Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights. Sophie Dahl

tomato sauce and dear little cream-filled pastries for pudding. The pub at the top of the hill was all about jacket potatoes and a fine ploughman’s. But what jacket potatoes—twice-baked and filled with butter, gruyère and watercress, or the alternative: tuna, mayonnaise and sweetcorn. I think I tried to go on a diet once, and it involved, from what I can remember, eating a lot of brown rice and apples and lethicin, because a friend of my mother’s told me that they all lived on it in the seventies and that it melted fat clean away. In the sixth form games were no longer compulsory, and I began to feel the same way about school, causing an academic rift that I rue to this day.

      Between school and modelling, before I met Isabella, I was first a nanny, then a waitress. Both were perilous where food was concerned. As a nanny, I was constantly picking at leftover fishfingers, Twiglets, egg sandwiches and Victoria sponge. The two girls I looked after were incredibly sweet: a round baby and a six-year-old with a voice like Marianne Faithfull. We went to lots of rather posh tea parties where the mothers greeted me as ‘Nanny’. I adored the little girls but was a bit hopeless really; not ironing their clothes, taking naps with them and trying on their mother’s scent when she was out. I was very much eighteen. We did, however, make each other laugh, and I loved Jaffa Cakes as much as they did.

       I tottered off to the woods, lamely clutching a saw

      And not for me the kind of waitressing job where I ran on skinny legs around a steamy frantic environment, collapsing at the end of a twelve-hour shift in sheer anaemic exhaustion. No, I went to work the 7.00 am shift in a coffee-shop bakery after the baking had already taken place. Thus, my arrival coincided happily with things coming out of the oven; a muffin with apple butter, a dark molasses banana bread. I think it was my all-time favourite job. It involved chatting, smiling, eating and concocting lovely coffee-based milkshakes which I would sip through the day. I was an awful waitress, because I was clumsy and could never remember anyone’s order. But they were terribly sweet there, and I learnt how to sweep a floor properly, and that you cannot wear five-inch peep-toed mules to waitress in.

       I was dripping in diamonds and not much else

      When I began modelling after those brief jobs, I was completely unprepared for the onslaught of curiosity it carried with it. I was in that funny teenage place of being both very aware of, and yet somehow forgetting I had a body. I wanted to look the same as my friends; I wanted to be able to borrow their clothes. Beyond that, I didn’t think about it too deeply.

      Issy had never told me to lose weight; she had just said rather vaguely, ‘Now, my love; no more chips and puddings for you, and always wear a good bra and red lipstick.’ My concession to this advice was a DIY diet; eating instant powdered soup with dry pitta bread for three days, which was revolting, and certainly had no effect. I ended up being measured for a bra at Rigby and Peller, which had an infinitely more tangible result than the soup, and also developed a lifelong love affair with Yves Saint Laurent’s Rouge Pur, which smells of roses.

      It was Issy who introduced me to Sarah Doukas, the founder of Storm Model Management, and when she signed me, weight loss was nowhere on the day’s agenda. Sarah is famously visionary; she discovered Kate Moss at JFK airport when she was fourteen and manages her to this day. With her customary canniness, she saw that there might actually be a place for me in fashion, given the vocal protest the media were making against the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look that was defining style. The timing, and her instinct, made a happy marriage to set the scene for what was about to happen.

      My first job was being photographed nude by Nick Knight for ID magazine. They gave me five-inch long silver nails, silver contact lenses and a canvas of skin powdered silver. I don’t remember feeling naked; I felt like an onlooker, such was the transformative power of the hair and make-up, which took four hours. The overriding memory I have of that day is of being turned into someone else; some alter ego with comic-book curves and a rapacious smile. Being naked seemed almost incidental. A few hours later I was sent in a cab up to Park Royal to be shot by David La Chapelle for Vanity Fair in a portfolio about ‘Swinging London’, this time clad in a string bikini. When I went home late that night, I didn’t wash my make-up off because I wanted to wake up looking like that forever. Of course the next morning I was a smeared shell of a creature, my sheets covered in silver dust.

      A few weeks later, I boarded a train to Paris, carrying nothing but a little basket with my nightdress, knickers and a toothbrush, and went straight from the Gare du Nord to the house of Karl Lagerfield, who was shooting a story for German Vogue about King Farouk. Gianfranco Ferré was playing the part of the erstwhile king, and I his bawdy American mistress. I was dripping in diamonds and not a great deal else. I felt incredibly shy around Mr Lagerfield, who was kind yet reticent behind his fan, until he roared with laughter, pinched my cheeks and kissed me like an uncle. We stopped for a proper French lunch, a stew heavy with red wine, oozing cheese and crusty bread and little pots of dense, dark chocolate for pudding. I was in heaven. The shoot went on long into the night, and after everyone else had gone home he photographed me waltzing around his beautiful library, which shone with swathes of waxy lilies and hundreds of candles. At 3.00 am I walked across the street to the old-fashioned hotel where I was staying, and I lay in bed with my eyes wide open, unable to summon sleep. There was so much to absorb and evoke, from the books that lined the walls from floor to ceiling, to the church-like smell of the lilies, the cool of the diamonds as they slipped around my neck, the food…

      People had noticed me. Big women from all over the world wrote me congratulatory letters, commending my big bold form. Morning television shows wanted to interview me. Newspapers breathlessly reported my strange fleshy phenomena; a welcome backlash, finally, against the x-ray fashion industry. In the wake of the very angular, it seemed people wanted an anti-waif; a sensual woman who indulged in whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted it. By default, this became me. But reflection on what it represented and what it might mean had escaped me; no longer reliant on waitress’s wages, I was too busy skipping around London, Paris, New York and Milan, spending my modelling money in posh restaurants, city appropriate. I went to Nobu for the first time and nearly died with pleasure—that black cod! In Italy it was risotto, in Paris remoulade, and New York was just a culinary world mecca, full stop.

      I remember doing shows in the early days, happily squeezed into some mini little thing. Although a walk up and down a runway is over in minutes, you can register the faces of those you walk by in slow motion. I produced such a strange mixed reaction, one that was palpable. The more formidable fashion editors would sit there with their arms tightly crossed, looking embarrassed and rolling their eyes. Others would cheer and shout. The photographers at the end of the runway would sometimes catcall and whistle. It had been a long time since the advent of tits in fashion, so they were pretty enthused. I found a sort of sad teenage validation in this—not particularly thought-out or examined—something along the lines of ‘It’s men, whistling at me. They seem to fancy me. Hurrah! That must mean I’m kind of sexy.’

      Every woman in my family had been through a tricky adolescent over-spilling phase. The difference with mine was that it became both representative and a matter of public record, rather than something to look back on with tender mirth when presented with a family album. We always joked as a family about our greediness. We described events by what we ate. There was and is, a total ease and pleasure around food and cooking. My path has been a funny one; having come from such a background, to then find myself at a formative age dropped into the middle of an industry not exactly renowned for its epicurean appreciation. There’s something sort of fun and subversive about it. It was a slightly wiggly trajectory, but one full of interesting stuff.

      And guess what? I’m now right back where I was at seven, bar the penchant for coral lipstick and bad hats. I just couldn’t get away from the siren call of the kitchen that is an inherent part of me. The kitchen of which I speak is both literal and metaphoric. It’s the sum of what I’ve learnt so far, and am still learning.

      This kitchen is a gentle relaxed one, where a punishing, guilt-inducing attitude towards food will not be tolerated. In this kitchen we appreciate the restorative powers of chocolate. The kitchen would have a fireplace, and possibly a few dogs from Battersea Dogs’ Home curled up next to it. There might be a small upright piano by the window, with an orchid