Nigel Slater
Nigel Slater is a British food writer, journalist and broadcaster. He has written a column for The Observer Magazine for seventeen years and is the principal writer for the Observer Food Monthly supplement. Prior to this, Slater was food writer for Marie Claire for five years. He also serves as art director for his books.
Although best known for uncomplicated, comfort food recipes presented in early bestselling books such as The 30-Minute Cook and Real Cooking, as well as his engaging, memoir-like columns for The Observer, Slater became known to a wider audience with the publication of Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, a moving and award-winning autobiography focused on his love of food, his childhood, his family relationships (his mother died of asthma when he was nine), and his burgeoning sexuality.
Slater has called it "the most intimate memoir that any food person has ever written". Toast was published in Britain in October 2004 and became a bestseller after it was featured on the Richard and Judy Book Club.
"I think the really interesting bits of my story was growing up with this terribly dominating dad and a mum who I loved to bits but obviously I lost very early on; and then having to fight with the woman who replaced her ... I kind of think that in a way that that was partly what attracted me to working in the food service industry, was that I finally had a family." As he told The Observer, "The last bit of the book is very foody. But that is how it was. Towards the end I finally get rid of these two people in my life I did not like [his father and stepmother, who had been the family's cleaning lady] - and to be honest I was really very jubilant - and thereafter all I wanted to do was cook."
In 1998 Slater hosted the Channel 4 series Nigel Slater's Real Food Show. He returned to TV in 2006 hosting the chat/food show A Taste of My Life for BBC One.
Slater has two elder brothers, Adrian and John. John was the child of a neighbour, and was adopted by Slater's parents before the writer was born.
He lives in the Highbury area of North London, where he maintains a kitchen garden which often features in his column.
“I am a winter person, never happier than on a clear, frosty morning.”
“Pamper a tomato, overfeed it, overwater it and you will get a Paris Hilton of a tomato.”
“Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it.”
“Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?”
“It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality.”
“Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light.”
“I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.”
“Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape.”
“Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.”
“I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.”
“Believe me when I tell you that there is no lie quite so obvious as the one where you try to protest that you have washed your face ready for bedtime while you are still sporting an enormous ear-to-ear purple smile of dried Ribena.”
“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. ”
“...I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in 'greens' than it is in meat - both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that go beyond me and those for whom I cook.”