Now with a new epilogue, the UK's most influential food and drink journalist shoots a few sacred cows of food culture. Meanwhile, Manchester is to get a new craft beer and food space, just as soon as restrictions lift. Society, which will be located on Barbirolli Square, will house two bars, plus five food outlets from the likes of Falafel Guys and Dokes Pizzeria. It’s a sister operation to Assembly Underground in Leeds.

If it wasn’t empty shelves in supermarkets through suddenly increased demand for home cooking, it was the nature of being forced to eat together in a family unit, or alone when we didn’t have one. It was about the communal experiences in cafes and restaurants of which we had been robbed. It was about so much more than just how things tasted. Which was when the idea of collecting these columns together arose. They were all about the detailed pleasure and pain of the table. It’s in the nature of a column written for a newspaper supplement that some are tagged to events in the news, but many more have ranged far and wide across the edible landscape in a less time-fixed manner. There is no dessert on the menu today, but at weekends they serve cherry pie. These have already been made in preparation for the rush. And yes, if I ask nicely, they will pop one in the oven. A note of warning: it is a dish with a sugared pastry crust. If you are livid about this being described as a pie because there isn’t pastry all the way round, please write to your MP. They’ve not got much on at the moment. Beneath that toffeed crust is what happens to fresh cherries cooked down in sugar syrup for a long time. On the side is a gravy boat of double cream. The dish is a tenner, and is designed to serve two, even if one of them is me. Jason Matthew Rayner [3] (born 14 September 1966) is an English journalist and food critic. He was raised in Harrow, London, and studied politics at the University of Leeds, where he edited the Leeds Student newspaper. After graduating, he worked as a freelance journalist for newspapers including The Observer and The Independent on Sunday. He became the Observer restaurant critic in 1999. Rayner has also written several books. It led to a stint as a reporter for The One Show on BBC One, for whom I made more than 150 short reports. I came to love those which showed us exactly where our food comes from; not just the touchy-feely, niche artisan stuff of farmhouses and kitchen tables – although there was a bit of that – but the complex, large-scale business of freezing a pea crop within 45 minutes, or harvesting carrots in the middle of the night, when it is good and cold. I skimmed across a silvery Morecambe Bay at dawn’s low tide to fish for brown shrimps, and stood in a tank with a massive farmed halibut in my arms, while it was milked for its sperm. It was a varied life.

I remained a reporter, investigating the tangled politics and economics of food supply chains and national health policy.

Edo in the centre of Belfast also has a smoky, live fire focus to its cooking courtesy of the wood burning Bertha oven at the heart of the kitchen. Much of chef Jonny Elliott’s menu is a robust take on classic tapas: there are croquetas, tortillas and padron peppers. But there are also salt room aged steaks and fish dishes sent for a spin through the intense heat of the apple and pear wood-burning Bertha ( edorestaurant.co.uk). That thoroughness is a function of Roden’s reluctance to stop researching. The book was 16 years in the making and was only eventually published because of an intervention by her American editor. Judith Jones, also responsible for shepherding the likes of Anne Frank, John Updike and Julia Child to publication, had to wrest it from her hands. “I just wanted to carry on travelling the world and talking to people,” Roden says now. I wanted to carry on travelling the world and talking to peopleThis was another age when words like biryani needed translation’:Jay’s lamb biryani, from Madhur Jaffrey’s book. Photograph: Jay Rayner

What really gives the volume its rolling swagger, though, is the outrageous text. “You’re buying White Heat because you want to cook well? Because you want to cook Michelin stars? Forget it,” the introduction begins. “Go and buy a saucepan. You want ideas, inspiration, a bit of Marco? Then maybe you’ll get something out of the book.” He was barely 30 and he was already talking about himself in the third person. One brooding White image is captioned: “At the end of the day it’s just food, isn’t it?” It’s food he’s willing to dismiss out of hand. “This is disgusting; it’s a horrible dish,” he says alongside a shot of his assiette of chocolate. “It’s vulgarity pure and simple. It’s a dish invented for suburbia; it should be called ‘chocolate suburbia’.” Hilariously, Harveys was located on a suburban shopping parade. He once announced that I was specifically not invited to his new restaurant in Cardiff’s Hotel Indigo But now they had their first child, a pregnancy which had encouraged in Cassie such a profoundly sweet tooth she started making fudge (stay with me; these things will all tie up eventually). Off to the West Midlands they went in search of affordable housing. Cassie set up Sweetmeat Inc, a fudge-making business on the high street in Stirchley just to the south of Birmingham city centre. James took cheffing jobs, but also cooked his Chinese food at pop-ups.It puts the “call my cardiologist” into “lush”’: Rhodes’s custard tart. Photograph: Sîan Irvine/BBC Worldwide Ltd In 1997 he won a Sony Radio Award for Papertalk, BBC Radio Five Live's magazine programme about the newspaper business, which he presented. He chairs a BBC Radio 4 programme called The Kitchen Cabinet. [9] A t the age of 16 I was the youngest child of an extremely successful and famous person [journalist and TV agony aunt Claire Rayner], and I was trying to find my own way in the world. My 16th was the most dramatic year of my adolescence, for a bunch of reasons. It was the year that I lost a lot of weight, and weight had been a preoccupation throughout my young life. It was the year I was thrown out of school for four months and plastered all over the national press. And it was the year that my closest friend was killed in a mountaineering accident. So it was a very, very dramatic year for me. In 2015, a 25th anniversary edition of White Heat was published, full of testimonials to the book’s brilliance by chefs it had influenced. One of those was the young lad from Nottingham who had only been able to afford it because he found it in a charity shop. “How mad is that?” Sat Bains says. Three decades on from its first publication there is no doubt: to a certain type of chef White Heat and Marco Pierre White still matter.