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
Praise
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘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.
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