once became entangled in an ice-cream protest. I can’t remember exactly what their point was but the demonstration involved blocking the route to Downing Street with scores of ice-cream vans simultaneously playing their music-box jingles. (Had I been the prime minister I would sent someone out for a cornet.) There is something usually so joyful about an ice-cream van yet seeing them like this, in a traffic jam the colours of a seaside town with their out of sync renditions of nursery rhymes, was positively unsettling. I was reminded of this reading OFM’s extract from Matthew Dooley’s new graphic novel Flake, which is published next month. His drawings of ice-cream vans – I remember spending most of my pocket money at one resembling Good Golly Miss Lolly – are both fun and deeply nostalgic. Sign up for Word of Mouth: the best of Guardian Food every week Read more This being our Easter issue, we have sent the brilliant Dan Lepard in search of the best high-street chocolate eggs and hot cross buns. Now, as you may know, I am particularly partial to a hot cross bun (Fortnum and Mason’s generously candied fruit buns for me please), so I await his findings, toaster warmed and ready, with a certain impatience. This is also the issue in which we have lunch with Roger Phillips, who I think of as the original forager. His mushroom guide, first published in 1980, has sold a phenomenal 750,000 copies and is still a mycologist’s bible. We tracked him down to Borough Market where he told us about his new book while tucking into chanterelle and spelt stew. We also have a heart-warming story about the recipes cooks have inherited from their mothers. We talk to Ravneet Gill, Jessie Ware and Tom Adams about the way their mothers have influenced how they cook today. “Mum makes things look so effortless. She’ll execute five or six different dishes – an array. And I’ve inherited that generosity, but it’s slightly optimistic” says Jessie Ware. We also hear from Jay Rayner and Rachel Cooke and chat with Sara Cox.