Benjamin Benton

My grandmother, and many like her, kept an account book for household spending. This was not the product of an overbearing marriage or mistrust on anyone's behalf – it was simply how things were done at a time when habits had been formed during rationing after the second world war, and banking was manual and slow. I spent a lot of time observing her kitchen on childhood visits. It was where my lifelong obsession with cooking began, and I can still recall a sense of balance in how she shopped and cooked; she was fond of naughty treats and lavish cuts, but she kept a stock pot, knew her way around basic butchery and was reluctant to let anything go to waste.

It seems our course is set. Food prices are rising at the fastest rate in more than 40 years, taking the average family’s yearly grocery bill over £5,200 – and there’s no relief in sight. Lord Woolton would be rubbing his hands at a situation so ripe for his ingenuity and optimism – and perhaps his namesake pie and the national loaf might find themselves resuscitated before long. But his 1945 call for ‘a simpler diet’ of bread, potatoes and vegetable oils won’t help much in 2022. According to the Office for National Statistics, ‘low-cost’ everyday staples are seeing the greatest price rises of all, with the average cost increasing by 17 per cent in the past 12 months.

The phone rang, and on the other end of it was my father. ‘We’ve been thinking,’ he announced before we’d even exchanged pleasantries, ‘you need to get an air fryer. It’s the solution to these energy hikes.’ As a chef and writer with a couple of bestselling cookbooks under my belt, I was of course already familiar with the air fryer phenomenon. The countertop gadget, billed as more energy efficient than regular ovens, has been much hyped as a cost-saver as we face a winter of rocketing bills. But I’d quickly dismissed it as a fad.