A Life in Food

"My mother is scraping a piece of burned toast out of the kitchen window, a crease of annoyance across her forehead..." So begins Nigel Slater's amusing tribute to his life in food and the food in his life.
Each chapter begins with a food item and Slater riffs off of that to tell the story of his life and of his family: "Cake holds a family together. I really believed it did. My father was a different man when there was cake in the house....if he had a plate of cake in his hand I knew that I could climb up onto his lap."
We forget sometimes just how important home cooked meals mean/have meant/continue to mean to us. The food doesn't have to be great but it has to be prepared with care and of course served with love to mean something to us. What Slater has done is to take the ordinary, the everyday and elevate it to the sublime. And even though he writes about his childhood in England and the foods he fondly and not-so fondly remembers, his memories are so personal and the words to describe them are so lovingly related that they cease to only be of a particular time or place...they become universal: "You can't smell a hug. You can't hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding."

A touching and philosophical memoir from a talented chef

Nigel Slater grew up in the post-war England that most Americans my age only know from The Avengers. There are surprising coming-of-age elements in this memoir, which Slater spins out with an unexpected grace. He is, you might know, a chef, a chef who writes quite well. His love of food is built on a terrible irony. His mother, who died when he was nine, was a terrible cook; his stepmother, whom he didn't like, was a wonderful cook. This is a version of the Frank Sinatra problem: how can a beneficent God allow unpleasant people to be gifted artists? He just does.

A tasty read

Infectious and irreverent, Toast is a memoir that leaves you hungry for treacle-laden delights (even if you've never partaken of that particular sweet), as well as feeling the sympathetic pang of loneliness. Slater's dysfunctional childhood is retold via events in which there is the omnipresent taste or aroma of a meal or snack (and who among us can say that memory is not food-based?). Perhaps it is the cushioning of a parent's death, molestation, and the awkward development of self-awareness with visions of jam-layered sugarplums, as it were, that allows the reader to swallow the bitter pill of Slater's own unfortunate episodes. Although it is his innocent guile and his mischievous insight that endears him as a kindred spirit and hero for his triumph of self.
Despite not being familiar with many of the regional goodies that Slater reminisces over, I only felt the stranger in the latter chapters (brief and unnumbered vignettes that they are). Slater talks of working in hotel restaurants, pursuing his quest for the love in and of cuisine, but his lust for beef Wellington or moules mariniere (the cuisine of the 5-star) fails to trigger the same compassion as his earlier longings for the simple joy of catching the whiff of a Christmas cake in the oven.
Still, Toast was a palatable and charming journey.