This Thursday, the 27th of March, we are hosting our Spring Statement Coffee House Shots Live.

Shots regulars, Michael Gove and Katie Balls, will be joined by very special guests, Lord David Frost and Lord Maurice Glassman, just hours after the spring statement, or emergency budget, is announced.

They will be delving deeper into the measures and how they will reverberate throughout the political landscape.

And this will all be taking place at 7.30 at London's Cadogan Hall.

To get your tickets, go to www.spictator.com.com.com.com.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Hello and welcome to Table Talk, the spectator's food and drink podcast. I'm Lara Prendergast, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Lloyd Grossman, a man of many talents.

From gracing our screens as the host of Master Chef and through the keyhole to crafting a beloved line of pasta sources, Lloyd has left his mark on both the culinary and the cultural worlds.

He's also a renowned historian, author and advocate for heritage preservation.

Lloyd, welcome to Table Talk.

Thanks, Laura. Here I am. Here you are. Lloyd, we always start this podcast at the beginning. What are your earliest memories of food? My earliest memories of food. Well, I was very

lucky because even though I grew up in the 1950s, which was not one of the great kind of food

decades, my mother and father were

very keen what would now be called food is, namely they went out to lots of restaurants,

they traveled a lot, and they always took me with them. So, you know, from the time I was in my

Moses basket, I was taken to restaurants,

which was very unusual in those days. So I have sort of very hazy memories, very, very hazy

memories of sipping a Shirley Temple cocktail probably at about age six or seven, while I was in some fancy

restaurant with my parents, you know, my father in a dinner jacket. It was those sort of days

where people actually very much got dressed up to go to very smart restaurants. But I think

more to the point, I was lucky to grow up in what was

then a very small New England, Massachusetts village, where, you know, we were in the midst of

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