and made even more so by the wealth of seasonal produce everywhere you go.

Perfect koshari, tabbule salad and 'handkerchief bread' pudding

Koshari

This is my home version, a cross between Lebanese mujaddarah and Egyptian koshari

Serves 6-8
For the tomato sauce
extra virgin olive oil 4 tbsp
small onion 1 , very finely chopped
garlic cloves 4, crushed
chopped canned tomatoes with their juice 2 x 400 g cans
chilli flakes½ tsp to taste

For the koshari
extra virgin olive oil 6 tbsp
medium onions 2, thinly sliced
vermicelli 50g, broken into 2.5cm pieces
brown lentils 250g
basmati rice 275g
sea salt to taste

Put the oil and chopped onion in a saucepan and fry over a medium heat until golden. Stir in the garlic and fry for a couple more minutes then add the tomatoes and chilli. Increase the heat to medium-high and let it bubble for 20 minutes or until thickened. Use a potato masher to crush the sauce and make it smooth. Keep warm.

While the sauce is cooking, start preparing the koshari. Put the oil in a frying pan and place over a medium heat. Add the onions and fry, stirring occasionally until golden brown. Remove with a slotted spoon and spread onto paper towels to drain off the excess oil. Add the vermicelli to the oil and sauté until browned. Set aside.

Put the lentils in a saucepan with 1¼ litres of water. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for 15-30 minutes, depending on the lentils you are using. They should be quite tender but not mushy by the time you add the rice.

Rinse the rice under cold water and add to the lentils. Simmer for another 10 minutes and stir in the vermicelli and the oil in the pan; add salt to taste. Wrap the lid of the pan with a kitchen towel, place the lid back over the pan and remove from the heat. Let it sit for 10 minutes or until the vermicelli is tender and the liquid fully absorbed. Stir in half the fried onion and reserve the other half for garnish. Use a fork to stir the rice so that you fluff it up at the same time.

Transfer the koshari to a serving dish, ladle the sauce all over and scatter the remaining caramelised onion over the sauce. Serve hot.

Fake Dolma (Dolma Kadhaba)

Kadhaba means liar in Arabic and it is a humorous way to indicate there is no meat in the stuffing.

Serves 4-6
olive oil 100ml
onions 250g, very finely chopped
chopped plum tomatoes 2 x 400g cans
sea salt
Egyptian or Calasparra rice 250g, rinsed and drained
parsley 100g, most of the stalks removed, finely chopped
mint leaves 50g, finely chopped
dill 30g, chopped medium fine
freshly ground pepper½ tsp
allspice 1 tsp
cayenne pepper½ tsp
juice of 3 limes juice
preserved vine leaves 1 x 450g pack
medium-large potato 1, thinly sliced
medium ripe tomatoes 2, thinly sliced

Put the oil in a saucepan and add the chopped onion. Place over a medium-high heat. Let the onion sizzle then reduce the heat to medium and sauté the onion until golden.

Add the tomatoes and salt to taste – if you are using preserved leaves go easy on the salt. Cook the tomatoes until the sauce is thick and there is no excess juice. Let cool slightly.

Put the rinsed and drained rice in a bowl. Add the herbs and tomato sauce. Add the spices and lime juice and salt to taste and mix well. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary.

Separate the vine leaves and stack neatly, cutting and discarding the stem and sorting them by size if you have the patience. Put the larger leaves in a colander and run cold water over them to get rid of some of the briny taste.

Use the torn leaves to line the bottom of the pan in which you will be cooking the stuffed vine leaves. Spread the potato slices over the torn leaves and cover with the tomato slices.

Take one vine leaf and lay it flat on your work surface, shiny side down with the stem end nearest to you. Place from 1-1½ teaspoons of stuffing (depending on the size of the leaf) in a thin raised line across the top of the leaf, about 1.5cm away from the tip of the stem and again the same distance short of either side – the line should be thinner than your little finger. Fold the sides over the rice, in a line that slightly tapers towards the bottom, then fold and tuck the top edges over the stuffing and roll neatly but loosely, leaving enough space for the rice to expand during cooking. Place the rolled vine leaf, with the loose end down, over the tomatoes, starting from one side of the pan. Continue filling, rolling and arranging the leaves, side by side, doing one layer at a time. Reserve one large leaf to lay over the rolled ones. If you have any leftover stuffing, put it in a small pan, add an equivalent amount of water, and cook for 20 minutes to serve on the side.

Put a little water in the bowl of stuffing and swirl it around to get the last of the juices, and pour the water over the vine leaves to about 1cm off the top. Lay the vine leaf over the rolled leaves and put an overturned heatproof plate over it, to stop the stuffed leaves from unrolling.

Cover the pan and place over a high heat. Bring to the boil, then reduce the heat to medium and boil gently for 30 minutes. It is a good idea to test one vine leaf before you take them off the heat, to make sure that both the leaf and the rice inside are done. Serve warm or at room temperature.

White Tabbule

Even though this salad is not Egyptian, it is perfect with koshari. I adapted the recipe from one I found in Ibrahim Mouzannar's Lebanese Cuisine.

Serves 4-6
pointed organic white cabbage 1, about 500g, shredded very fine
spring onions 100g, trimmed, thinly sliced
fresh mint leaves 200g, chopped medium fine
firm ripe tomatoes 400g, de-seeded, and diced into small cubes
juive of 1 lemon or to taste
extra virgin olive oil 100ml
Aleppo pepper 1 tsp
sea salt

Put the cabbage, spring onion, mint and tomatoes in a large bowl. Add the lemon juice and oil. Season with the Aleppo pepper and salt to taste. Mix well. Taste and adjust the seasoning if necessary. Serve immediately.

Egyptian Bread Pudding

Known as Umm Ali, this is the quintessential Egyptian pudding. I use toasted markouk (handkerchief bread).

Serves 4-6
markouk 250g (1¾ sheets)
mixed nuts (pistachios, hazelnuts, peanuts, cashews, almonds and walnuts) 350g
organic full-fat milk 750gJ

golden caster sugar 100gJ

orange blossom water 1 tbspJ

raisins 4 tbsp, soaked for about 1 hourJ

creme fraiche for garnish

You will also need
an oval baking dish 28cm x 24cm x 6cm

Preheat the oven to 200C/gas mark 6.

Lay one sheet of markouk over a large baking sheet and toast in the oven until golden brown. This should take about 8 minutes. Take the toasted bread out and lay the remaining markouk on the baking sheet. Toast until crisp and golden.

Break the toasted bread into medium pieces and arrange in an oval baking dish, about 28cm x 24cm x 6cm.

Spread the nuts on a large baking sheet and place in the oven. Toast for 10-12 minutes or until golden brown. Remove from the oven and cool.

Put the milk and sugar in a pan and place over a medium heat. Bring the milk to the boil, stirring every now and then. Take off the heat and add the orange blossom water.

Pour the hot milk over the bread. Drain the raisins and sprinkle all over the bread. Sprinkle the nuts all over.

Put the dish in the oven and bake for about 20 minutes until the milk is almost absorbed and the bread is a little crisp around the edges. Serve immediately with creme fraiche.

Anissa Helou is a partner in Koshari Street, 56 St Martin's Lane, London WC2N 4EA; kosharistreet.com.

Her latest book is Levant: Recipes and Memories from the Middle East (HarperCollins, £20.00). To order for £16 with free UK p&p, click here

There's more sugar in many wines than you'd think – it's best to avoid the ones where it's there to smooth over the rough edges

Nutritionists call it "invisible sugar", that phenomenon of modern life that has seen sugar in its various forms creep into just about every packaged food. It's not just that can of full-fat Coke; it's the cheeky addition to the packet of crisps, the pasta sauce, the slice of bread.

You might have thought the wine industry was moving in the opposite direction. After all, over the same period that Big Food has been feeding us high fructose corn-syrup, sweet wine, the most popular style right up to the Blue Nun and QC-flavoured 1970s, has fallen from favour. We've come to think of dry wines as synonymous with quality and sophistication, and sweeter options as wine for beginners – the sugar acting like stabilisers until we get used to sourness and tannin.

In fact, sugar in wine never really went away, it just had to get sneaky. Most people, in a phrase occasionally used by the wine trade, "talk dry, but drink sweet", and brand owners have had to learn ways of getting round this conflicted behaviour. That's why many of the biggest-selling wines, while avoiding the words "sweet" or "sugar" on the label and being packaged like dry wines, contain quite a bit of sugar. This is particularly true of Californian brands such as Blossom Hill and Echo Falls and Australians such as Yellow Tail, whose reds and whites will often smuggle in 10 grams or more of residual sugar per litre, appreciably more than the 1-2 grams in the average red Bordeaux .

But it's not just obviously mass-market wines that have more sugar than you might expect. Preparing to write this column, I had a look back through the technical data given out by retailers and wineries at various tastings over the past year, and I was surprised by how many supposedly "dry" New World and southern European reds come in at 6g/l or more, and how many whites at 8g/l or more.

The problem here isn't the level of sugar itself. The statistics are a bit of a red herring since there is more to the perception of sweetness in wine than sugar. Acidity, tannin and alcohol also play their part, with higher acidity making a wine taste less sweet, prominent tannin giving a feeling of dryness and higher alcohol giving an impression of greater sweetness. A wine with 2 g/l of sugar but low acidity and 15% alcohol may well taste sweeter than a high-acid wine of 10 g/l of sugar and 11% alcohol. It's all a question of balance.

Just as you don't really notice the individual instruments on a conscious level when you're carried away by a piece of music,- in the best wines you're not thinking about the sweetness levels, or the acidity, or the tannin. There's a harmony between all those basic elements that leaves you to focus on the allusive flavours and textures. The best sweeter wines – whether they have around 10 g/l of sugar like some of my favourite Alsace whites or more than 400g/l as in some Pedro Ximenez sherries – have that every bit as much as the best dry wines. Wines on varying degrees of the sweetness spectrum also do a much better job of matching spicy food: they're the only ones that really work with desserts, and are often fabulous with cheese. Where sugar does become a problem is when it's used to smooth over rough edges (spiky acidity, rasping tannin) or plug gaps (lack of fruit or body). The winemaker ratchets up the sugar, either by stopping the fermentation while there's still plenty of sugar left in the must (juice), or by adding sweetening agents such as concentrated grape must once fermentation is finished.

Just as tricky is the fact that you never really know how much sugar you're getting. The best you can expect is one of those vague, subjective sweetness scales offered by some supermarkets on their back labels. I think it's time that changed. Not just so we can have some idea how a wine might taste, but to bring this sneaky form of invisible sugar out into the open.

Six best sweet wines

Château Jolys Cuvée Jean Jurançon
France 2010
£14.49, Waitrose)
Deep in Pyrenean south-west France, Jurançon produces some of my favourite fully sweet wines from, in this case, late-harvested and wind-dried petit manseng, a swirling blend of candied tropical and orange fruit and mountain-fresh acidity.

STAR BUY
Ostler Blue House Pinot GrisWaitaki Valley, New Zealand 2010
(£18.50, Berry Bros & Rudd)
In pinot grigio (Italian for pinot gris) mode, this grape variety tends to be anonymously light and dry. When allowed to fully ripen and carry a bit of extra weight and sugar in Alsace or New Zealand, it's transformed into something much richer and more attractive, shimmering with quince and spice.

Tesco Finest Alsace Gewurztraminer
France 2012
(£7.99, Tesco)
Gewurztraminer's sheer force of unbridled musky perfume is at its best with a little sugar; really dry styles generally seem to miss out on its divisive flamboyance. This one has 14 g/l and is exotic like really good Turkish delight.

Joh Jos Prüm Riesling Kabinett
Mosel, Germany 2011
(£15.95, Corney & Barrow)
The classic racy, delicately lacy off-dry style of German riesling is becoming increasingly rare: the Germans are these days much keener on dry wines. J J Prüm have remained masters of the style, however, and this is a dancing, joyous low-alcohol white.

Allegrini Palazzo della Torre Veneto,
Italy 2009
(from £14.99, Imbibros.co.uk; Roberson; Tesco; Wine Direct; Rannoch Scott)
Most of the world's better red wines are properly dry, but the use of some dried grapes, which naturally concentrates the sugars, brings a bittersweet-tinge to the cherries and dark chocolate in this lighter but still sumptuous take on Amarone from northeastern Italy.

Domaine des Aubuisères Cuvée de Perruches Vouvray
Loire, France 2012
(£9.99, or £8.99 if you buy two bottles, Majestic)
Like riesling, chenin blanc is made into every conceivable level of sweetness in the Loire, from bone dry to lusciously sweet. This is off-dry (9 grams of sugar), but its brisk apple-store character would be so good with pork chops.

Back in 1998, the comedian recalled dinner with Charles – and singing for his supper to a young William and Harry

I'd experienced Spike Milligan in a number of states - hyper, despairing, giggling, excruciatingly, at his own jokes, and blurred from what he called "good brain-numbing" electro-convulsive therapy. His favourite sedative, though, was wine. He called it the love of his life, apart from "an Italian lady I met in 1944". That year he'd been a wine waiter for officers in a military rehab facility in Portici, Italy. "I loved that job, it taught me everything," he said.

The last time I drank with Milligan, at home in Dumb Woman's Lane near Rye, was in mid-1998, with his health deteriorating. He looked frail but spoke animatedly of wining and dining with Prince Charles. "I phoned the palace and said 'What's the dress for a dinner at Highgrove?' and they said black tie. So I arrived in the full kit, but Charles was wearing an open-neck shirt, flannels and slippers. He said 'That's the palace - they're always making bloody mistakes.'

"At one point, William and Harry came down in their pyjamas and he said, 'Look Spike, would you sing the Ying Tong Song to them?', and I had to sing this fucking song. I felt such a fool, but then we had a lovely supper.

"I had to stay overnight but I couldn't sleep in the double bed because my wife snores so badly, so I slept on the floor of Charles's toilet. It was elegant and spotless."

Did he step over you in the night, to use "the throne"? "I don't know. I was sleeping soundly. It had this excellent woolly rug which I used as a pillow."

Milligan was also mulling on jam and writing poetry. "Damn damn damn jam," he advised me. "Jam will get you in the end."

Luxury foods should be a treat – and reassuringly expensive. So don't expect me to applaud when the price of lobster falls

Browsing the financial pages, as I'm apt to do, I stumbled on a piece about lobster prices. In New England, lobstermen are struggling to stay in business. In 2005, Maine lobster generally sold for about $6 a pound wholesale. Cut to 2013, though, and thanks to a couple of unusually bountiful harvests, lobster off the boat is fetching a mere $2.20 a pound. This dramatic fall hasn't, however, had much impact – or any impact at all – on restaurant prices, and it was this fact that struck me as most interesting. After all, as the writer – the New Yorker's estimable James Surowiecki – duly noted, while it's obviously the case that keeping prices high ensures a restaurant makes more money per plate, it may also mean fewer bums on seats.

Surowiecki suggested that lobster is more of a luxury good than a commodity: like a Hermès bag or a Prada coat, its price is linked intimately to certain psychological factors. I guess you could call it aspirational. Lobster has had an exclusive image for a long time now, and if it were suddenly to be priced like chicken, people might desire it less. Restaurateurs are anxious about the message lower prices send out; their customers may not know what's happening to lobster stocks, and might worry they're being offered a crustacean of inferior quality. Lowering the price of lobster might also start to make certain other dishes on their menus – the pan-fried sea bass, say, or the seared tuna – look overly expensive.

Well, I couldn't stop thinking about all this. Lobster prices haven't fallen so dramatically here. Last April, in fact, a cold snap had the wholesale cost of Scottish lobster rising from £15 a kilogram to an average of £25 – though stocks have recovered since, and prices are pretty much back to what they were. But even if they were to drop off a cliff, I would still prefer my favourite restaurants to rip me off, just a little. Some perverse part of me doesn't want to be able to eat lobster every day; I want it to be, as it is now, a dish I only order as a huge treat, perched at a glamorous bar, a glass of something crisp and alcoholic in one hand, a theatre programme in the other. Sometimes, a girl wants to scoff a pot of vinegary cockles with a wooden fork in the rain on the sea front at Scarborough. And sometimes she wants to arrange her limbs in the flattering candlelight and, credit card safely stowed in her clutch bag, pretend to be Diana Cooper or someone called Maud.

Of course, lobster wasn't always posh. According to Surowiecki, they were so abundant in colonial New England that servants, as a condition of their employment, insisted on not being fed lobster more than three times a week. On these shores they were at first a food of the poor, a way of eking a meagre diet from land and sea. Slowly, though, they came to be associated with wealth. In 19th-century Scotland the gastronomes of the Cleikum Club favoured a dish called lobster haut gout, in which the shellfish were eaten with a sauce made from veal jelly and walnut "catsup". Personally, I associate lobster with debs and Mayfair flats and other (to me) imaginary worlds, for which we must mostly blame my reading. In Arabella Boxer's super- posh Book of English Food there is a prewar recipe adapted from Vogue for lobster sandwiches to be "taken with hot consommé after the theatre". How very Enid Bagnold. In Good Savouries by Ambrose Heath, a book I may have mentioned/droned on about before, there is a recipe for lobster toasts that is straight out of PG Wodehouse. The message of both seems to be: we are so fancy, we eat lobster as a snack.

I will never "snack" on lobster. I rather despise the lobster rolls and lobster mac-'n'-cheese that modishly populate so many menus just lately (a means, according to Surowiecki, of using cheap lobster on the sly while keeping the prisine crustacean, in its half shell, expensively centre stage). A lowering feeling washed over me when I first heard of the chain Burger & Lobster. Some things should be expensive. I want chips, sometimes, and a little green salad; a glass of ancient riesling – I like it to be roughly the colour of an old lady's toenails – would be just divine. Mostly, though, what I want is that rosy shell cracked open on my plate to reveal – it's almost pornographic to write it – the ridiculously expensive white flesh within. Every mouthful will set me back at least a pound, and I'm afraid (so kill me!) that is half the point.

Roddie Sloan supplies sea urchins to some of the world's best restaurants, including Noma in Copenhagen and St John in London. He dives for them off the coast of Norway, inside the Arctic Circle, in waters that average 2C

Arctic diver Roddie Sloan was about to abandon his beloved urchins to study engineering, but then he got a call that would change his life...

"Our urchin diver is a Scotsman who came to Norway for the love of a woman, and stayed for the cold, pristine waters of his new region of Steigen. If it lives in the north Atlantic and I want to cook it, Roddie will find it and it will arrive at Fäviken neatly arranged in a little box, whether it's edible or not."
Magnus Nilsson, chef, Fäviken, Sweden

A small icy open boat 300km inside the Arctic Circle: diver Pawel grins as he hands me a holy grail and for a second I forget the biting wind. The interior of the spiky sea urchin he is holding out is an astonishing tangerine like a Chinese lantern, bathed in low brilliant light. What I have in my hand is Stronglyocentrotus droebachiensis, the mythical Norwegian Green, talked about in hushed whispers by chefs. I lift out a delicate coral "tongue" – more accurately, its gonads – and let the umami flavours wash over me: the texture is of wobbly custard; the taste clean, like the smell of the Arctic sea, only sweeter. I close my eyes and quietly drift with the water. We have plenty of time and urchins while we wait for Roddie Sloan to reappear from the freezing sea.

Sloan had known this was a good day to fish, he says, because the sea eagle had told him. "Like most fishermen I have superstitions," he says. "If I don't see an eagle, I know it will be a bad day." And winter days here – if you can call barely four hours of dim light a day – can be very bad. He tells me of a five-hour battle through 4m waves to get his tiny boat the final kilometre home. Luckily, today the fjords are calm, the sun is shining and as we fill the boat with urchins and clams, Roddie Sloan and Pawel "The Fish" Laskowski are happy.

Just a few years ago, Sloan was ready to quit the sea. The millions he dreamed he'd make from diving had failed to materialise, unlike his second son (he now has three). Anxious about how to support his family, Sloan hung up his wetsuit to study engineering. But then came a phone call that would change his life. 

"I remember the day," he tells me later as I stoke the log fire in our borrowed white wooden house on a tiny island in the fjord. "It was a sunny Sunday, a beautiful autumn afternoon, Lindis [his wife] is making dinner while I am standing on the terrace. The phone rings. It's a chef wanting urchins but I tell him he is too late. It isn't fair to my wife any more, it is over.

"In my mind I already had autumn organised," he continues. "I was going to university. We spoke for about an hour, about sea urchins and other foods from the sea, but he was a two-star and I had been supplying Le Louis XV [Alain Ducasse's three-Michelin-star palace in Monaco]. I was polite but I wasn't interested.

"When we had finished, Lindis asked who it was," he says. "Some Danish chef, I told her, calling from Nimrod or Nana, I don't care. I am going back to school."

It was, of course, René Redzepi from Noma.

Under pressure from Lindis – a super-smart Norwegian gender specialist and government adviser – Sloan succumbed but tripled his price: "If you don't want to do something, you hike the cost," he says. "But I didn't want Lindis to be angry."

It was a fragile start to a life-changing friendship. "With René," he says, "the price doesn't much matter, it is about the product. This was an extremely new experience for me." But Sloan was intent on leaving the sea. "I still wanted to study, so he was my only client."

A few weeks later, Redzepi turned up. "He was wearing trainers to go to sea," Sloan laughs. "He had a new hat, he had duty-free, but was in all the wrong clothes. We kitted him and took him out for four hours. The season was finished, it was minus 22. We talked about changing nappies, about family, philosophy and sea urchins.

"I realised I really like this guy," he says. "I am a loyal dog – once I have made up my mind, it takes a lot to get rid of me. I tell him we will change the price, he tells me he wants 50kg a week."

Next, he ate his green urchins at Noma: "It was a dish of 'frozen pebbles and sea urchins' – an amazing taste sensation, suddenly I saw what he saw." Sloan, a Scottish economic exile from Dumfries, transplanted to Nordskot, an Arctic hamlet of 80 people, had found another new home. "Noma has become 'my kitchen' in a way," he says. "I can drop in for tea, coffee, maybe curl up under a table."

Through Redzepi and his MAD [food] symposium in Copenhagen (Sloan was a reluctant but compelling speaker at the second event in 2012), he has found validation and a viable market with many of Europe's top chefs now clamouring to buy from him.

Fäviken's Magnus Nilsson again: "We met the first time in Copenhagen … I looked into a pair of glistening blue eyes and heard the words, 'I am Roddie the urchin diver, you are my closest chef [they're more than 600km apart by road], we need to work together.' We soon found a logistical solution that was manageable for us both in terms of money and quality, which involves a couple of ferries, a firm of removal men and a monthly bribe of a box of beer. The produce arrives every Tuesday at Fäviken and it includes the best sea urchins I have ever seen anywhere."

This season – late September to January – Sloan will also be supplying UK restaurants including St John. For now at least, wild talk of further education is on hold.

Ask Roddie Sloan about his relationship with his adopted community, the Arctic sea, and its produce, and his voice becomes quieter. We make tea and talk about Nordskot's oldest inhabitant, 81-year-old Finn Ediassen, who started fishing aged eight and taught Sloan "all I know about ropes and knots". He tells me how this community nestled at the foot of an austere mountain range at the top of the world had carved a precarious living fishing and whaling but now there was no work; how they had indulged his obsession with the urchins and clams they still only think of as bait. 

The fire crackles. The Arctic light dips. Sloan's eyes shine as tells me of his pride in how they have taken him in, recognising a kindred wild spirit bewitched by the sea.

But it is when he talks about being a warden for his beloved urchins that Sloan comes alive. The green is one of 700 species, 500m years old, he says. "The quality starts in the sea – how you pick it up with your hand, how many you have in the net. How you handle it, how you fish it.

"They have changed my life, these beautiful creatures," he says. "My mother doesn't understand it. For her, they are still something my Aunty Jean brought back from her holidays. But they have given me a community, friendships, food. They have given me a place, a proper life."

All the while, a few urchins shyly shift and move as we talk. As daylight finally fades, I watch entranced as they dance on spikes across the kitchen table. "They are very precious to me," Sloan says softly.

Later, I am sitting drinking smoky scotch when Roddie Sloan calls from his home in the village. "Look outside," he says, simply. "Northern lights." 

So I stand on the terrace of my Arctic explorer's island cottage and watch as the sea and sky come alive. I see electric greens shoot and pulse over the forbidding horizon as though orchestrated to an unheard symphony. I watch the sky and fjord turn the intense colour of limes and the stark icy mountains take on an unearthly mauve. And for the next three hours as I drink whisky and watch, I almost envy Roddie Sloan his hermit life, the few hours of daylight, the many hours spent diving in the icy water. But then I remember the forecast is for more storms, more snow and minus 15 and I shudder and return to the fire.

For more information, email arctic.caviar@gmail.com; Twitter: @Roddiesloan

The singer was showing off his $100,000 kitchen. Was a sandwich really all he could muster?

There was a seminal article in Esquire in 1966 by Gay Talese entitled "Frank Sinatra has a cold". This photograph could be entitled: "Frank Sinatra has a sandwich".

Sinatra had just installed a $100,000 kitchen in his Palm Springs home. That represented, in 1964, when this picture was taken, the definition of "made it" – a man with a $100,000 income was on his way to the Forbes 500. Frank had just spent that on a kitchen. And been photographed eating a (I assume baloney or some such) sandwich. He wasn't naturally profligate – though he had given away $50,000 worth of gold cigarette lighters by the age of 30.

Frank's relations with food were fraught. On one hand he loved clams Posillipo, and ricotta torte for dessert; or veal Milanese, "paper thin", according to Salvatore Scognamillo, of Patsy's in Midtown, his favoured restaurant in New York. On the other, he abused fellow diners. There's an account in Craig Brown's book Hello Goodbye Hello of the Vanity Fair columnist Dominick Dunne, who had offered unto Sinatra some imagined slight. "[Dunne] was having dinner at the Bistro in Los Angeles when Sinatra, clearly drunk, abused him loudly from a neighbouring table. Sinatra then turned his venom on… Lauren Bacall, Maureen O'Sullivan and Swifty Lazar in rapid succession. Finally he grabbed the tablecloth and pulled it from beneath all their plates and glasses, threw a plate of food over Lazar, and stomped out."

Do we forgive him for his unforgiving nature? For his continual capacity for reinvention, yes. For his hairpiece, no. For In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning, a thousand times yes. For his championing, ever, of African-Americans, again a thousand times. A savage angry small man, and torn, yet so blessed.