I should have known; five o'clock is tea-time for any young mother, and Sophie Grigson is no different, except possibly that Dad's here too, and, tonight at least, Dad's in charge because Mum's doing an interview to talk about Fish, the new book that she has written with Dad.
Well, that's the idea. The tiny kitchen, made smaller by the presence of both an Aga and a "semi-professional" oven which Sophie uses for testing, makes no concessions to modernity and the kitchen table, jammed in behind the door, is cluttered with the paraphernalia of the children's supper.
Question: So what do children of gastronomes eat? Answer: the same as everybody else. For Florence (4) and Sidney (2) tonight it's sausage and pasta and carrots. For Dad (William Black) it's a snack of bread and prime-quality cheddar. Since moving to this rural idyll in the depths of the Northampton countryside three years ago (the cottage dates from 1692) he has learnt to make his own bread, simply because "it's impossible to get any decent bread" locally. Because the children prefer white (like all children) it's white, which is to say, yellow as good home-made bread should be. Quality of materials is the central, most important thing in eating well, William stresses.
He's tired, having left home this morning at four for the drive down to Billingsgate, London's international fish market. Fish is what William does and knows. He's a consultant with a major catering consortium soon to be floated on the stock exchange and today's crack-of-dawn trip was to buy fish for Bank, their flagship restaurant at the Aldwych. Do the children like fish? No. But then neither did William at their age. His Pauline conversion happened in Kinsale in 1979. "A degree in social anthropology had got me a job behind a bar in the King's Road. The uncle of someone who worked there asked if I'd be interested in selling oysters, taking them around oyster bars in London. And that involved going out to Kinsale where I spent two or three summers working on the oysters. Then I started doing a bit of fish from Ireland. So that was my education. And that's where I learnt to eat oysters and appreciate fish. Fresh soda bread, half a pint of Murphys and oysters, fresh from the water, is one of those wonderful combinations." For Sophie too, Ireland was "a crucial part of my fishy experience". She had first met Myrtle Allen through her mother, the food writer Jane Grigson; and six years ago Sophie and William spent their honeymoon at Ballymaloe. While Sophie talks about the Allens and Ballymaloe ("heavenly"), William talks about the quality of fish at Skibbereen. ("It's so highly valued, it goes directly to Spain.") What William Black doesn't know about fish isn't worth knowing. Not only does he understand the buying and cooking end, he is deeply involved in the ecological side and acts as consultant on sustainable fisheries to the Marine Stewardship Council. And from facts to fancy (did you know that cod grunt and sharks fart?) it's all there in Fish, including charts showing seasonality, a crucial and too-often-overlooked factor, William insists. "At some times of the year, plaice, for instance, will be virtually tasteless because it's shot its roe and is very, very thin. A good fishmonger should actively inform and encourage. You should look at what's good and then buy." "In the book we've put quite a lot of alternative fishes to the one in the recipe with precisely that in mind," Sophie adds, (theirs is very much a double act). "For cooks who are not deeply confident about cooking fish - and a lot of people aren't - I think they might get a bit scared to just choose another fish when the fish that they think they want isn't available. They need a bit of support. An awful lot of fish are very interchangeable in terms of the way you cook them, although of course they'll taste different."
Fish cookery holds a special place in Sophie Grigson's life. Her mother's book, Jane Grigson's Fish Book, (soon to be republished in paperback) remains one of the most influential cook-books of all time. Was it not rather daunting, I suggest, to cover the same ground?
Sophie's attention being temporarily engaged scraping something messy from the kitchen floor (haphazardly strewn with stencilled fish - "all anatomically correct. William said he couldn't bear a faked-up fish on the floor.") William answers. "Jane's book was written at the beginning of the '70s and the situation has changed pretty radically. And I think our approach was different, in that my side of things comes from physically selling it and handling it. Jane had a much more literary approach to writing a cook-book; ours is more practical and informative though it may not be as great a literary masterwork."
Sophie agrees: "You get a very different angle from my mum's book. They are just reissuing it in paperback and I genuinely do think they do work well together. There is one very specific recipe of my mum's I included - the halibut with Welsh rarebit topping which was part of my childhood and when I started to cook for myself it was one of the first things I did and it's so easy and it's so good." However it's impossible, she believes, to quantify her mother's influence.
"All the time I've been writing about food, I've had to get used to the fact that of course I've been influenced by my mother and my mother's recipes are always there at the back of what I do. Because most people are influenced by their mothers cooking and my mother was just a heavier influence. There's no point in trying to run away from that."
But she did try to run away from cookery writing. Indeed any writing. Her father was the poet John Grigson. "He was a really great writer and my mother was a wonderful writer as well, not a wonderful food writer, a wonderful writer.
So I studied maths as I knew I could be better at maths than my father. Not difficult it has to be said." As Sophie chortles, the children join in. Everyone joins in. Laughter is as central to this household as food.
However a maths degree from UMIST (Manchester) hardly offers automatic entry to the media world in which Sophie had vague ideas about making a career. She began as "general factotum" in a company that hired out crews for pop videos, working her way up to production manager. Although not really confident enough to move on to producing, she was "pootling on merrily" with no intention of doing anything else till fate intervened when her mother introduced her to the then deputy editor of the Sunday Express, Michael Bateman. "And Mum said, in a motherly way, `My daughter is a brilliant cook'." Bateman promptly asked her to write an article for him. "At that age you think `Yea, I can do that.' It was `50 ways with potatoes'. I lived in a two-room attic on the edge of Hampstead Heath and I slaved away on this tiny little stove. Then I progressed to 50 ways with rice, 50 ways with beans and just carried on."
Five years later, around the time when pop videos were losing their appeal ("It gets a bit obscene editing pop videos past a certain age.") she was asked to take over the London Evening Standard's high-profile cookery column, since when, Sophie Grigson has gone from strength to strength. Her trademark, bottle-brush, bottle-blonde hair, mirroring her eclectic attitude to food have turned her into one of TV's most successful cooks. The famous hair is now red ("I've been bottle-blonde for too long, so now I've gone bottle red. I'm going to be 39 soon, so this is my last throw.")
As for her mother's assertion that her daughter was a brilliant cook, Sophie says not. "I know people who are phenomenally good cooks and they do something and it tastes a million times better than when I do it. But I'm a good cook and I like cooking, which is what it's about. And I'm curious. No recipes are totally concocted from the imagination. You're always learning about food. In a way, the style I have developed - if I have a style - is that thing of having a fairly wide range, including classics, and of not being too obsessed with continuously inventing new things."
Six years of five-days-a-week recipes on the Evening Standard taught her that what people want is "a recipe that works and gives them a good meal. They don't want something that is necessarily radical. Which is not to say that I am not interested in new and unusual ideas. In the Fish book I try to cover a broad spectrum, partly because I think if you can give people things that are quite reassuring then you can ease them into trying something that is a bit different."
Although Fish abounds in information (and recipes) for exotic warm-water fish I have barely heard of, let alone seen on a fishmonger's slab, both William and Sophie are firm believers that there are a lot of ordinary fish out there that are seriously undervalued. Not only mackerel and herring but ling and pout ("dirt cheap and very good") and pollack, all easily available in Ireland.
"People would be well advised to seek out these species," says William. When it comes to fish, freshness is all and one of the book's aims "is to get people to think about how long has the fish been on the boat". Attitudes are changing. Cod, that long-time companion of the chip, now keeps company with turbot and lobster in the hipper London restaurants. It's a policy he intends to follow at his "fish shop-cum-restaurant" project overlooking Southwark Cathedral on London's South Bank where "you can sit in the sun and the whole point will be to keep prices as low as possible".
In the meantime there's the book. Seared Cod With Caramelised Shallot and Red Wine Sauce, Anchovy and Tomato Risotto, Tarte Fine Of Red Mullet And Fennel, Tuna Teriyaki With Soba Noodles - and 176 more. It's hard to imagine anyone will ever want to buy, let alone write, another fish cookery book.
Fish by Sophie Grigson and William Black is published by Head- line at £20 in the UK.