Appetite: A Memoir in Recipes of Family and Food

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He provides us with some recipes that are perfect for home cooks, interspersed with Proustian passages of autobiography. The result is Appetite, an entertaining memoir told through food, complete with recipes for key dishes in his life. Credit cards not directly accepted, but credit card payment can be made via the US PayPal service, or via ABECom.

Sitting round the table year after year, the world around us may change, but great recipes last a lifetime.Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read an ARC of this delightful book. Appetite, however, is image free which is its loss considering we live in a world of readily accessible imagery. Appetite review ‑ Ed Balls reminisces his favourite recipes and food memories Ed Balls spent more than two decades in politics yet he's probably best known for his Gangnam Style salsa routine in Strictly Come Dancing.

The majority of these though are clearly prior fans of Ed Balls, from his participation in the celebrity dancing show and his hilarious Gangnam Style moves; they mentioned this upfront so I suspect glowing reviews would still have been forthcoming had a book been about lifelong involvement in seal clubbing. There are some amusing, often food-related anecdotes about politicians: Gordon Brown's (entirely unsurprising) dislike of fancy food, Peter Mandelson serving Ed an exquisite but alarmingly small lunch. I haven’t actually tried his revolutionary sounding sponge cake which uses double cream rather than butter; let’s keep an open mind here. Ed Balls was just three weeks old when he tried his first meal in 1967: pureed roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. He has a way with words and a nice line in self-deprecating anecdotes, which made me laugh and smile numerous times.Only the soggy bottomed meat pie, from TV celebrity bake-off, is mentioned and even here he disputes the ruling of the professional judges. The British political food book is not a crowded field, aside from Nigel Lawson’s diet guide, but it’s fertile ground. Listening to Balls back on his special subject, you wonder if there’s still a pilot light of political ambition flickering deep within.