Appetite: A Memoir in Recipes of Family and Food

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View image in fullscreen ‘She’s like a snail, you can see wherever she’s been’: Ed Balls with his wife Yvette Cooper. I spent years in a world where there was this drive and competition to get to the top and to feel the pressure of that.

Then last summer, after Covid torpedoed a documentary he planned to make about Trump’s America, he entered – and won – the BBC’s Celebrity Best Home Cook, beating a group including the comedian Ed Byrne and Rachel Johnson, journalist and sister of Boris, for the approval of Mary Berry. It’s also true that the pandemic has provided utter vindication to a Ballsian view of stimulus spending.

I think the world he came from where the roast beef cooked while the family were at church (he’s an agnostic now, poor thing) with the remainder served up as shepherd’s pie on Monday, had an awful lot going for it. I was inspired after reading it to watch the recent series Best Celebrity Home Cook (series still available on iPlayer), on which Ed was a contestant, and it was an opportunity to see some of the recipes in action, including the famous lasagne.

A butterfly flapped its wing, David Cameron promised a referendum on the EU, Ed Miliband ate a bacon sandwich. As for treacle tart, it is, like so much food from these islands better simple than fancy: white breadcrumbs, lemon juice and golden syrup rather than Balls’ rather odd sounding croissant and apple mix. Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding is indeed the best thing you can eat, but I maintain that beef dripping (fat) from the joint, smoking hot is preferable to Ed’s groundnut oil – and while roast potatoes can indeed be fabulous with olive oil, they too are even better cooked in dripping.

Whether it’s the book of his favourite recipes he gives to each of his children on their 18th birthday or the time he spends teaching his father to make a cheese soufflé, he demonstrates that food is a way of showing he cares. After Labour lost in 2010, Balls came third in the ensuing leadership contest behind the brothers Miliband, and emerged as the obvious choice to become shadow chancellor. A roast like the one his mother would have on the table at the family home in Norwich every Sunday in the 1970s.

I noted how the finer details of recipes were sometimes lacking, for instance: how big a shoulder of pork for the bbq recipe?Balls has always been a keen home chef, the primary meal-maker for himself, Yvette and their three children, Ellie, 22, Joe, 20, and Maddy, 17. Twenty-one years earlier he had left a promising career in journalism to work for Labour in opposition.