Author(s): Nigel Slater

General

This edition not available in New Zealand. This is top food writer Nigel Slater's eat-and-tell autobiography. Detailing all the food, recipes and cooking that have marked his passage from greedy schoolboy to great food writer, this is also a catalogue of how the British have eaten over the last three decades. "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 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. 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. First published 2003.