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My favorite way to cook a clam is in chowder. I was a New Yorker for 20 years, and I always loved tomato-based, celery-heavy Manhattan chowders.

I make a wicked clam chowdah, and linguine with clam sauce. Oysters I like to eat raw, and mussels in either a white wine sauce or in beer with paprika.

My mum and my husband are from Irish backgrounds, so we have a lot of potatoes. Chips, mashed, boiled, new potatoes, I love them all. Even the slightly wonky ones like Duchess potatoes that go up in a little spiral.

While it's typical to find steamed clam recipes which include a bit of bacon or sausage, you might not think of adding shredded ham hock, but it's another way to pair the lusty, smoky flavor of animal fat with the briny ocean flavor of shellfish.

Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But a well-cooked clam is a toothsome, tender thing, full of that magical stuff known as clam liquor.

You can't escape the taste of the food you had as a child. In times of stress, what do you dream about? Your mother's clam chowder. It's security, comfort. It brings you home.

I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills... all apart from cooking.

Both sides of my family had come from Ireland in the 19th century for the same reason: There was nothing to eat over there. Since then, I've tried to make up for the potato famine by making the potato the only vegetable that passes these lips.

You know most of the food that Americans hold so dear - things like hamburgers and hot dogs - were road food, but even before they were road food, they were peasant food.

If the British Isles had an official vegetable, it would have to be the potato.