Bloggerview with Josa Young, where she spills the beans

Josa Young

Name and occupation

Josa Young, writer and internet content consultant

What would you like to plug?

My first novel, One Apple Tasted (www.oneappletasted.co.uk) - the next one, Sail Upon the Land, is finished but as yet unpublished.

Name your three desert island ingredients 

Garlic, Provencal herbs, tomatoes

Your best cooking tip.

If you start off by sauteing an onion, you will end up with a meal even if you have no idea where you are going next with this.

Which seasonal ingredient do you look forward to the most?

Asparagus

What is your favourite snack?

Don't snack on principle

What would you have for your last supper? 

Asparagus with hollandaise; Dover sole; creme caramel

What foodstuff would you banish to room 101?

Anything that weird orangish-yellow colour that indicates it has been deep fried (see thisiswhyyouarefat.com)

What's your favourite restaurant?

http://www.whitstableoystercompany.com/ 

What's your favourite tipple? 

Veuve Clicquot

Which book gets you cooking ?

Constance Spry

What comfort food comforts you when you are sick?

Heinz tomato soup

Kitchen implement you can't do with out.

Magimix

What's your dream dinner party line-up? 

Old old friends - their value is more than anything or anyone else to me

And what would you cook for them?

Vichyssoise, osso bucco with gremolata, pear and frangipane tart

What is your favourite cooking aroma ?

Fresh lemon zest

What was your childhood teatime treat?

Victoria sponge sandwich

What was the first thing you learnt to cook?

A version of Victoria sponge, only it failed to rise and was like a manhole cover

What was the first thing you taught your children to cook? 

Each child something different - included chicken satay with peanut sauce. The youngest is currently making many jellies from scratch with sheet gelatine and fresh juice in a brain jelly mould (he is 11)

What was your mothers signature dish and do you try to copy it?

Chicken in a delicious cream sauce with mushroom - with her own vegetables she grew - and no, I have never really tried to do it myself. Perhaps I should.

What would you make to impress your partner?

I would cook almost anything that was home made and fresh - as that seems to be the most impressive thing in these days of ready meals and other horrors. If he brought round some caviar, I would make proper buckwheat blinis, raised with yeast and provide the sour cream, chopped egg, chives and lemons.

Where do you go for the best fish and chips?

Yorkshire - fried in dripping

What was your most memorable meal?

A buffet at the Arc de Triomphe horse race in Paris in 1991. Unbelievable food.

What was your biggest culinary disaster?

Exploding cake - used too big a mould and it burst hot uncooked cake mix all over the kitchen (just before a child's birthday party)

What's the worst meal you've ever had?

Sea slug - I was in Hong Kong writing about food, and it was one of the dishes I was offered. Like warm wet rough wool blanket served with lashings of HP sauce. Revolting.

What's the most outlandish thing you've ever eaten?

Peacock - out in the wilds of Rajasthan, staying with a thakur (local landlord) I expressed an interest in trying peacock. He sent a servant to knock one off a branch. Rather tough, it need to hang for a few days.

Who's your food hero/food villain?

Hero? Isabella Beeton - young, brave, independent and doomed.

Villain? Whoever it was in the food processing industry that managed to infiltrate the department of education and remove domestic science and food and nutrition from the curriculum sometimes between 1977 and 1999. This led to generations being taught 'food technology' (how to assemble a pizza) instead of the basics of cooking and hygiene.

Nigella or Delia?

Delia - I do use some Nigella recipes, but feel that they are often far too high in fat

Gin or Vodka?

Gin 

Muesli or fry-up?

A good muesli with freshly grated apple, fresh walnuts and good yoghurt is hard to beat

Wine or beer?

Wine 

KFC or Burger King?

If absolutely forced, I would eat the coleslaw in KFC (last did so about 30 years ago)

What do you consider the best of the best of British?

Well hung beef with freshly grated horseradish mixed with cream

What's the best/worst thing about the British restaurant scene?

Best thing is that it is SO much better than when I was young - you can actually get a decent meal in many different places now - particularly liked the gastropub trend when it came in the 1990s. 

Worst is that the British public as a whole still accept mass produced food masquerading at home cooked in many many places throughout the UK that are pulling off a con because they know the British are still pretty ignorant, and their palates have been corrupted by ready meals laden with salt and sugar.

What do you think will be the next big thing?

Dessert restaurants - I haven't got a sweet tooth myself, but plenty of people do. All kinds of pop ups, particularly in people's homes.

What would you do if you could choose any other career?

I only ever wanted to be a writer - and I have earned my living all these years writing, even if sometimes it was strap lines for ads, brochure copy or complaints procedures for ISPs. I would just like to write novels please and see the next one, Sail Upon the Land, published.

Who said oranges were the only fruit?

One apple tasted by Josa Young

And here she speaks to The Telegraph just after publication

I couldn't write about sex at all until after my mother died. Growing up in the 1970s, the official parental line was that nice girls didn't, you know, do it, let alone write about it – although it was a different story for my brothers. Double standards were the order of the day.

Which meant, in effect, that I was barred from writing fiction. In order to create fully rounded human beings, and describe their relationships with each other, I would have to tackle the subject of sex – along with intimacy, misguided love, death, resentment, friendship, the passion of women for their babies, the problems of marriage and finding the right person, and all the rest of the complicated, messy stuff that humans do. When a parent dies, there is grief, of course, but there is also liberation. You must grow up, and one of the grown-up things I wanted to do was write novels.

When I put a sample chapter of my debut novel One Apple Tasted online, a friend advised me to take it down. Too raunchy, she said. Yes, it had rude words in it, but I thought it was a rather mild scene of two people with wildly different agendas ending up not doing it at all. Because that is part of most people's sexual experience – deeply unsatisfactory, particularly when young, and when you don't really know the other person.

Yesterday, a survey about the reading habits of 2,000 women aged between 45 and 60 reveals that nearly two thirds are keen on raunchy scenes in novels. Add a decade or two, and you've got an even broader readership: my parents-in-law – far more liberated than my own parents – said they loved the book. In fact my mother-in-law praised my ability to write realistically about sex – rather surprising, perhaps, for a "nice girl".

After my parents had both died (when I was 47), I found passionate letters and photographs dating from the Second World War that told a very different story about their attitudes when young. Perhaps I sensed the undertow that informed their marriage, and writing about earlier generations has been my way of trying to work it out.

The prim and proper 1950s seemed to reset the sexual clock back to Edwardian double standards, and wartime liberality in the face of imminent death was quickly shuffled back under the carpet. Now I wish my mother had been alive to see my book published, as I realise she would not have been shocked at all.

Far worse than hypocrisy to me is the sterile Noughties take on sex – that it has the same emotional weight as a game of tennis, with orgasm rather than straight sets as the goal. I sometimes try to work out what market force is driving this sickly dumbing down of Eros, this bossy and unattractive blunting of his exquisitely painful arrow with a nubbly rubber sucker.

Sex is sold to the young as a supposedly consequence-free activity in a thousand flavours and textures, but free from the wild, driving emotional life force that gives it meaning. What about intimacy? What about the human life that may (or may not) begin? What about a thousand ships? What about crimes of passion (still with us)? No one kills each other or chases each other across the globe for a game of tennis.

The floodgates opened, and out of me poured, in the space of five weeks, the first draft of One Apple Tasted. I wrote it in a freezing, semi-abandoned building in Bayswater, wrapped in a blanket with mittens on my hands. I was amazed by what my characters got up to – quite unexpected goings-on in the front seats of cars, in punts – anywhere really. In the 1950s and the 1980s, among other decades. But there were reasons for their behaviour, deeply rooted in who they were and how they thought and the mores of the time in which the scenes are set. The love-making was significant both to character and plot: my characters took their clothes off all right – but only if the role demanded it. I didn't just drop in historically accurate 1950s heavy-petting scenes to keep me warm as the chill February wind blew through the broken window.

I took a deep breath and just went for it, typing up to 8,000 words a day. Drawing on what I knew as a grown-up woman about what people do – and don't do – when trying to get it on with another person. Sex in films and in books is often so completely unrealistic and unmoving that for years I thought I must be doing it wrong. Writing about it is a terrific risk. What if I am wrong about it too? Not "good in bed", not able to write realistic scenes. When Auberon Waugh set up the Bad Sex in Fiction award in 1993 for purple passages by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer and Melvyn Bragg, the aim was "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." Even now as I write this, I wonder what people will think.

In the run up to publication, I read quite a few "hen lit" and "chick lit" novels to see what they were like. I was quite astonished to see how old-fashioned some were, with women taking quite traditional roles and doing polite and rather unrealistic jobs. There were sex scenes all right, but they seemed dropped in from a great height, and quite pornographic while lacking authenticity and passion. The men tend to be flawless, romantic heroes with rippling muscles that do not, in real life, exist on men who also have a good sense of humour – one of the sexiest attributes a man can have.

My hero is beautiful, certainly (at least to begin with), and funny, but he is deeply flawed. Spoilt and indulged, he has no idea of what women are thinking or feeling and is as hormone-driven and indiscriminate as young men I knew. But I had to check with my husband that his thought processes were authentic.

One major aspect of sexuality that is much ignored in the modern novel is not doing it. And virginity is another theme of One Apple Tasted – where you hang on to it for so long that it becomes hideously significant and hard to shed. In a time when we are meant to have sex all day, every day, drawing on tips from magazines and newspapers to "spice things up in the bedroom", virginity, chastity and celibacy seem thoroughly controversial life choices. But they are part of people's sexual experience, and just as valid as the more exotic perversions that get a regular airing in the tabloids.

For women of my generation, growing up in rapidly changing times, reading about the authentic experience of others of this most intimate part of our lives should be comforting, exciting and moving. It grounds us and makes us feel normal. If it makes us feel sexy as well, then that is all to the good.

I am in the business of reminding my readers that it doesn't matter much what age you are, or whether you have a perfect body, but that love and life and sex are – or should be – intimately entwined. That sex really matters and is nothing to be ashamed of. That the best sex comes from long and loving relationships, and genuine intimacy is the goal for which we should strive, whatever our age. I have no objections at all to good sex scenes, it is Bad Sex that makes me cross and bored and embarrassed – in books as well as in real life.

One Apple Tasted by Josa Young (E&T Books)