Inevitably, it was the prosciutto that Jose Carreras recalled, and the handful of apple crumble that stuck in impresario Raymond Gubbay's mind today, as much as the velvet voice.

Stories abound of Luciano Pavarotti as a genuinely larger than life character, a man with a gargantuan appetite for food and fun, who travelled with saucepans and bottles of olive oil in his luggage. He cooked pasta for some, like the conductor Sir George Solti, but kept many others - stars, opera house managers, politicians and dignitaries - waiting as he cooked lunch for himself.

Carreras, the Spanish tenor whose performances with Pavarotti and Placido Domingo as The Three Tenors sold 10m records, yesterday recalled for a Swedish newspaper a shared love of poker - and food.

"I remember that the last time I was visiting him in his town in Modena, at his home, he was preparing some special bread and tomato for me, together with prosciutto. He was entertaining also in the gastronomic aspect that he liked very much."

Gubbay remembered a masterclass he staged at the Barbican in the mid 80s, when the singer's legendarily complicated tax affairs, later to land him in major trouble, required that he quickly give a live paid performance in Britain.

"He was big even then, and we'd been warned we had to find him something suitable to sit on, so we'd rushed around hiring this extraordinary collection of thrones and enormous chairs. He walked in and saw them all lined up, laughed uproariously, took out of his holdall a little folding stool, and that was all he used: he never even sat on one of our chairs."

"He was no trouble, generous with his time and with the students, very direct and encouraging with them. At the end of the second half somebody asked about his film Hey Georgio, which had not been a great success to put it mildly. He just laughed, and said 'it was rubbish, wasn't it?'

"There was a reception afterwards with a buffet, and as one man had just got his apple crumble and cream dessert, he saw that Pavarotti was about to leave, and rushed over to shake his hand. Pavarotti did shake hands - but with his free hand he scooped a great handful up of the dessert and ate it. The man was completely overcome, he had shaken hands and his hero had eaten his apple crumble, it was a real double whammy."

His last appearance in London was at Covent Garden, in Tosca, in January 2002.

"I looked at him sitting on a stool in our rehearsal room, just perched on the edge of it, scarf around his neck, and to me he seemed much quieter, and not nearly as large as I had expected - but then when you saw him on stage he was just immense," said Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera.

"We were very worried that he wouldn't show, but he did, on the day, at the time, ready for rehearsal - and then four days before the first night, his mother died. We managed to get him onto a plane, in time for the funeral and before the fog that comes down every evening in January - but inevitably we wondered if we would see him again, and then when he did the first night if he would do the second, and so on.

"But he did them all, and splendidly. On the last night I watched him, and he took curtain call after curtain call, and some of the lowest bows I have ever seen, his eyes scanning the house and drawing in the applause - it was a truly theatrical moment."

The author and critic Gillian Widdicombe has a more haunting memory. She had seen him in performance many times, and interviewed him at length, but later met him several times with her husband, Jeremy Isaacs.

"He had come to London to sing Ballo, and we were to meet him afterwards for supper. He sang like a pig. It was obviously awkward when we met him afterwards, in this quite small apartment. He was sitting in an enormous armchair, looking completely knackered. He looked me in the eye and just said, 'I should stop ...'. He knew it was true, and he knew I knew it was true - but of course he didn't stop."

She and Lord Isaacs, however, also cherish the happier memory of the day of the cream cakes.

"He was appearing in Florence, with Zubin Mehta - they got on terribly well because of their shared love of football - and he agreed to meet Jeremy in the afternoon but warned he wouldn't be able to speak. Jeremy said 'of course, maestro, you will want to rest your voice for this evening', but [Pavarotti] said 'no, no, because of the football'. When he got to the flat, there were all these enormous cream cakes the Italian fans had given him - so they spent a companionable afternoon, watching the football and eating cake."