The culinary writer Nigel Slater loves cats, greengage plums and tuckboxes on trains. He writes like Agatha Christie characters speak, browses tulip catalogues and fetishises fountain pens while maintaining a middle-class Midlands affection for salted crisps. In short, Slater, who at 68 still has his floppy hair intact, is an embodiment of Evelyn Waugh’s “creamy English charm”.
“I see no point,” he declares in A Thousand Feasts, “in putting pen to paper to preserve anything negative, sad or painful.” Instead, he dedicates over 350 pages to what he calls “moments of joy”.
[ Nigel Slater: ‘I’m happy, but I’ve only just realised it’Opens in new window ]
It might be paradoxical to read Feasts as a companion to his childhood memoir Toast, whose 20th-anniversary edition coincides with Feasts’ release. Harrowingly funny about Slater being abused, neglected and orphaned, Toast brandished food as a weapon. Feasts provides a panacea, allowing the author the boyhood moments he was denied, whether sneaking bites of biscuit batter or fretting in Tokyo under the stern, schoolmistress glare of a “disapproving eel lady”. (“I check my buttons,” he sighs.) Anthropomorphising his herb patch, he channels Alice’s gossipy Looking Glass garden. “Comfrey and angelica are bullies, mint is a serial trespasser and coriander is a diva. Say boo to basil and he’ll faint before your eyes.”
Explicit is his infatuation with Japan to which he pilgrimages once a year. Echoing the prose-and-haiku genre of haibun, most of Slater’s essays are followed by a brief meditation. Thus, his account of battling a mouse concludes with “a foreign coin or a faded Polaroid, a misplaced ring or a single tarnished paper clip”. Precious to Japanese aesthetics is the moment before an ending, like cherry blossoms that are most exquisite drifting to the ground. This suits Slater, whose pleasure in cooking and gardens is ephemeral and enriched by pathos.
In Japan, an object only attains beauty when it is marred, like a lacquer cup with a single chip or a dish mended in gold where it cracked. (Such sensibility can be transposed to the English nostalgia for a meticulously darned jumper.) Appropriately, Feasts is not without flaws. Slater is gifted with twists of phrase – the hue of cardamom is “wet, green pistachios” – but occasionally he repeats himself. More pressingly, how many descriptions of pottery must we endure? However, his book celebrates imperfection, and while it may be lopsided, it also enchants, a portrait of its author at his most relaxed, the “goblins” of his past replaced by sympathetic spirits as he stretches in autumnal twilight.
Mei Chin is a freelance critic
