The Great British Bake Off presenter and burgeoning food expert Sue Perkins on why Manhattan will always be her go-to for culinary adventure

“For me it’s always about just really indulging and I love comfort food when I’m travelling. I suppose I’m a bit of a glutton actually. I don’t know when to stop. For a very brief while when I was growing up I went to a convent school. I was left-handed and they used to smack me every time I used the knife and fork the way that came naturally to me. So my earliest experiences of food were that I couldn’t get to it. As an adult there’s this constant amazement that I can get what I want, when I want. I’m afraid I do take advantage of that. [During The Great British Bake Off] I can eat thousands upon thousands of calories. One day, it’s all going to catch up on me. And you don’t want to be there when the bomb goes off – when the Perkins waistline goes, ‘Right I’ve had enough of this’.

But my first (literal) taste of freedom came back when I was 17 in 1986. I’d just done my A-levels before heading off to university and I went travelling down the east coast of America for three months. When I got to New York the first thing I did was have a massive stack of pancakes for breakfast. I’ve travelled quite a lot in America since and pancakes always bring back memories of when I first visited the city. They give me the feeling that ‘anything is possible’. Life isn’t limited. Life is a series of endless possibilities, but the only possibility I was going to explore for the next five days was eating my own body weight in food.

I’d been working in a book shop to pay for my travelling. Nine months in a bookshop in Croydon, so when I got there I was like, ‘Right, bedlam!’ This was the old-school New York before they power-hosed people off the streets. I got mugged; I had the full experience. Looking back I suppose I was mildly mugged. He said, ‘I’d like your suitcase,’ I said, ‘Really? But I’ve got everything in it,’ and he said, ‘Don’t make me ask again,’ so I said, ‘OK’.

When you’re young, you’re just too excited. You lap it all up and you don’t care. New York is just brash and doesn’t give a sh*t. It was open 24 hours. In the late Eighties you would go to a restaurant in London and it would stop serving food at 9.30pm and that was it. [But in New York] it was four o’clock in the morning and you could order Korean food. This was 20 odd years ago. I didn’t even know what Korean food was. Equally you could go to a Jewish restaurant and eat these amazing sandwiches, feeling like you’re in a movie.

Sue Perkins: “Pancakes Take Me Back To New York”