Maybe clipping my own coriander and knowing what de-glazing means is about to grow on me

Mum never taught me anything about cooking other than the joy of licking out an enamel baking bowl, and she took no pleasure in the eternal task of week in week out work. “Ooh,” she would sigh, “wun’t it be good if you could just eat a pill instead of all that cooking and washing up, just to start it all over again. And when you think about it, where does it go? Down the toilet!”

So it was always a shock to her that I would find it quite relaxing at the end of a day’s rehearsal to pour a glass of wine and conjure up something on the spur of the moment from whatever was in the fridge.

“Ooh, I don’t know how you do it,” she’d say. “One minute there’s nothing to eat and the next she’s got all this food out of nowhere without planning any of it from scratch.’’

“Mo-om, it’s just an omelette,’’ I would mutter.

I was recently surprised to read that no one makes traditional puddings of spotted dick and jam roly-poly anymore. Perhaps more surprising, I not only googled meringue and apple pie, but actually got moving and made it – and watched it go down a treat with the kids. Maybe clipping my own coriander and knowing what de-glazing means is about to grow on me. I did a mean Moroccan lamb casserole this week – remembering in a sweat, at the last minute, that the way to lower the kind of spiciness that takes your skull off is to add potatoes, lemon juice and a blob of tahini.

Anyway, there have been, and are some, innovative Jewish cooks, and although I will never be one of them, I can admire and respect their excitement about food. Florence Greenberg nee Oppenheimer was born in 1882, and having trained as a nurse was in Egypt at the time of the Armistice and remained there for another six months. She returned to Islington in 1919 and was married in my shul, the West London, to the then editor of this paper, Leonard Greenberg. I love it that, noting there was no cookery column in the JC, Greenberg told her: “You’re a brilliant cook, write a column,” which, carrying ‘love, honour and obey’ to new heights, she did for the next 40 years.

Evelyn Rose, born in Manchester in 1925, took over the position, bringing Jewish cookery into a more health conscious and contemporary mode. Sharing the job latterly with her daughter Judi, she even took to television in its first wave of cookery mania. She was famously evacuated to California as a child during the war, and auditioned for the role of Velvet Brown in the film National Velvet. Another English Jewish convert, not known for doing anything to food save eating a lot of it, pipped her at the post – a 12-year-old Elizabeth Taylor.

Then along came Claudia Roden. Born in Cairo in 1936, she widened the palette further to include the Sephardic and Middle Eastern culture as well as cookery, paving the way for Yotam Ottolenghi to take over the air waves, bookshops and the high street.

Nigella Lawson added a lick of the bedroom to the kitchen, and together with Giles Coren and Jay Raynor, threw out the ethics of kosher food and milchig and fleishig. In fact if any of these three didn’t lace their food reviews with “soft shell crabs, nestling in a larded pheasant coulis with panko pork scratchings and a gelatine milk stout” one might wonder if they’d given up and gone on the Ozempik.

Returning though to my meringue, a final joke: two Scottish ladies in a tea shop and one says to the other;

“Will you have a piece of chocolate cake or a meringue?”

“No, you’re right,” says the other one. “I’ll have the chocolate cake.’’

Not as funny as the man who was then Diana Rigg’s boyfriend, way back in 1976, who laughed like hell at the meringue joke and was heard later re-telling it in his cut-glass accent thus:

“Two Scottish ladies in a tea shop and one says to the other;

“Will you have a piece of chocolate cake or am I wrong?”

Not a week has gone by, in 50 odd years, that I haven’t had a quiet shmerchle about that particular food for daydreams.