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Amazing Grace
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The instant that we have been left to conduct our interview, surrounded by exquisite confections at the heavenly Cedric Grolet French patisserie counter in the heart of The Berkeley, Grace Dent turns to me. ‘So,’ she begins, ‘just to say that I won’t be answering any questions about my personal life or family. I’ve got a deal with Crosse & Blackwell soups that means I can’t mention any other brands, and my publicist will be coming in to wrap things up in 37 seconds.’ She pauses; a half-smile breaks the deadpan expression. And then comes the mischievous, gleeful bark of laughter that I know well from the years we have spent as fellow critics and hired gluttons on MasterChef.
Quote AuthorIt is typical Dent: a stiletto-sharp, highly specific bit of tension-breaking humour. But, of course, what makes it particularly funny is the notion that she would ever engage in anything like cagey evasiveness. Lacerating, playful honesty – whether as a columnist, broadcaster or author of Hungry, her award-winning account of her father’s struggle with dementia – has long been her signature. And that especially applies when it comes to the new book we are primarily here to talk about. Namely, Comfort Eating, an ostensible companion to her hit guilty culinary pleasures podcast that, in the writing, morphed into something far more exposed, raw and emotionally complex.
‘The book was supposed to be a cheery spinoff where I discuss Stephen Fry, Russell Tovey and Jo Brand coming to my house, and I link it to what I’ve learned about comfort food,’ she explains. ‘That was the genesis. But the fact is, I began both the podcast and the book in deep, high-functioning grief about my mother [Dent’s mother died in early 2021; her father passed away in late 2022]. I didn’t have any time off work.'
And I realised that, when I started to write this book, and my father was also dying, the things that I wanted to talk about – bread, cakes, childhood fish and chips, Sunday dinners and the importance of butter in my family – all felt like getting up in the morning and going into therapy.
The result of this extended reminiscing is a book of two distinct, hugely compelling sides. On the one hand, it is all characteristically uproarious stories from behind the scenes of Comfort Eating, tales from her 1970s childhood in Cumbria and why Aunt Bessie represents ‘laziness rebadged as love’. On the other, it is seasoned with moments of crisply observed, unflinching disclosure – about her family history, about her working life, about the bottomless, bleak reality of bereavement – that frequently take your breath away. It is because of all of this that, she jokes, the book could be subtitled ‘tinned ravioli and death’. But the poignant symmetry of the moments she was describing – such as scattering her parents’ ashes at the same Silloth beach where her family would go for rainy caravan holidays – was too powerful to deny. ‘I was a bit like, “Should I leave it in?”’ she says. ‘“Do I want to bum everyone out with this?” And then I just thought: if not now, then when?’
