I love Sophie Dahl.

Maybe it’s because she shares a first name with my mother, or something to do with the fact her cheeks look like two apples. Then again, I’m also partial to lentils in a curry.

She was also fat and famed for her “curves”, so you’ve got to applaud her for that I guess.

I think you forget that she wasn’t massive though, a real, proper fat girl. The way the Press banged on about her, as being a plus size model, a cheerleader for the Rubens-esque among us, you’d think she was a right lumper.

She was, in fact, about a size 16 at her biggest, but it’s more likely she was a 14. Standing at an enviable 5ft 10in and with boobs up to her Granny Smiths, she was certainly formidable, someone who looked like she happily indulged in whatever she wanted.

Then she got thin. Thin as in curveless, ramrod, lanky, bloody lucky. And the world seemed to turn on her wondering where it all went wrong, or at least where her belly went.

On the one side you had the pear-shaped gals wondering why our queen stopped celebrating her ample backside, all of us biting down on our disappointment that one of the sisterhood had gone over to the light side; then there were those who just wanted to know what was in the Dahl Diet so they could follow it to the letter and be just like Soph.

So how then did she do it? And why?

It turns out, our girl has always had a complicated relationship with food. But unlike the mere mortals among us who don’t quite work out the kinks by cutting out the carbohydrates, she managed to figure it all out for herself.

And, just like magic, or like the time she went away and stuffed herself stupid only to find that her jeans were looser, her stomach flatter and half her bottom was still languishing at a five star retreat in Mexico, she became “normal”. No longer did she need to crack jokes about declaring her arse as excess baggage.

In her new cookery book, which is also part slimming confessional, she puts it like this: “I have always had a passionate relationship with food: passionate in that I loved it blindly or saw it as its own entity, rife with problems. Back in the old days food was either a faithful friend or a sin, rarely anything in between... I was the big model. I was meant to eat, a lot. It gave other people hope and cheered them as they enjoyed their chocolate. It was a clumsy way of thinking.”

To cut a long story short, in Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights, there’s no big reveal about how she lost weight but a series of what she calls “mini epiphanies”: love splits, moving house, losing work, finding work, loss, illness and the general mash-up of living.

Dahl writes: “To everything there is a season; from 17 to 21 mine was the season of chocolate cake. I didn’t know how to eat within the boundaries of reason; instead I learned loudly through trial and error. My unsure baby fat, for that’s what it was really, slunk slowly away one year. Its departure

left me to my adult self and the slow joy I get from food and cooking is something I cannot imagine being without.”

Hers is a lovely book, due in no small part to the way she weaves her thoughts about herself and her charmed life into a sticky, beautiful jumble that’s straight out of the Malory Towers of her mind.

Yet for all her humanity about eating well, body image and the delight she takes in feeding her friends, Sophie’s world reads like an unfamiliar glossy smorgasbord of things whole and hearty, sweet and dainty.

Her BFG namesake ate snozzcumber, but Soph has a more refined palate.

Her childhood wasn’t filled with tomato sauce sandwiches and frozen Arctic Roll, or chicken and chips in a basket like mine. You’d expect nothing less than one where every one of her relatives was born knowing how to make Victoria sponge and vanilla custard; her adult culinary life is more about throwing together scrumpdiddleumptious chargrilled scallops on pea puree or chicken and fennel au gratin than only having the energy to warm up a couple of cheese and onion pasties after work and then hate yourself for it. If Ms Dahl was writing this, I’m sure she would sum up her ethos by reminding us of her book’s subtle: The Art Of Eating A Little Of What You Fancy (HarperCollins, £18.99).

So does she have a weakness that brings her down from her posh perch and back into the land of the indigent indulgent?

White bread slathered with butter and Marmite, followed by salt and vinegar crisps.

Nice to see Dahlicious is human after all.