Nigel Slater - Toast

The story of a boy’s hunger

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2003

This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010

Copyright © Nigel Slater 2003

Nigel Slater asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781841154718

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 9780007386871

Version: 2019-04-19

‘An ingenious and touching treat’

Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year

‘ Toast follows a recipe – boyhood blues without bitterness – that looks simple yet is actually hard to pull off. Slater manages it’

Guardian

‘Delightful…singular and original’

Evening Standard

‘The genius of his food writing comes from an obvious belief that food and happiness share the same organ in the brain’

LYNNE TRUSS, Sunday Times

‘A banquet of unlikely delectations…England’s answer to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential’

Daily Telegraph

‘Proves he can write mouth-wateringly about families and life too: I gobbled it up’

Daily Telegraph Books of the Year

For Digger, Magrath and Poppywith love

In memory of Elvie 1902–2002

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Toast 1

Christmas Cake

Bread-and-Butter Pudding

Sherry Trifle

The Cookbook

The Lunch Box

Jam Tarts

Spaghetti Bolognese

Arctic Roll

Pancakes

Flapjack

Percy Salt

Sweets, Ices, Rock and Politics

Rice Pudding

Butterscotch Flavour Angel Delight

Mashed Potato

Tinned Ham

Space Dust

Bombay Duck

Blackcurrant Pie

Grilled Grapefruit

Cheese and Pineapple

Apples

Cream Soda

Setlers

Sunday Roast

Heinz Sponge Pudding

Crisps, Ketchup and a Few Other Unmentionables

Senior Service

Jelly 1

Jelly 2

Lemon Drops

Milk

Peas

Ice Cream

Cold Lamb and Gravy Skin

Apple Crumble

Sherbet Fountains

Radishes

Tinned Fruit

Lamb Chop

Tapioca

Treacle Tart

Crumpets

Bubblegum

Porridge

The Day the Gardener Came

Hot Chocolate 1

Hot Chocolate 2

Milk Skin

Jammie Dodgers

Peach Flan

Mince Pies 1

Mince Pies 2

The Night Just Before Christmas

Marshmallows

Fried Eggs

Cheese on Toast

Cheese-and-Onion Crisps

Fray Bentos Steak & Kidney Pie

Smoked Haddock

Birthday Cake

Bed

Fairy Drops

Tinned Raspberries

Scrambled Egg

American Hard Gums

Spinach

Smoke

Players No. 6 (Tipped)

Tinned Beans and Sausage

Banana Custard

Strawberries and Cream

The Dead Dog

Bourbon Biscuits

Garibaldis

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Salade Tiède

The Day She Darned Dad’s Socks

Bluebird Milk Chocolate Toffees

Victoria Sandwich

Ham

Boiled Ham and Parsley Sauce

Green Beans

‘Go and Play’

Lemon Meringue Pie

Salad Cream, Mushroom Ketchup and Other Delights

Coffee and Walnut Cake

Candyfloss

The Man in the Woods

Walnut Whip 1

The Hostess Trolley

Walnut Whip 2

Happy Families

Rabbit

Damson Jam

Tears

Toast 2

The Wedding Cake

Duckling à l’orange

Fillet and Rump

Prawn Cocktail

Peach Melba

Pickled Walnuts

Sweeties

The Two of Us

Another Funeral

Apple Pie and a Wake-up Call

A Sniff of Basil

Irish Stew

Black Forest Gâteau

Seafood Cocktail

La Steak Diane

Cold Roast Beef

The Wimpy Bar

Pommes Dauphinoise

The Bistro

Toast 3

Acknowledgement

About the Author

Also by Nigel Slater

About the Publisher

My mother is scraping a piece of burned toast out of the kitchen window, a crease of annoyance across her forehead. This is not an occasional occurrence, a once-in-a-while hiccup in a busy mother’s day. My mother burns the toast as surely as the sun rises each morning. In fact, I doubt if she has ever made a round of toast in her life that failed to fill the kitchen with plumes of throat-catching smoke. I am nine now and have never seen butter without black bits in it.

It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. People’s failings, even major ones such as when they make you wear short trousers to school, fall into insignificance as your teeth break through the rough, toasted crust and sink into the doughy cushion of white bread underneath. Once the warm, salty butter has hit your tongue, you are smitten. Putty in their hands.

Mum never was much of a cook. Meals arrived on the table as much by happy accident as by domestic science. She was a chops-and-peas sort of a cook, occasionally going so far as to make a rice pudding, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental cream-and-black Aga and a finicky little son. She found it all a bit of an ordeal, and wished she could have left the cooking, like the washing, ironing and dusting, to Mrs P., her ‘woman what does’.

Once a year there were Christmas puddings and cakes to be made. They were made with neither love nor joy. They simply had to be done. ‘I suppose I had better DO THE CAKE,’ she would sigh. The food mixer – she was not the sort of woman to use her hands – was an ancient, heavy Kenwood that lived in a deep, secret hole in the kitchen work surface. My father had, in a rare moment of do-it-yourselfery, fitted a heavy industrial spring under the mixer so that when you lifted the lid to the cupboard the mixer slowly rose like a corpse from a coffin. All of which was slightly too much for my mother, my father’s quaint Heath Robinson craftsmanship taking her by surprise every year, the huge mixer bouncing up like a jack-in-the-box and making her clap her hands to her chest. ‘Oh heck!’ she would gasp. It was the nearest my mother ever got to swearing.

She never quite got the hang of the mixer. I can picture her now, desperately trying to harness her wayward Kenwood, bits of cake mixture flying out of the bowl like something from an I Love Lucy sketch. The cake recipe was written in green biro on a piece of blue Basildon Bond and was kept, crisply folded into four, in the spineless Aga Cookbook that lived for the rest of the year in the bowl of the mixer. The awkward, though ingenious, mixer cupboard was impossible to clean properly, and in among the layers of flour and icing sugar lived tiny black flour weevils. I was the only one who could see them darting around. None of which, I suppose, mattered if you were making Christmas pudding, with its gritty currants and hours of boiling. But this was cake.