I like the idea that I cook different things from my mum and dad, but I also like the idea that part of what I cook I inherited from them,” he says. This is food writing as it should be: a triumphant mix of childhood memories, family feasts, political machinations and always good food. Yet for the past six years Balls has given every impression of being that rarest of beasts: a happy freelancer, and politician actually enjoying being out of office. He doesn't refer to this in the book much, which was in my humble opinion, well done or a good editor?

If you try to go too early to consolidate with austerity and cutting the state, you’ll make things worse. I loved his competitiveness when it came to his favourite family recipes in "Celebrity Best Home Cook" and it was very interesting to watch as the former and I would say life-long labour politician compete with the sister of our then future and now former worst-ever prime minister. Ed Balls was just three weeks old when he tried his first meal in 1967: pureed roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Recipes such as his mum’s lasagne, and apple and blackberry crumble aren’t fancy or fiddly but they’re a glorious celebration of family food at its finest. This is more like Yvette’s kitchen,” he adds, throwing his wife, Yvette Cooper MP, under the slovenly bus.I haven’t actually tried his revolutionary sounding sponge cake which uses double cream rather than butter; let’s keep an open mind here.

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. Disoriented by a menu that featured polenta, Brown didn’t eat, instead wolfing down a steak back at HQ. His stories of early childhood, from eating pureed roast beef at just three weeks old to his first experience in a restaurant at 13 years old, cast light on how the social norms of our eating habits have morphed in a mere 40 years. Yet long after the memories of Strictly and Celebrity Best Home Cook have faded, the UK will still not be in the euro, the Bank of England will still be independent, the NHS will still be at the heart of British life. On the night of 7 May 2015, Ed Balls thought there was a chance he would wake up the next morning as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.This may result in small marks to the dustjacket and title page, please also bear in mind that each signature will be a little different from the one we show here. His stories resonated with the listeners at Durham Book Festival, as tales of Sunday roasts and the quirks of family eating awakened the audience’s collective memories.

It’s also true that the pandemic has provided utter vindication to a Ballsian view of stimulus spending. He cooks it every Sunday for his MP wife Yvette Cooper and their three children, served it to his campaign team the night before his political career ended, and prepared it for Little Mix's Jade Thirlwall and Leigh-Anne Pinnock after they scaled Mount Kilimanjaro together for Comic Relief. It’s also a loving tribute by a son to a mother who is no longer cooking in the family home but in a care home for her dementia. The result is Appetite, an entertaining memoir told through food, complete with recipes for key dishes in his life.

However, it's not just those things, he takes you on your own trip down memory lane as he goes on his life/food journey, reminding you of yours which is pretty special I think. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives. A note for the publishers: please, please add a line at the end endorsed by one of the dementia organisations regarding NOT IGNORING signs of memory loss or dementia, it’s imperative to speak to your family GP and arrange for a memory test. The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network. Nice to be reminded of life in the 60s and 70s - remember you needed both the Radio Times and the TV Times to know what was on 'all three channels'.

But you might as well find that out now rather than on your deathbed, because it leaves you time to do something about it.But these recipes at the close of his chapters are moving – testimony to a time when mothers knew how to cook, and did, and fathers liked food plain rather than fancy, even though his parents had lived in the US with Balls senior’s job as an academic, and were later to spend time in Italy.