It can be whipped up easily (and on demand) from store-cupboard ingredients. Briefly baked until set on the outside but still gooey in the middle, it is excellent served with some fruit to cut the richness.” When the cake is nicely browned underneath, flip it over with a spatula and cook the other side. (If you are scaling up quantities, and making a larger cake – one that pretty much fills the pan – you can cut it into halves or quarters when the first side is crisped, and flip over each half or quarter, one at a time.) Start to finish, your S and B might take 20 minutes or more. There are people who actually prefer the taste of the healthier versions that are implicitly denigrated by entrepreneurial millennial vegans like Tegelaar and these café owners. The last time I made a cake with the full amount of suggested sugar, I found it pretty unpleasant, and sugar totally overwhelmed the other flavours. The introduction in Good Comfort, when mentioning reducing sugar in their café cakes, at least recognises people like us exist and are worth catering to: "the few guests who notice this change invariably comment positively: 'I really like that it isn't too sweet'". Dialling down the sugar and the refined ingredients is part of it, but dialling up the whole ingredients is what the book's more about," Fearnley-Whittingstall adds.

And don't worry - the desserts are still sweet. After all, this is the person who admits to whipping up boxes of chocolates as a child. Tip the spuds into the pan. If they aren't already mashed, crush them roughly with a fork or masher, but keep the texture quite chunky. Let the heat penetrate the potatoes for a minute or two then add all the other veg, and any herbs or flavour bombs, with a little more seasoning. Stir together then press the whole lot down into a rough cake. Last time we had friends over for dinner, I made a dessert of home-made avocado ice-cream, with brownies. I should have taken a photo because it was scrumptious, despite the recipe's claim that the brownies had only 91 kcal per serve because they were made with yoghurt instead of butter. I don't care about calories, but I do try to offer desserts that are healthy-ish. OTOH if I'm only going to make brownies once or twice a year, I want them to taste decadent. The success of the show and the books allowed Hugh to establish River Cottage HQ near Bridport in 2004.

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He continues to write as a journalist, including a weekly column in The Guardian and is Patron of the National Farmers’ Retail and Markets Association (FARMA). We can have all those things and they can be truly delicious - and yet better for us than perhaps some of the old-school or conventional versions of those recipes."

I also love the presentation and design; neo-70s you might call it. It has tones reminiscent of 1970s to early-80s books, but is glossier and more visually appealing, and with cleaner lines. Therefore more appetising, than, say, my mum's copy of Cookery in Colour by Marguerite Patten, which I used to look through as a kid. It's an early-autumn colour scheme, with lots of green and brown: the start of my favourite time of year, and also when keen cooks are gearing up to make exactly this kind of food. Tip the rice into a saucepan, cover with plenty of boiling water and bring to a simmer. Cook for 20 minutes, until almost al dente (still firm to the bite), then drain. Maybe they are planning a River Cottage Vegan Baking handbook, like they have the Gluten Free one and other food-group specific handbooks like Mushrooms. There is more and more great technical advice out there from the likes of the aforementioned Vegan Baking Bible, and Philip Khoury's upcoming A New Way to Bake, on restaurant-grade patisserie, with restaurant-grade ingredients you can also see listed under his YT videos. But so far as I can tell, there still isn't a high-quality, trustworthy book focused on vegan baking with the sort of fruit and veg grown in the UK and on vegan versions of traditional British sweet recipes. Recipes in his new book, River Cottage Good Comfort, might have a less tooth-rotting amount of sugar in them, but you won't necessarily miss anything. People used to making recipes dairy-free or vegan will already have their own preferred method of making standards like batter, but this book seems likely to interest omni households who cater for vegan guests from time-to-time, or who may have one (perhaps newly) vegan resident who isn't the main cook. (The recipes really suit a relaxed family dinner.) For these circumstances , it would be a good idea to consistently include advice for such things, as is done for the lasagna.

And Good Comfort is in every way generous, as Hugh makes our favourite foods healthier not by taking stuff out of them, but by putting more in: the best whole ingredients, celebrated in all their colourful and seasonal diversity. But what I found is even my sweet tooth is completely satisfied by much less sugar than conventional recipes, and certainly industrially produced biscuits, cakes, sweets and puddings tend to include. We definitely need a sugar rethink." For millennia, that was the human race's relationship with food, and it was pretty much all you thought about all day.