Paul Merrett may have been brought up in landlocked Guildford, but as the son of a marine biologist, coastal waters have always played a large part in his life, and he remembers many a family holiday spent by the sea in Dorset and Wales.

“When I look back, they were always done on an extreme budget, staying in some dodgy friend’s caravan or a tent in a garden, or possibly even a B&B. But that would have been the pinnacle; never a hotel, not ever.”

Entertainment was all firmly based around the outdoors, and often involved foraging for food. “We’d go fishing in rock pools, fishing in the sea, and often get up very early and go looking for field mushrooms, or pick blackberries and wild nettles. Because we went time and time again, it all became very familiar,

and looking back I have very fond memories. What’s nice is that those are the places I now take my own kids to, although, of course, they think all that free entertainment is very dull, very old-fashioned.”

The chef, who has just finished helping us slash our shopping bills in BBC Two’s Economy Gastronomy, spent his earliest years in Zanzibar, and so grew up on very spicy food. But his father’s parents were “very traditional English”, and it was his granny, a domestic-science teacher, who first taught him to cook. “My mother was busy making biryanis and vindaloos, whereas my grandmother showed me how to make Yorkshire pudding, gooseberry crumble, flapjacks and things like that.”

You’ll find all sorts of cross-cultural influences in Merrett’s cooking, which has taken him from Michelin-starred work at L’Interlude in Soho and the Greenhouse in Mayfair to his own gastropub: the Victoria, in East Sheen in southwest London. When he’s on holiday, though, cooking is all about local food, simply prepared, and that’s the reasoning behind the meal he is preparing today for friends in the pub.

“I do build my holidays – quietly and without my family realising – around food,” says Merrett. “And I suppose I tend to hark back to the things I remember eating when I was young. Among them are the prawns we used to boil in great vats of sea water in Dorset. We’d all tuck in with our hands and fingers, dipping the prawns in different sauces.”

The mussels he associates more with Norfolk, another familiar holiday destination. “It’s a bit of an issue in this country that, very often, locally caught fish isn’t sold locally, so you have to seek it out. Dorset is an exception, as is Norfolk, where they have great seafood. I’ll always go to a local market and pick up a couple of crabs or a kilo or two of mussels. We cook them in the pub with all sorts of additions, like coconut milk or wine, but I think the cider here gives it a bit of a tang.”

To finish, a dish we don’t often see nowadays: good, old-fashioned baked custard. “This pudding is my granny through and through. I can still remember the dish she’d serve it in, and the smell of nutmeg always reminds me of her. Unlike crème brûlée, it’s made with single cream and milk, so is a lot cleaner on the palate. That means you can eat more of it for a start, but it has a lovely eggy flavour, too.

“We’d always eat it with seasonal fruit, and at this time of year that means blackberries. You can’t beat food for free, and you don’t have to live in the wilds of Dorset to find them. I live in Ealing, and by the canal there are kilos of the things, and people are always there picking them. It means even we urbanites can play at being hunter-gatherers.”

The Victoria, 10 West Temple, London SW14 (020-8876 4238)

Rock-pool hunter’s prawn cocktail

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