By admin 
My first food memory is when my father came back from Arabia. He was in the military and traveled a lot, and I hadn’t seen him in a while. He took me to the corner store where they sold broken cookies for pennies. They weren’t luxurious, but he carried me home on his shoulders and I thought, life doesn’t get any better than this.
My mother was a good, if somewhat resentful, cook. When I came home from school, there would often be a burnt pan on the back step because she got tired of looking at it. She swore in the kitchen and said, ‘Damn hell of buggeration.’ Women didn’t swear much in the 1970s.
We were in Malaysia at the time I was very young and my mother did a real curry course. This was in the late 1960s when Vesta instant curries were popular in England. She was quite snobbish about things like that. She called them ‘packet manure’ and cooked her curries from scratch. Her specialty was a shrimp and egg curry, with small bowls of desiccated coconut and peanuts.
We also had things like beans on toast. Although I can’t eat them now as I have developed an allergy to tomatoes. And I love tomatoes.
When my dad got out of the army, he went back to college and we were bald for a few years. So there was a lot of minced meat: spaghetti bolognese, shepherd’s pie and lasagna. With good minced meat, not school minced meat. I have never made a lasagna in my life. My mother could, but she didn’t like it and mumbled under her breath all the time. But she was a housewife: it was part of the deal.
I enjoyed school lunches because I was very greedy. I didn’t like liver and onion – an acquired taste that I didn’t acquire. There was a lot of gravy, which I enjoyed. Potatoes also roast, and we always took them out of the can and put them in our bags for later.
When the family lived in Malaysia, Jenny’s mother took a curry course.
When I was young, I would take sweets. I was a typical 70s candy store addict: coke cubes, sherbet dip dabs, flying saucers and penny chews like Black Jacks and Fruit Salads.
At Manchester Polytechnic theater school we lived in the canteen and I got really fat. I subsisted on cider, crisps, pies and sausage rolls with very thick dough, which I got from the bakery. If you dropped one on your foot, you would break a toe.
Drama teachers in those days were not only allowed to sleep with you, but could also tell you that you were fat. The teacher who told me I was fat didn’t even sleep with me when I got skinny, which I thought was rude. I went on a diet and didn’t know how to stop. For ten years of my life, eating was not something relaxing and enjoyable. It was a struggle, a lot of procrastination, distrust, not having lunch until 3pm – which was actually an absolute nightmare.
Sherbert bip dabs were a sweet shop favorite
I can’t really stand offal. I don’t like duck or fish with bones either. Oysters, mussels and whelks too. If you have to take something out with a pin, I don’t do that.
I don’t have hangovers anymore. I fear them because they are so debilitating. But the hangover food was always a bacon sandwich with brown sauce, not red. God, I miss red sauce.
My comfort food is cheese, and 5 p.m. is cheese hour. I love Babybel, and I really enjoy taking it out of the wash.
Eating on tour isn’t as difficult as it used to be, because of the M&S and Waitrose stores on the highway. You just have to think ahead. Every green room has a disgusting microwave. So if you want to take control of your life, you can heat up some soup.
I always have low-calorie mayonnaise in the refrigerator. I have it on pretty much everything.
My last dinner would be a good roast. And a smoky ham with roasted beetroot. I like coleslaw and gravy. Don’t make me choose. I’ll just take them both.
Jokes, jokes, jokes by Jenny Eclair (Small, Brown, £25). To order a copy for £21.25 until November 24, visit mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25.