OK, the world really doesn't need another cook book, particularly from someone who has never actually worked in a restaurant kitchen. But then again, nor has Delia, and she hasn't done badly.

I can already hear my old mate Bruce Felstead giggling sarcastically at my suggestion of writing a different type of cook book, if there is such a thing. Bruce was once Chef at Trevor Oliver's Cricketers Pub in Essex and claims to have played a profound part in son Jamie's early training in his Dad's kitchen.

However, you don't need to be a classically trained chef to have a deep understanding of cooking and I've been fascinated by food for most of my life; reading about it, talking about it, watching TV programmes about it, arguing about it, experimenting with it and, naturally, cooking and eating it.

My introduction to cooking began as a kid in Walthamstow, East London, and my 'teacher' was, of course, my Mum. She was, I thought, the best cook in the world, mainly because she was at that time the only cook I knew.

If we ever visited relatives we would be presented with a salad spread (which has little to do with cooking) and I certainly never entered a restaurant until I was about 15, so my dear old Mum was probably the only person who ever cooked for me for a least my first decade and a half.

So how did it all start?

As an 8 year old kitchen assistant.

We had a family of 6, including my brother and two sisters. Both my parents worked and the rest of us were all at the same Blackhorse Lane School and yet somehow I, the youngest, was always the first home each day.

And this meant that before I bogged off for a game of football or cricket on the green downstairs, within view of our balcony, I would help my 'not home yet' Mum with a few bits of prepping for dinner, or teatime as it was then known!

This basically meant setting the table (or 'laying' the table, an expression that I stopped using years later when in the US after causing great, and rather naughty amusement) and peeling the potatoes which I vaguely remember we seemed to have every night.

Then I began to see other cooks on the television – and the first two I ever saw had, in my very young opinion, nothing whatsoever to do with cooking

There was Philip Harben, Britain's first TV chef. He was balding on top and with a beard, and if you saw him upside down (and I used to do headstands on the settee just to achieve this) he still had a face. But in my childhood days he was more like watching a chemistry teacher teach.

I'm sure I'm wrong – and apologies to any descendents of the long gone Mr Harben.

And then there were the Craddocks, Fanny and Johnny, and again unfortunately to my young eyes had nothing to do with cooking. But it was theatre. Pure cabaret.

Fanny was a frightening woman, an extra from The Wizard of Oz, and it seemed that Johnny, the totally down-trodden, hen-pecked husband, was permanently pissed.

And there was also often a young lad helping who I believe was called Peter, aged about 16, who was always in the middle quietly doing the prepping work while Fanny lectured us and Johnny demolished a bottle of Burgundy - and I'm sure that Fanny would occasionally fondle Peter's bottom as she walked behind him as he would sometimes twitch suddenly – dangerous when wielding a sharp knife.

But then it all changed and a new, exciting superstar appeared that would change my entire view of cooking – and he was Graham Kerr, aka The Galloping Gourmet, a Scot who was raised in London and spent some time in New Zealand leaving him with a quaint, gentle accent.

He was exciting. He was in colour (the others weren't) which somewhat helps a cooking programme. He was in a large studio with an audience. He had a number of cameras bouncing around. He cooked live on the telly and at the end of the programme he invited someone from the audience to taste and enjoy his work.

And he made mistakes, live, and somehow it didn't matter, and I'm quite sure that he did more than anyone in introducing foreign delights to the UK, particularly pasta which, before Graham Kerr, generally existed only as Spaghetti in tins and sugary sauce.

So this was for me and I've cooked ever since but I'm quite sure that my culinary upbringing and subsequent passion for food is not that common in the UK.

Our country has, for many years, had a rather poor reputation for cooking, sometimes quite rightly, sometimes unfairly and there are a number of reasons why this dismal perception of our food has come about.

IN THE BEGINNING

As I've just explained, I had an extraordinary beginning to my culinary life but this is rarely the case in Britain.

In many other countries, particularly Mediterranean lands such as France, Italy, Spain and Greece, cooking is a perfectly natural part of every girl's young education, and most boys, learning from their Mama, Papa or Grand-mere and most kids from such countries grow up with a rich understanding of cooking and food.

In Britain, sadly, this isn't the case and it isn't natural, normal nor expected for parents to teach their children how to cook, perhaps because many of those parents themselves have limited knowledge or experience (see below).

Once upon a time in the distant past, I believe that girls (note, not boys) had a 2-hour weekly lecturing at school under the guise of 'Domestic Science' (what the **** is that?) and I'm quite sure that taught them little.

So here we have, in my humble opinion, the first and rather major problem in Britain's perceived lack of cookery expertise – we are not naturally taught from childhood or from our schooldays!

MRS THATCHER'S BRITAIN

OK, it's not all Margaret's fault but her consumer-led ideals certainly added petrol to the flames of this issue – and it's a little un-PC, but that's life!

For most of our country's history, up until just after the 1950s just after the last War, there was an almost universal household structure in Britain where the husband went out to work and the wife stayed at home, washed the clothes, had babies and cooked.

Whether you think that is disgraceful or not is irrelevant – that was how it was since long before those Norman chaps paddled onto the beach near Hastings – but it does have a major bearing on Britain's latter-day cooking abilities.

Then in the 50s and 60s it all began to change as Britain emerged from the depredation of the War and, with the added excitement of television (often loudly American which opened up the whole new world to British people) we slowly became a consumer-led, product-hungry nation.

And as this change in lifestyle progressed, and the 60s became the 70s, more and more British women went off to work to earn that extra crust to help buy all those goodies that were now available and easily accessible to an average family. Women were becoming more career-minded, the sky was the limit and it was even thought that one day one could even become Prime Minister. Surely not?

But all good things have downsides and a sad by-product of this refreshing female revolution was that fewer women were cooking as they used to and, generally speaking, the husbands were just plain hopeless.

I have absolutely no doubt that this total change in family structure and lifestyle priorities had a profound affect on the lack of cookery expertise that ultimately became endemic in our kids, who then, of course grew up with less culinary knowledge, had children of then own and passed on their almost non-existent skills to their own offspring, who in turn grew up...

QUICK FIX FOOD

Another by-product of the same revolutionary period is the instant fast food phenomenon and as our lifestyles and priorities changed and our material expectations soared, we had less time in the kitchen, less inclination to cook and more money to spend.

So instead of cooking food, we bought it in the form of ready-made bread, ready-made pies, cartons of ready-to-cook lasagne, packets of frozen vegetables and people simply forgot how to cook anything from scratch with raw materials – and to a great extent this still applies today and a wander around any giant supermarket will show that possibly 99% of all foods are, to some extent, 'fast' foods.

This instant food world has brought about a plummeting of acceptable standards and a poor understanding of food quality as subsequent generations see, buy and taste such food as perfectly 'normal' fare.

It never ceases to disturb me when I have conversations with friends and family who; don't think that there's any difference between frozen and fresh fish; don't understand why anyone would want to make their own bread; don't understand the point of spending 3 or 4 hours cooking a complicated dish that you could buy 'ready-made' in a foil tray or marinade a leg of lamb for 2 whole days.

And I remember the wonder of the faces of my daughter-in-law and her 2 little girls as I cooked, in goose fat, especially for them, a batch of large hand-cut, blanched and triple-cooked 'Pont Neuf' Maris Piper chips.

They couldn't believe that it was possible to even cook your own chips (seriously!) and they thought that chips came either from the chippie or frozen in bags as tiny crunchy things and went into the oven for 15 minutes.

They couldn't believe that chips could taste so amazing.

COOKING BY NUMBERS

I suspect that I have well over a hundred cook books containing endless thousands of recipes from all over the globe and, with the wonders of the internet, I can probably locate almost any recipe for any dish in a few minutes.

That can be very helpful and extremely interesting, but the 'recipe' culture has brought with it a major problem in our household kitchens in that people are merely reading recipes (particularly the ones with nice pictures!), buying the bits and following orders.

How often do we visit friends for dinner and are told that "I hope you like the beef, it's a Gordon Ramsey" and then wondering why the hell it doesn't work, looks awful and tastes worse and the reasons are often quite obvious.

The big problem with incessantly following recipes is that you don't learn how to cook; you simply learn how to follow instruction (hence - 'cooking by numbers') and there are so many basic cooking principles that you should be aware of before you even attempt to emulate a 3-Star Michelin chef.

There are some books that do actually explain these principles as you waddle along through a recipe and it is vitally important that you understand what is happening to the raw material when you "do this, do that, marinade, roast, season" etc.

As you begin to absorb more and more knowledge, recipes take on a whole new aspect and you begin to understand why you are doing something, have the ability to alter it and even (shock, horror) create a recipe all by yourself – your own dish! And when you can achieve that, you've become a cook!

RAW MATERIALS

Perhaps one of the greatest differences between the Brits and the Meds is our general inability to appreciate excellent raw materials and identify poor ones!

The previously mentioned instant food culture has certainly been a major factor in this problem as most food purchased today simply isn't fresh anyway, but packaged, sealed or frozen and many shoppers rarely even have access to raw, fresh food other than the over chilled fruit & veg in supermarkets.

And even when a shopper does understand food quality and does have the opportunity of accessing raw food, the chances of having the permission to study it are virtually nil, and if you've ever picked up an apple in a greengrocers to smell it, or a plaice or herring in a fishmongers to do the same or check the gills – you'll understand my point.

You'll usually get seriously short shrift from a grumpy shop owner.

So most Brits do need a huge dose of education in the quality of those fabulous, fresh, raw materials that we have on offer – if you look for them.

This really starts with a sound knowledge of the seasons for all foods; vegetables, fruit, fish and meats, as food that is sold out of its natural growing season is almost undoubtedly imported and has probably been frozen, over-chilled, under-ripe or old.

Fresh fish has bright scales and eyes, rich red gills – and if it smells of fish, it's old.

Identifying good quality meats require a variety of different factors and too many to list here, but supermarket meat is generally produced more for the photographic studio than it is for the palate as it's considered far more visually saleable.

And fruit and vegetables are so often kept far too cold to help extend their shelf life which in turn drastically reduces both its flavour and nutritional content.

THE COLD VERSUS THE HOT

This may seem so obvious, yet I'm sure that almost everyone is guilty of completely ignoring the dreaded temperature problem – and it comes in two forms.

I have so often heard tales of "I followed the recipe exactly – in the oven Gas Mark 7 for 40 minutes – it wasn't cooked - didn't work at all" and with a little investigation you soon find it why.

When you put food into the fridge, strangely, it becomes very cold, (which is excellent as it's simply doing its job) and when you take it out of the fridge it has a habit of remaining cold, for quite some time.

So if you take a chicken out of a fridge at a temperature of say, 3C, and plonk it into an oven of say, Gas Mark 7 or 220C - the fridge has got a helluva start on the oven meaning that you need to allow the poor beast at least 30 minutes to reach room temperature before attempting cooking.

And people do this all the time, I've no doubt.

The other form of the temperature problem is that it's all very well following a recipe to the letter, and putting the old bird into an oven on Gas Mark 7 for 70 minutes but you have no idea what the temperature is because I doubt you've ever checked it.

At the back of your Gordon Ramsey book may be a little chart that says Gas Mark 7 is 220C or 425F, and he's right. So when did Gordon last pop round and check the temperature of your oven?

I'd like to think that we're seriously coming out the other side of all these problems and the standard and worldwide reputation for British food has enhanced immensily over the last few years..

So it should be.

We grow some of the finest fruit and vegetable available anywhere; the qualities of our dairy produce (whatever the French say) are often second to none and the fish and seafood around our coast are excellent, if a little less prolific.

And who knows? Thanks to the likes of many a TV chef such as Nigella and Jamie (the new Graham Kerr) the households in Britain are beginning to cook again – and, maybe soon, as well as anyone!

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From the 'never to be published' book, COOKING IN A CUPBOARD