I was a starving London art student, invited to a hunt ball in the Dorset countryside by an impossibly posh girlfriend. The white-tie affair ran on through the night with riotous drinking and appalling dancing. Afterward we reeled back across the fields and crashed in a gorgeous Georgian stone farmhouse. I was the first awake and lurched downstairs in the grip of a thundering hangover. The low morning sun shone across the paddock and fell, lambent, on a huge, coal-fired range. An ancient, well-seasoned cast-iron pan stood next to a box thoughtfully filled by the absent housekeeper with the makings of breakfast.

I got tea brewing and began to prep on autopilot while, one by one, gilded youths who are today, doubtless, venal politicians or hard-eyed CEOs appeared from their rooms blinking in the sunlight and a little abashed, wrapping pale hands around steaming mugs of reviving tea. Breakfast is never easy to time perfectly but on this one, miraculous morning I was on a streak. My brain, too gin-stewed for generating conversation, was à point for the poetry of the range. Eggs flipped to plate, each exactly as requested. Bacon and black pudding crisped in the pan. The Cumberland sausages, gently poached in oil and then seared beneath a broiler, formed a meaty keel, while baked beans were a cheery mortar that filled any disheartening gaps on the plate.

My girlfriend and I split up soon thereafter. I should probably have noticed how she was looking at the handsome chap who’d come down from Sandhurst in his dress uniform. She later married him. I, though, was the more irrevocably smitten. At once I’d discovered the joy of cooking for others, the respect afforded the man with the pan, and the sheer, leveling properness of an English fried breakfast.