MY LIFE IN FOOD: TV presenter and author Dan Jones

My first food memory is me being an incredibly picky child, only eating raw cucumber, raw carrot, corned beef, which will age me slightly, and Bovril sandwiches. It was all unbelievably salty: beef and raw-vegetable based.

When I was young my dad worked a lot so my mum cooked. She wasn't keen but she could provide children's dinners. As we got older I saw my dad a lot more because he started working for himself. He's an extremely good, self-taught cook, so there was a kind of transition when I became a teenager, where he would do most of the adventurous cooking. He still does.

My father has a library of cookbooks and would run through national cuisines. He'd have a Greek phase, an Italian phase. He liked 'project' cooking.

When I was about ten we would pick mushrooms on autumn Saturday mornings while walking the dogs on Kirtlington Park polo fields in Oxfordshire. I remember the house smelling of mushroom soup afterwards, something I disliked intensely. But my father was proud of, and also confident in, his mushroom knowledge. He knew that he wasn't going to 'Phantom Thread' us and poison the whole house.

Potato smileys were a staple at secondary school and there was a competition to discover who could eat the most. I think I clocked 41 one day.

There were ways to pass the port and claret at 'formals' when I was at Pembroke College, Cambridge. That whole dining thing was radically different from anything I knew before. There was also a great rumour that if you had done well in tripos [exams] you'd be invited to a feast where swan was served. I never saw that happen, nor did anyone I knew. Was that because I kept low company? I'm not sure.

I have a happy memory of sitting in Tokyo's old fish market Tsukiji, eating sushi, when I travelled to Japan aged 19. I was just talking about it to my children, who are 15, 12 and three, and I said Japan was the closest experience on earth to going to another planet, from the lavatory technology to vending machine cuisine in Tokyo station.

I can't deal with eggs if the white and the yolk are separate. I can eat scrambled eggs or an omelette but not fried or boiled. It's weird. The most disgusting thing I've ever tried was sea urchin, in a sushi joint in West Hollywood. It tasted like the rank, stinky snot of an elderly consumptive, but the chef was watching. There was no getting out of it.

I may not have inherited my father's cooking skills but I do have his passion. My daughters are pretty good eaters, and you can take them anywhere. But our toddler is even more of a picky eater than I was. He'll only eat beige food and he hurls vegetables across the room. We're in Greece at the moment and astonishingly he's started eating spanakopita [spinach pie]. So every day I'm just shovelling it into his mouth.

My comfort food would be Italian – definitely pasta or anything that sits on the edge of Italian and Greek. Like pastitsio, lots of bechamel, meat sauce and pasta. It's perfect hangover food.

If I open a fridge and there's not a packet of mini cocktail sausages in there I'm always disappointed. That's my favourite thing to have, along with a pot of hummus. We have other things in there as well, but those two really feel essential.

My final dinner would be high-end basic. I'd have a vodka martini with an olive then a prawn cocktail, like the one in The Wolseley. Steak with tiny slivers of hot, salty frites. Old-fashioned surf and turf with a glass of burgundy, and some macaroons at the end. I don't mind dying after all that.