Nigel Slater - The Kitchen Diaries II

For James Thompson

Thank you, as always, to Louise Haines, my editor for over twenty years, for your endless encouragement, guidance and patience. Without you there would be no book.

To Jonathan Lovekin for taking beautiful pictures of so much I have cooked over the years. Thanks, Jonnie. I am grateful to Harry Borden for kindly allowing my publishers to use his thoughtful portrait of me.

To James Thompson, producer, kitchen genius and confidant. He who holds it all together. James, thank you for everything, but especially for your sure hand with the recipes, guiding their journey from diary to table, published page and television screen. For your inspiration, enthusiasm, hard work and friendship, I can never thank you enough.

To my literary agent Araminta Whitley and my television agent Rosemary Scoular, to Harry Mann, Sophie Hughes, Wendy Millyard and everyone at LAW, United Agents, Breckman and Company and Mishcon de Reya for dealing with all the really important stuff that I don’t understand.

To everyone at Fourth Estate, especially Victoria Barnsley, Michelle Kane, Georgia Mason and Olly Rowse. To David Pearson for helping to make this second volume of the diaries so beautiful and, as always, my thanks to Jane Middleton and Annie Lee for their eagle eyes and endless patience.

To everyone at the Observer, especially the wonderful Allan Jenkins, Ruaridh Nicoll, Martin Love, Gareth Grundy and John Mulholland. To Leah, Debbie, Helen and Caroline. And to Sarah Randell and Helena Lang. Thank you for your continued support.

To William, Sean and Mark and everyone at Fullers for all your hard work on the kitchen and to Steve Owens and everyone at Benchmark.

To Katie Findlay for helping to keep the garden in great shape; to Rob Watson at Ph9 for looking after www.nigelslater.com; to Dalton Wong and everyone at twentytwotraining for their endless encouragement and support and to Tim and Asako d’Offay and Takahiro Yagi for their wisdom and kindness.

And thank you to all the bookshops and those who work in them for their continued enthusiasm. And to everyone who enters their local booksellers and discovers the magic that lies on those creaking shelves and gets to know that there is nothing so beautiful as the feel and smell of a book in the hand.

I had no real intention to present a television series. I had enough on my plate with a long-running weekly newspaper column and my books, and, however much I enjoy watching ‘celebrity chefs’, had no wish to be part of that world. The idea of filming a cookery series was suggested to me by Jay Hunt, at the time controller of BBCI. She gently persuaded me that there was room for a series with calm and gentle presentation and understated and simple food.

Not only did the series turn out to be a success beyond our wildest dreams, I ended up rather enjoying myself, and as a result there have now been four of the ‘Simple’ series. I owe a huge debt to Jay and to Ian Blandford, to Alison Kirkham and Tom Edwards and of course to Danny Cohen. To the production team and everyone at BBC Bristol, especially Pete Lawrence, Simon Knight, Jen Fazey, Michelle Crowley, James Thompson and Gary Skipton. And to my awesome crew who have made the shows what they are: Richard Hill, Sarah Myland, Robbie Johnson, Conor Connolly, Cheryl Martin, Simon Kerfoot, Sheree Jewell, Sam Jones and Archie Thomas. And thank you to Rudi Thackeray and his team. A big shout out also to the guys at Kiss My Pixel and to Mark Adderley and Nadia Sawalha. Thank you all.

This book is not a traditional television ‘tie-in’ but versions of many of the recipes in Simple Suppers and Simple Cooking can be found between these pages. (Others are in The Kitchen Diaries volume I and Tender Volumes I and II.) Thank you to the millions of you who watch each programme, and send such heartwarming letters, emails and tweets. I cannot tell you how much the entire team appreciates it.

And to that vibrant, warm and encouraging community at Twitter @realnigelslater. You are a joy.

Nigel Slater, London, September 2012

www.nigelslater.com

Twitter @realnigelslater

www.4thestate.com

I cook. I have done so pretty much every day of my life since I was a teenager. Nothing flash or showstopping, just straightforward, everyday stuff. The kind of food you might like to come home to after a busy day. A few weekend recipes, some cakes and baking for fun, the odd pot of preserves or a feast for a celebration. But generally, just simple, understated food, something to be shared rather than looked at in wonder and awe.

Sharing recipes. It is what I do. A small thing, but something I have done for a while now. As a cookery writer, I find there is nothing so encouraging as the sight of one of my books, or one of my columns torn from the newspaper, that has quite clearly been used to cook from. A telltale splatter of olive oil, a swoosh of roasting juices, or a starburst of squashed berries on a page suddenly gives a point to what I do. Those splodges, along with kind emails, letters and tweets, give me a reason to continue doing what I have been doing for the past quarter of a century. Sharing ideas, tips, stories, observations. Or, to put it another way, having a conversation with others who like to eat.

That is why, I suppose, each book feels like a chat with another cook, albeit one-sided (though not as one-sided as you might imagine). It is a simple premise. I make something to eat, everyone, including myself, has a good time, so I decide to share the recipe. To pass on that idea, and with it, hopefully, a good time, to others. For twenty years I have shared many of those ideas each week in my column in the Observer and in my books. They might also come dressed up a little nowadays, in the form of the television series, but it is still the same basic premise.

For years now I have kept notebooks, with scribbled shopping lists and early drafts of recipes in them. These are not, I hasten to add, a set of exquisitely bound Kitchen Chronicles, but a scruffy hotchpotch, a salmagundi, of anything and everything I need to remember, from shopping lists and baking temperatures to whether it was two or three eggs that went into the cake. The books also contain the endless lists that I have written, almost obsessively, since childhood.

The notes, sometimes carefully annotated, sometimes not, vary from neat essays in longhand in black fountain pen to a series of almost illegible scribbles on any bit of paper that was handy at the time. The notebooks have recently been replaced, unromantically, by notes typed on an iPad. A decision I now rather regret. These notes form the basis of this second volume of The Kitchen Diaries. More than a diary, this is a collection of small kitchen celebrations, be it a casual, beer-fuelled supper of warm flatbreads with pieces of grilled lamb scattered with toasted pine kernels and bloodred pomegranate seeds or a quiet moment contemplating a bowl of soup and a loaf of bread. We can either treat food as nothing more than fuel or relish its every quality. We can think of preparing it as something to get done as quickly and effortlessly as possible or as something to find pleasure in, something to enrich our everyday life, to have fun with.

I have always written about the minute details of cookery, the small pleasures that can make it enjoyable and worth our time. (The bigger picture, the science and politics of food, its nutrition, provenance and chemistry, I leave to others who can do it better.) What intrigues me about making something to eat is the intimate details, the small, human moments that make cooking interesting. Whilst I never forget that most cooking is about getting something on the table at the end of a working day, I see no reason why it can’t be something to celebrate. The craft of making something with our hands, something for ourselves and others.