Nigel Slater is one of Britain’s most highly regarded food writers. His beautifully written prose, warm personality and unpretentious, easy-to-follow recipes have won him a huge following. He is the author of a collection of much loved cookery books, including the classics Appetite, The Kitchen Diaries and the two-volume Tender. He has written an award winning weekly column in the Observer for twenty years, which is syndicated internationally and he is a regular contributor to Sainsbury’s The Magazine. Nigel's writing has won the National Book Awards, the Glenfiddich Trophy, the James Beard Award, the British Biography of the Year and the André Simon Memorial Prize. Television awards include a Guild of Food Writers' Award for his BBC1 series Simple Suppers and the BBC Food Personality of the Year. His memoir Toast – the Story of a Boy's Hunger won six major awards, has been translated into five languages and is now a BBC film starring Helena Bonham Carter and Freddie Highmore. His latest book, Eat has just won the National Book Award.
<p>Now with an updated foreword by Elizabeth Day and afterword by Nigel Slater, twenty years later Toast has become a classic food memoir, detailing all the food, recipes and cooking that have marked Nigel’s passage from greedy schoolboy to great food writer.</p><p>‘Toast’ is Nigel Slater’s truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. Whether relating his mother’s ritual burning of the toast, his father’s dreaded Boxing Day stew or such culinary highlights of the day as Arctic Roll and Grilled Grapefruit (then considered something of a status symbol in Wolverhampton) this remarkable memoir vividly recreates daily life in sixties surburban England.</p><p>His mother was a chops-and-peas sort of cook, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental AGA, a finicky little son and the asthma that was to prove fatal. His father was a honey-and-crumpets man who could occasionally go off ‘crack’ like a gun. When Nigel’s widowed father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen, the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his father’s affections. But as he slowly loses the battle, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary talents, and we witness the birth of what was to become a lifelong passion for food.</p><p>Nigel’s likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses form a fascinating and amusing backdrop to this incredibly moving and deliciously evocative memoir of childhood, adolescence and sexual awakening.</p>
