Tune into new episodes of the podcast as celebrity guests throw the cupboard doors wide open on their lives, told through memorable food moments. Listen to Comfort Eating with Grace Dent wherever you get your podcasts. Comfort Eating book Have I made a single recipe from the book? No (and there are only six). But halfway through reading it, in the grips of a lung infection and the mournful last days of summer, I did find myself thinking about boiled eggs and Marmite toast in a way that felt almost metaphysical. My new Guardian podcast, Comfort Eating, in which I talk to famous folk about their food secrets, is my dream opportunity for an honest chat. Interviewing celebrities is always a bit of a tussle: they arrive semi-spikily, bearing lists of things they don’t want to talk about, or they don’t want to be there at all, or they’ve been a prisoner all day in a hotel suite, repeating dull anecdotes about their latest project. Now that Dent makes her living as a restaurant critic and television personality, firmly ensconced in the London liberal elite, all this might feel a bit put on, except that her affection is tangible, her humour tweezer-sharp and the writing as strong as a Christmas stilton.

Grace’s new Comfort Eating book, inspired by the podcast, is out now. It’s a wonderfully scrumptious, life-affirming journey through the foods that really mean the most to us. Chippy teas, gas fires, formidable older female relatives, Saturday morning telly, sliced bread, pyjamas, pebble dash, margarine and wind-whipped beaches smelling of vinegar are everywhere in this book. Because, of course, to talk about comfort food is so often to talk about childhood, home, family and formative experiences. Dent's affection is tangible, her humour is tweezer-sharp and the writing is as strong as a Christmas stilton But what Dent really wants to write about, it seems to me, is nostalgia. This is a book shot through with a certain kind of recollection of northern, working-class family life in all its funny and poignant detail. As Dent puts it herself: “There’s nothing about life in late 20th-century north-west England that isn’t faintly hilarious in print, and I would not swap a single, solitary second.” This is a book that’s not just about comfort but also sadness, suffering and grief; the first series of Comfort Food was recorded just after Dent had nursed her mother during the last weeks of her life, and there is a tinge of heartache to much of what’s described here. All of which makes for a particular kind of slightly mournful, slightly camp, slightly wistful philosophy, typified by statements such as: “Life is impermanent, and everything changes. I love tinned pasta because I like to cling to the small things that are constant.”