As the British social anthropologist Tim Ingold has argued, this ‘show-and-tell’ form of teaching instils a particular kind of knowledge in the novice: rather than just cramming his mind with facts, it gives him a sense of ancestry and belonging.

Through this fine-tuning of perceptual skills, meanings immanent in the environment … are not so much constructed, as discovered.’

Home is a response to landscape formed by an idea of how to live. It is always shaped by food: if one lives by gathering berries and hunting bison, for example, one’s home is going to look very different to that of someone who farms.

Before and immediately after we’re born, our mothers give us food, love and protection all at once: the three pillars upon which all future home life will be based.

Food makes us feel at home because it roots us in the world, both socially and physically.

For them home was never a building, but rather a carefully curated territory that, because of its lack of farms, fields and fences, went unrecognised by Europeans.

An era of neurotic, cheerless eating ensued, as all foods with a trace of fat – chicken skin, egg yolks, whole milk – were condemned to waste.

Our need to eat once located us: it told us where we belonged. Now that link is broken, how do we find ourselves in the world? How, in particular, do we find that special place we call ‘home’?

Back in the 1960s, however, in the absence of a shared language, my father and Helle resorted to a more ancient form of communication: the giving and receiving of food. Through the rituals of hospitality, they forged a bond more powerful than words.