Nigel Slater, OBE, is perhaps Britain’s most treasured food writer, loved by cooks the nation over for his comfortingly do-able recipes and his colourful writing, the companionable tone of his bestselling cookbooks and his longstanding column in the Observer. In his funny and poignant memoir Toast he describes the ingredients that combined to make him the cookery writer he is today – a childhood that certainly had very little that was comfortable about it.
Growing up almost as an only child, with two older brothers, Nigel was always painfully aware that his birth had been not only inconvenient but had triggered the asthma that ended his mother’s life. She died at Christmas when he was only 9, leaving him bereft and defenceless against his father Tony, a self-made factory owner given to terrifying rages, who early on cast sensitive Nigel as a ‘nancy boy’. And when, after his wife’s death, Tony took up with a woman for whom Nigel could feel nothing but scorn, life became even more difficult.
The book opens with his mother scraping a piece of burnt toast out of the kitchen window, and though this was a regular occurrence and his mother had never been much of a one for cooking, as Nigel says, ‘It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.’ Toast is subtitled ‘the story of a boy’s hunger’, and it is through food, ranging from the irresistible to the revolting, that Nigel relives his experiences of survival, growing up and final escape. Each short chapter has something edible as its title, taking us instantly back to a 1960s world of grilled grapefruit, Arctic Roll and Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pies. It’s a treat.
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