My first food memory is eating Farley’s rusks aged three or four. My primary school was near our front door, so we’d come home for lunch. My mum Lynne would fry some eggs with baked beans.
Growing up, my mum did the majority of the cooking. She was a fantastic cook with a huge range of West Indian dishes, from rice and peas to jerk chicken, and ackee and saltfish, which we had at Christmas and Easter.
We ate English food, too, which is one half of who I am. On the one hand, I love fish and chips, along with eggs and sausages: tasty, wholesome food. And on the other, spicy, flavoursome Caribbean cooking. I never had any problem marrying the two.
I’m good at cooking West Indian dishes, because that’s what I learned growing up. But as my schedule has got heavier, it has been harder to find the time. So my wife Catherine is the cook, and a damned good one, too.
I lived in Tokyo in the 90s, and Japanese is one of my favourite foods. I love the refined, subtle flavours. I don’t have the most sophisticated of palates, but I can appreciate good ramen or sushi.
Clive lived in Tokyo in the 90s and loves Japanese food
When you’re in a disaster zone, or the middle of a conflict, eating is not about amuse-bouches or having our senses teased. It’s about sustenance and survival. In impoverished regions that have been hit by famine, war, disease or natural disasters, they haven’t got anything. Basic peanut formula is what sustains some children. It’s a life saver, literally: you’ve got a limp child given a high-protein peanut formula and suddenly they come to life. That is the real power of food.
When I was embedded with the Royal Marines during the Iraq war, we lived on rations, which were brilliant because I lost lots of weight. But they were also pretty bland. So I took Tabasco sauce with me. All the Marines had a bottle of it, too. It was the only thing that got us through the day.
I’ll never forget a meal we had during that war. We’d been on rations for a month and a half, and we stumbled across this village where the bakery was still open. We found some old tins of dolma [stuffed grape leaves], opened them and had them in the freshly baked bread. It was astonishing, like a religious experience.
Jerk chicken is a family favourite
Durian fruit is horrible and smells like rotting flesh. A few years back, I was filming in the Philippines, doing a profile on Rodrigo Duterte, a regional governor who later became president of the country. We were following him around, and he’s a hardcore guy. You do not mess with him. His war on the drug cartels and drug addicts was brutal, and absolutely appalling, Anyway, we’re sitting down at dinner, and he had a gun in his sock. It was like sitting down with Vladimir Putin. And his cook brings out durian. I thought, ‘I can’t do this.’ But this was Duterte. So I ate it and was retching every single time I took a bite. It was disgusting.
I also despise runny, stinky cheese with a passion bordering on a hostility only reserved for certain global dictators. It’s bad milk. Would you eat bad meat or mouldy bread? No. But Catherine loves it. I have to put it in a separate bag then in another bag, deep in the enclosed compartment of the fridge.
My favourite comfort food is a bacon sandwich. The bacon has to be crisp, in brown bread, with a bit of HP Sauce. And a cornish pasty. I do love a pasty.
I always have some kind of spread in the fridge. Bread needs butter. Some dressings. And eggs.
My last supper would be rice and peas and fried fish, with hot sauce, which, as the gallows are swinging before me, would take me straight back to my childhood.
