‘There is no doubt I have appetites. I like my dinner. And my lunch’: Jay Rayner on food, diet and cooking at home

Jay Rayner became our restaurant critic 25 years ago. In this extract from his deliciously revealing new book, he shares memories – and recipes inspired by his favourite restaurant dishes

When I was eight or nine years old, my mother told me I had “the Greenspan arse”. I knew she meant it fondly. John Greenspan, who was stocky and bearded, was my mother’s first cousin, the child of a great-aunt I had never met. He was a regular visitor to our house, along with his brood; a sweet and funny man who treated us kids like people who were a part of the conversation. I liked him, which was good because he was also my childhood dentist, although I later concluded he was only marking time. John, who died in 2023, eventually moved from London to San Francisco, where he became an eminent professor of dental surgery and a world-renowned researcher into Aids/HIV. I did not share his academic prowess. Apparently, I only shared his arse.

My mother’s point was that a branch of our family, the Greenspans, of which I was clearly a part, had a genetic predisposition to hefty, tree-trunk thighs and magnificent bottoms. We were a tribe of Jewish immigrants who, through hard work possibly driven by a paranoia that our host country might not always be welcoming, had done well for ourselves. And yet for all that, like most British Jews, we were essentially peasants from the Russian steppe, where the winters are hard and the pickings once meagre. Natural selection had favoured those of us with slower metabolisms and a tendency to store calories, in our case around our ripe-apple middles. If I wanted to know who I was, I only needed to take my clothes off and stand before a mirror. Behold: the Greenspan arse.

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