Whipping up other people’s recipes may be her bread and butter, but Guardian food columnist Felicity Cloake gets to be far more adventurous in her new book, The The A-Z Of Eating

TO be completely honest, I’ve always been quite a greedy person,” says Felicity Cloake simply.

Starting out behind the scenes in publishing, before realising she wanted to write herself, Cloake is best known for her Guardian column, ‘How to make the perfect...’.

Each week she picks a dish, tries out different recipes for it, steals the best bits and then pronounces the definitive ‘perfect’ recipe at the end.

Though she already has another three books under her belt, she says working on her latest, The A-Z Of Eating, which draws on her own ideas and kitchen experiments, felt like she was “writing my own stuff for the first time”.

Featuring 26 chapters divided into her favourite ingredients (rhubarb and kale rank highly), the London-based foodie explains that she set out to “explore the possibilities of the ingredients beyond the obvious”, and “shake people out of their comfort zone”.

As a result, there are recipes for home-made Angel Delight and mini-cheese and Marmite donuts rubbing shoulders with Guinness jelly (“It’s so satisfying bringing it to the table and having it all wobbly”), and even a Japanese noodle version of carbonara.

Of course, there are some ingredients she just can’t abide.

“My brother used to put tinned tuna in sandwiches when he was looking after me, and even now, the smell turns my stomach,” she says with a laugh. “I really would love to like truffles because they are one of those things that’s meant to be completely delicious and people go mad for them, but I can’t see it.

“I was reading recently that with truffles, like coriander, there might be some sort of genetic reason why some people enjoy them and some can’t stand them,” she adds.

“Science isn’t my strong point, but I do think it’s quite important for people that are interested in food to at least try and understand the chemistry behind it, and why some things work and some things don’t, because that makes you a better cook in the long run.”

When it comes to inspiration, Cloake always reaches for Diana Henry’s books , Giorgio Locatelli’s Made In Italy and “anything by Nigel Slater”.

“He’s the man who got me into cooking in the first place,” she says, recalling the uninspiring recipe books her mum had in the Eighties. “Suddenly, Nigel Slater came along, and He wrote so wonderfully and made it sound fun, and the photography was beautiful.

“I was like, ‘Ohh, this is a bit more interesting than I thought it was’.”