Hungry for Love

The past is a foreign country: they eat things differently there. At a picnic, for example, they might decant a tin of slimy boiled ham on to a dinner plate and eat it with a knife and fork, along with Heinz Salad Cream served in a sauce boat. They consume jelly with evaporated milk, cucumber slices in vinegar, plates of reformed cow’s tongue – and on special occasions they might serve them all at once on a wheeled trolley. Instead of vegetables they buy instant dried peas in cardboard boxes. They grill grapefruits. They’ve never heard of hummus.

Nigel Slater’s Toast (2003) – which won six literary awards – is many things: a childhood memoir, a confession, an act of literary vengeance. But on the surface it is a very funny travelogue from the alien country that is 1960s Middle England, told through its food. Or rather, through its culinary neuroses. In the Wolverhampton home where Nigel grows up, Arctic Roll is considered ‘something of a status symbol’, while now-unfathomable snobberies forbid all manner of foodstuffs including crisps (‘frowned upon, rather like baked beans’), tomato ketchup (‘quite unmentionable, even in hushed tones’) and Wagon Wheel marshmallows (‘would never have been allowed past the front porch’). It is a weird, lost world, and Toast conjures it with a remarkable vividness thanks to a structure singularly suited to its author’s literary gifts.

With eighteen bestselling cookery books, ten television series and endless awards to his name, Nigel Slater, OBE is Britain’s most treasured food writer. He calls himself ‘a cook who writes’ – or sometimes ‘a writer who cooks’. A well-thumbed, olive oil-stained paperback of his Real Fast Food (1992) has been a standby in my own kitchen for decades, and his long-running column in the Observer (thirty-two years and counting) is a reassuring weekend staple, its appeal lying not just in the simple accessibility of the recipes but in the delicious preambles that accompany them. Slater has a rare ability to capture in prose the sensory experiences of cooking and eating things, whether it’s a grilled chicken leg with its ‘sweet meat juices and bitter sting of charred skin’, the ‘caramelized edges and silky flesh’ of a roasted squash, or a ‘deep, fudgy lemon cheesecake so thick and clarty it sticks to the roof of your mouth’. The effect is intimate and personal: his recipes never feel intimidating, but rather as if friendly old Nigel is there in the kitchen with you, making encouraging noises and eager for you to share in his pleasure.

Toast began as an Observer Life piece intended to apply these descriptive talents to the foods of Slater’s childhood, but as he wrote about the joys of chocolate mini-rolls and banana custard he found that autobiographical elements – where, when and why he remembered eating things – kept creeping in. Ignoring his suggestion to cut the personal bits, Slater’s editor recognized they were the essence of the thing and dedicated the magazine to them. A commission to expand the concept into a book soon followed.

Slater is by no means the first writer to exploit the powerful connection between food and memory. Proust famously distinguished between voluntary memory, when you consciously try to recall something, and the much richer involuntary memories triggered by, say, the taste of a madeleine. But it’s hard to imagine a more overwhelmingly gustatory memoir than Toast. There are 117 short, digestible chapters, most named after a meal, a sweet, a biscuit or some other thing that a schoolboy can put in his mouth, and Slater claims that he tasted every single one while he wrote, thereby employing both voluntary and involuntary memory at the same time (take that, Proust!).

Everything that happens or exists in his childhood is rendered through the taste, smell, texture and sensation of whatever the young Nigel is consuming at the time. But as much as the descriptions of gulping cream soda (‘like drinking a sponge cake’) or eating Space Dust (it ‘crackled and hissed like you had put your tongue on a battery’) are specific, so the details of chronology and place are vague. This juxtaposition of vivid small details and opaque big events plunges us into a very immediate child’s-eye view of the world. Toast is not the autobiographical reminiscence of an adult, but the in-the-moment experiences of a boy: a jumble of sense impressions and half-understood happenings from which Slater’s story emerges as if by accident.

That story is moving, comical and frequently unsettling. Born in 1956, Nigel is the third son of Tony – a self-made factory owner – and Kathleen Slater, but his brothers are much older so he effectively grows up as an only child. He is painfully conscious of being inconvenient, and that his birth had not just been unlooked-for but had triggered in his mother the asthma that makes her life an exhausting slog. From an early age Nigel associates familial love with food (‘it is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you’) and yearns for his mother to share in the intense happiness he feels when making jam tarts or Christmas cake with her, but she is an uninterested, reluctant cook: buttering bread is ‘as near as she gets to the pleasure of cooking for someone you love’. Nonetheless, she is the sole object of Nigel’s devotion and his protector against the terrifying, violent rages of his father. Her death when Nigel is 9 – killed by the asthma at Christmas – is the book’s emotional hammer blow, leaving him bereft and loaded with guilt.

Another great food writer, M. F. K. Fisher, claimed that ‘our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others’. Nigel has mixed and mingled the three from infancy. Now, starved of love and his security shattered, food becomes the central focus of his personality. It is also his defence against the two monsters who dominate his adolescence: his father and his new stepmother, pseudonymously referred to as Joan Potter. The development of this toxic, claustrophobic three-way relationship, and the blackly comic food-related battles that take place in their unhappy home in the country, are the chief sources of Toast’s drama, later inspiring a 2012 BBC film adaptation (with a memorable turn by Helena Bonham-Carter as the chain-smoking, cleaning-obsessed Joan) and a touring stage play.

Slater’s bitter resentment towards Joan Potter drips from every page on which she appears. He paints her as crude, gold-digging and possibly even murderous. Tony, meanwhile, is a bully with a wild temper – and Slater has never forgiven him for it. Appearing on Desert Island Discs in 2005, Slater said of his father: ‘I’m still angry . . . It takes six or seven hours to read Toast, he made my life a misery for six or seven years.’

Yet, for me, what makes Toast so compelling is the ambiguity, the messiness, the human realness of it. In a school essay little Nigel had described marshmallows as being ‘the nearest food to a kiss’, so every night for two years after his mother’s death his father places two of them on his bedside table. Is that a pathetic simulacrum of affection from someone unable to provide real parental warmth, or is it actually a rather sweet gesture by a flawed man doing his best?

Toast provokes many such questions, not least about Nigel himself. This is a startlingly frank and confessional memoir, and Slater makes no attempt to portray himself as a saint: he is often selfish, deceitful, even vindictive. Just as surprising for me, in an autobiographical work by Britain’s most cosily avuncular cook, was how much disgust Toast contains. Slater’s gifts for graphic gustatory descriptions, so effective when eulogizing his favourite flavours in the Observer, are even more powerful when applied to the foods he hated as a child. Tapioca is ‘like someone has stirred frogspawn into wallpaper paste’. A sausage casserole looks ‘like an unflushed lavatory’. The passage in which Nigel is force-fed fried eggs by his father and ends up with his face ‘smeared with tears and egg and snot and vomit’ not only turned my stomach but brought rushing back a highly involuntary memory of my first day at big school, when I was required by a sadistic prefect to eat a plate of vile grey goo they called ‘chicken supreme’.

But that sort of thing was only common in that strange foreign country, the past. There, our neurotic relationship with food included a belief that an unemptied plate was such a sin that it justified inflicting Room 101-style tortures on weeping children. We live in a different world now, where food can be healthy, nutritious and indulgently enjoyable all at the same time. It is a world that Nigel Slater has played a leading role in creating.

Indeed, it’s hard to think of anyone in public life who has better found his niche or a more purely positive use for his gifts. The little boy in Toast may not be a saint, but he is brave, self-sufficient and determined to forge his own path out of fairly horrible circumstances. The formative trials and traumas of Nigel Slater are bearable for the reader because we know that they will eventually lead him to become a cook who writes like an angel; a writer who cooks for us all, and for the sheer love of it.