Food writer Nigel Slater is a man after my own heart, as he, like me, relates episodes of his childhood, through the food he ate at the time. I am not familiar with many of the foods he references since they are Brit-specific, for example, oddities such as grilled grapefruit, space dust, angel delight, cheese-and-onion crisps, arctic roll, and heinz tinned puddings. At the same time, I feel his descriptions are so illustrative that it is easy to sense what these concoctions taste like. He also captures the ambivalent feelings consumers had in the 1950's and 60's about accepting modern convenience foods, especially with his mother's culinary pride and his own fastidious palette on the line. Even more personally, Slater shows how he used food as an emotional substitute for a mother who died early and a distant father, who vented his frustration through abuse and ultimately remarried the family cleaning lady as if to destroy the family nucleus intentionally. However, the author does not dwell on the emotional impact of these events but rather uses his edible memories as the catharsis to which we could all relate.

The author can be a cipher as he is hesitant to incur the risk of sharing too much of his personal history. The wider significance of the people in his life is never explained, and as a reader, I don't miss this dimension since Slater is so engaging in his narrative, the focus of which is almost entirely on himself - through breakfasts, lunches and dinners. He is full of hilarious anecdotes such as his overachieving stepmother who sounds like she would put Martha Stewart to shame or taking nightly walks with the dog and a candy bar to observe couples making out in the back of cars. Slater eventually finds a substitute family working after school in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant, and he describes the mundane tasks as if they are pioneering adventures, whether it amounts to preparing prawns for a cocktail or defrosting ready-made meals. The timeline of his story is thankfully limited. It begins with burnt toast and ends as the author, just out of school, finds employment in a restaurant in London. Slater converts the recollections in between into precise sensory memories that attain emotional resonance. This is not sentimental writing by any means, as he evokes time, people and place with a palpable realism in his energetic prose. Like Ruth Reichl and Anthony Boudrain, Slater makes his own idiosyncratic exercise in culinary history a winning childhood memoir.

Download File Size:3.2 MB

---