He has penned a weekly food column for The Observer for 30 years, written 10 cookbooks and presented several TV series. Anybody can access the ravishing recipes on his beautiful website any time of night or day.
We don’t need more meal ideas from Nigel Slater, and he’s already delivered in Toast a remarkable autobiography. No, we need what he offers us in A Thousand Feasts: a reminder to revel in life’s minutiae. Unerringly tasteful and civilised, Slater identifies tiny quotidian pleasures with such finesse that all feels right with the world as you read his book.
When the pretty tome landed on my desk, rain was once again coursing down outside, a cargo ship carrying 20,000 tonnes of potentially explosive fertiliser was anchored inexplicably off the Kent coast, Israel and Hezbollah were fighting hard and pensioners’ winter fuel payments faced an uncertain future.
It was hard to imagine a remedy for such gloom. But I got lost in what Slater, 68, calls his ‘little collection of good times’ and – lo and behold – my soul was soothed.
I personally knew I was onto a winner when I read of Slater’s devotion to plain salted crisps – absolutely and forever my favourite flavour – and to a neat pile of fresh laundry. But I challenge the gravest cynic not to be transported by this book. Slater’s writing is orderly, elegant and so evocative it could make a tube of Polyfilla sound alluring.
The stories in A Thousand Feasts tickle all the senses. Taste is, of course, on almost every page but smell, sight, sound and touch are prominent, too. The smell of mint growing in Slater’s garden or flapjacks baking in his mother’s kitchen. The sight of snowdrops under an oak tree. The sound of raindrops, the size of cherries, hitting the roof when he is comfortably inside a taxi. The feeling of being soaked to the skin in a fisherman’s hut in Iceland.
In a recent brilliant interview for The Sunday Times, Slater told Alice Thomson that, having written all those cookery books and now not one but two memoirs, he doesn’t have an idea for his next project. Whatever he comes up with, fact, fiction or food, it’s sure to be the tonic we need at the time.
