Give me 'boring' food over red hot curries any day

I frequently utter those words after being served a curry or chilli con carne cooked by my husband. “It’s only mild,” he will reply, while I gulp down a glass of water.

He loves spicy food, the spicier the better, whereas I like more plain-tasting fare.

I often wonder if it stems from our very different childhoods. With a Dutch mother raised in China, the Caribbean and France, and a father whose work took him to America, Nigeria and Algeria, he experienced a varied, worldly cuisine which included fiery curries, spicy Chinese dishes, tangy African food, and a hundred things I had never heard of until I moved to London as a student.

I grew up on very simple, traditional English dishes: stew, shepherd’s pie, steak and kidney pie, egg and chips and traditional Sunday dinners with roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.

When I was growing up in North Yorkshire, spicy food wasn’t ever on the menu. I never had it and to this day I shy away from it. I still love all the stuff I was brought up on - food my husband terms 'boring' and ‘bland.’ He winces at the idea of meat and two veg, whereas I’d eat it every night.

I like 'bland' food like egg and chips

I am pleased to say that I am not alone. Yorkshire people are least likely to be able to tolerate spicy food. According to a study commissioned by sauce-favourite Dolmio, just 56 per cent of those from God's Own Country are able to tolerate heat - the lowest percentage in the UK - with 15 per cent never going hotter than a masala.

With Bradford being renowned as the curry capital of Britain, that surprises me, but carrying out a small vox pop on neighbours, friends and fellow shoppers in Asda, I have to conclude that it’s true. We Yorkshire folk are spice-phobic.

In the 1960s and 70s the spiciest thing we kids consumed was tomato sauce. The first I knew of spicy food like curry was in the late 1970s when a chip shop in Middlesbrough, 15 miles from our village, began serving cartons of sludgy curry sauce which we poured over our chips after a night at a club.

It looked like something you’d clear from a blocked drain and I wasn’t keen. Even less so, three years later when I tried a real, fire-breathing curry for the first time.

That was in London when, as student, I went on a first date to a Soho curry house. I don’t know what he ordered but I drank the equivalent of a bath of water that night.

He - a born-and-raised Londoner - wolfed down an even hotter vindaloo with ease. Like my husband, he had grown up in a world of more cosmopolitan cuisine. His parents had a spice rack in their kitchen - something I’d never seen before. In our house, we stuck to salt and pepper.

In Dolmio’s research London emerged as the spice capital of the UK, with 79 per cent enjoying hotter meals with a kick.

Maybe we Yorkshire folk are softies, but to me, too much spice not only leaves your throat feeling raw, it destroys the flavours of food.

Sometimes, if we are eating something my husband finds particularly dull, he will smother it in a firey Korean sauce. It drives me mad.

He would happily eat spicy food for breakfast, dinner and tea - or as he says breakfast, lunch and dinner - I’m surprised he doesn’t coat his morning porridge in red hot chilli sauce.

Give me my bland, boring 1960s/70s Yorkshire diet any day of the week and I’m more than happy.