At three weeks old Ed Balls was fed puréed roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. The former shadow chancellor has, perhaps wisely, included this as an anecdote rather than a recipe in a new autobiographical cookbook inspired by his mother’s meals.
Entitled Appetite and featuring on the cover a grinning photograph of Balls as a child, the cookbook features one recipe per chapter, intertwined with tales from the former Labour MP’s life and what he learnt from his mother, Carolyn Riseborough.
Balls, 54, described it as a “memoir in recipes” yesterday, explaining that it starts with “my first roast beef dinner at the ripe age of three weeks old”. NHS advice tells parents to start children on solid foods from around eight months, but Balls said of his unusually early first experience of solid food: “I’m told the health visitor was adamant.” Delia Smith has described the book as “delightfully different” and the publisher’s synopsis says: “Taught to cook by his mother, he’s now passing these recipes on to his own children as they start to fly the nest . . . Appetite is a celebration of love, family, and good food.”
Balls, who served as shadow chancellor from 2011 until he lost his seat in 2015, has embarked on a media career and in February won the BBC’s Celebrity Best Home Cook. On Twitter he calls himself a “Dad, cook, pianist, economist”.
The book will be published on August 19.
