Nigel Slater

I’m one of that breed of cooks who might best be called ‘enthusiastic amateur chefs’. People like me are never happier than when we are making a souffle of this, smoking that or creating a jus of the other. I suspect that we are also constantly aggrieved when our guests, after an initial flurry of ‘darling, how clever of you’, and ‘gosh, how simply divine’, seem largely to forget the food as the evening moves on into gossip, chat and laughter.
Nigel Slater’s joyous new book, A Thousand Feasts, is a timely reminder that people like me should, frankly, get over ourselves. This book, from the renowned food writer, is drawn from the notebooks and diaries that he has kept over his decades of touring the world. It is a series of vignettes of his experiences in food and the people with whom he has shared them. They range from the amusing to the poignant to the whimsical.
Writing about a camping trip to Ireland, for example, he explains that ‘we slice delicious sausages from the local shop and fry them in a shallow, battered pan over a small gas stove. I want my bangers to be a deep glossy, brown. John wants to save gas.’
On a trip to Seoul, having walked through ‘puddles of what I very much doubt is rainwater’, he meets a ‘chef as plump as a pumpkin’, who is making dumplings – ‘stuffed with minced pork and shredded cabbage’. The staff, he says, though not apparently noticing him, nevertheless nod in his direction, acknowledging that ‘don’t worry, we’ve clocked you’.
Some of his one-liners are fabulous in conjuring up in only a few words an entire scene and experience. ‘Lifting the lid on a bowl of miso soup and hearing the almost silent sigh as lid and cup part company’; ‘newly made marmalade sitting in a café in Spitalfields. Pots of glowing amber, rust and cinnamon jelly, waiting smugly for toast’; or ‘Gothenburg, a pastry shop’s window full of gingerbread houses sitting on a bed of snow. Suddenly, I am in a fairy tale.’
A Thousand Feasts is, in the best way, the ideal book for the downstairs loo or the last thing you read before turning out the light. The longest of the entries is only 2 pages, and it is a delightful book simply to dip into, like ‘the delight of seeing a hand-made hazel hurdle on an allotment.’
What this wonderful book reminds us – in particular, my breed of ‘keen amateur chefs’ – is that food is not really about the ingenious techniques which create it. It is the people we eat it with and the places where we eat it. Few of us can remember the detail of even the finest Michelin menu. But all of us will have vivid memories of certain meals taken with certain people, in certain places. These meals will remain in our minds, long after recollection of the chef’s cleverness has departed.