Customer Reviews

Appetite

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a foodie, and I love cookbooks. This is one of the best cookbooks I have ever owned. [...] I completely enjoy reading Nigel Slater's prose. He talks about food in a way that makes you want to eat! His goal is to develop enough confidence in his readers that they can easily find their way around a kitchen without being slavishly bound to a book. If you are obsessed with exact measurements, you will not like this book. However, if you want to become a more confident cook, then you must read this.

The first half od the book is written in prose with no recipes. However, there are enough suggestions that I found myself putting the book down to run in and whip up this-and-that just from reading the suggestions he has. There are lists of what goes with what and what is in season (although it is based on the seasons in the UK). Just reading this first half of the book (I read it as I would a novel) will make you a better cook.

In the recipe sections, many recipes begin with a vague recipe (you know - a chicken, a lemon, a head of garlic, a little butter), then there are several sections after that add variations. Each well worth the space it fills. In many ways, this is a great cookbook for me (if I may gender stereotype for a minute). Although I am a woman, my husband and father have both enjoyed this cookbooks. Unlike most cookbooks, it is more concerned with tasty food and skills in the kitchen, rather than trying to help you to get exactly the result that the author got when s/he made it.

Nigel is British, so you will find Britishisms here. Bangers are sausages, rashers are bacon. However, measurements don't matter too much since he uses them so infrequently anyway. One lemon in the UK is about the same as one lemon in the US! Also, there are several typically British foods, like British pudding here. But contrary to what most Americans think, British food can be amazing. Their food has not been as hijacked by convenience foods as ours has - so the food is real --- REAL GOOD!

One last point... the photography is fabulous! I read that Nigel insists on doing all the cooking for the photo shoots and won't allow food stylists to spruce it all up for the camera... so you see the tasty crunchy bits at the bottom of the pan... very appetizing.

I'm really hoping that Nigel will influence other cookbook writers to use this more laid-back style of writing. It's oh so much more fun!

`Appetite' by the eminent English culinary writer, Nigel Slater is one of those rare cookbooks on whose every page you get a new insight into the craft of cooking. Nigel is to wunderkind Jamie Oliver what Tom Colicchio is to Emeril Lagasse on this side of the pond. And, Slater's publishers take every opportunity they can to trumpet Sir Jamie's blurb on Slater that `Nigel is a Genius' on Slater's books. I think I can safely say that Slater is not a `genius', but he is hands down one of the most thoughtful and eloquent writers on food preparation I have read in my 2 ½ years of reviewing almost 500 cookbooks. I know from Jamie Oliver's series, `Jamie's Kitchen' on training his 15 young chefs and from his books that Oliver is every bit as good and as inventive in his recipes as is Slater. It's just that Oliver is not nearly as reflective and as literate about expressing his ideas.

Slater's objective in this book is to promote the great pleasure of cooking without a recipe. He states this objective, eloquently as usual, in the very first sentence of his introduction, viz. `I want to tell you about the pleasure, the sheer unbridled joy, of cooking without a recipe'. And, I believe that Slater succeeds in this objective far better than the well-intentioned book `How to Cook Without a Book' by Pam Anderson.

In order to make this objective a reality for the amateurs among his readers, it is not surprising that Slater must present us with almost 190 pages of introductory material to bring us all up to speed. This is not unlike the situation with the talented Jazz musician, who must be a master of the mechanics of both his instrument and of the way musical notes blend harmoniously from two or more different instruments. The irony and great pleasure in these introductory chapters is in the fact that Slater is a real minimalist when it comes to kitchen equipment. He is perfectly happy with two or three very good knives, a grill pan, a saute pan, a skillet, and a large casserole which can double as a stock pot or pasta pot or braising pot. Slater is also very fond of his genuine Chinese thin steel wok, but there are very few stir frying recipes in the book, as Slater is quite candid with the fact that the home kitchen simply cannot reproduce the high heat under a wok in a professional Chinese restaurant kitchen.

While I was very pleased with everything I read up to page 61, it is there, on the section on cooking with steam, that I realized that Slater was on to something important. Here, and in most other sections, Slater demonstrates that he is from the school which teaches us to buy the best ingredients and do as little as possible to screw them up. In this vein, he is probably very much one with the writings of Richard Olney of `Simple French Food'. In his lecture on steaming, for example, we are taught to not waste the cooking juices from a piece of steamed food. And, even though there have been many implements made to do steaming, Slater is a minimalist even here, when he says he commonly steams using a simple colander placed in a large pot holding the boiling water.

Slater's chapter on `Eating for the Season' is so good it easily outshines the written efforts of other great local / seasonal messiahs such as Alice Waters and Deborah Madison. Here, again, it is not that Slater is so much brighter than these others, it is just that he is so much better at putting across the point!

When, on page 211 we finally get to Slater's first true recipe, we find a collection of remarkably simple dishes, very similar to the sort of thing we are familiar with from Jamie Oliver and the River Café gals, Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers. These are exactly the sort of recipes that are easy to memorize and serve as a basis of improvisation. The very first recipe in the pasta chapter calls for nothing more than a handful of pasta per person, 5 or 6 florets of broccoli, and a few ounces of gorgonzola. Given the range of pasta shapes, blue cheeses, and sturdy vegetables that could be substituted into this schema, you have the model for many different recipes here. Every basic recipe is followed by an `...and more' section where a typical range of substitutions or elaborations are provided. Sort of like John Coltrane's guidance to his sidemen before launching into a performance of `My Favorite Things', except that Coltrane's sidemen are such accomplished musicians that they have no need to be told what cheeses sub well for gorgonzola!

Other chapters give us the same style of basic recipes for soups, rice, vegetables, fish, meat, fruit, pastry, dessert, and cake. And, after the remarkable discovery of baking recipes on which you can improvise, there is the cozy little ode to the joys of washing dishes. I really appreciate his take on this humble chore, as, like weeding in the garden, I always sort of liked washing dishes by hand.

Just like Colicchio's `How to Think Like a Chef' and John Ash's `cooking one on one', this book is a master class on home cooking. Therefore, the person who is quite comfortable with getting their recipes from `The Joy of Cooking' may loose patience with all the background information and the loose (improvisational) style of recipe writing. On the other hand, for those of us who are determined to turn a necessary task into a skill with which we are proud, this book is a MUST READ!

Blunt and straight to the point insight about real cooking. This book is great. However, I only recommend this book if you like reading cookbooks and you are an advanced cook or aspire to be an advanced cook. His keen insight and practical, blunt advice help to hammer home what cooking really is... and should be.
Nigel gives you a firm lesson in the fundamentals in just one or two sentences throughout the book. It's a cookbook that is mostly filled with great advice - kind of like a chefs journal on steriods. I highly recommend this book- it's the kind of book you can read twice and still learn more on the second reading. Bottom line = his opinions are really good advice and this book is like a casual conversation- except that he is the one doing all the talking.

Nigel's book is not like other cookery books, but if you read it and accept it's premise that most cooking is instinctive, you will get great results from this book. Don't expect it to be prescriptive down to the last pinch of salt - this is not Nigel's style. But you will discover your own way of doing things, and develop the confidence to go on and create your own dishes. I cannot recommend this book highly enough - it's fab!

This is the cookbook that I've been searching for! Nigel explains his philosophy of cooking and urges the readers to develop their food instincts and confidence by experimenting a bit, not slavishly following recipes. The amounts aren't exact--the risotto recipe I tried listed "a big piece of parmesan" or something like that. New cooks may be intimidated by not being told exactly what to do, but this style encourages us to trust and develop our own tastes. I enjoyed reading this cookbook straight through and have tried a couple of the recipes. The pictures are beautiful and I've always found it handy to have a visual guide for what the finished product might look like. However, if you're looking for an all-purpose cookbook with a wide variety of recipes, keep looking.

and get in the kitchen and cook. I've bought about 5 dozen cookbooks this year--I keep them by the bed and read through them at night before they migrate to the dining room bookshelves--and this is by far the most inspiring one of the lot. Slater writes about food passionately--with desire, not just enthusiasm--as well as commonsensically. His biases may not be yours, but he's upfront about them. And the food is so inviting--both the text and the superb pictures help you hear the spatter of fat in the pan and feel the acid steam of a lime and chile rich broth in your nose. He invokes all your senses and all you can do is salivate, and take out the pans, and cook. Cook what? Slater's food here is home cooking; it is not cheffy or gussied up. Almost all of it is tremendously inviting and big flavored, and easy to make for any reasonably seasoned cook. Absolute beginner cooks might worry about his seemingly imprecise recipes, but the way to learn to cook is to cook often, and I think this book makes cooking so alluring that they'll get better just from getting more practice. If you believe that cooking is chemistry, this is not your book. If you see eating and cooking and reading as sources of pleasure, loving gifts, and a chance to make a big mess in the kitchen, this cookbook is for you. Highly recommended.

I love Nigel's cookbooks, not the least for his elegant prose. WHile I was not particularly impressed with actual recipes in this book (so far), I find it to be an exceptional educational resource on how to create your own recipes. Nigel encourages his readers to find their own way of cooking, their own favorite ingredients, and create their own favorite recipes. I love cooking, but I hate cooking the same thing twice, and I frequently regret not having "variations" paragraph in the end of my favorite recipes in various cookbooks I use at home. Nigel does exactly that!
But I agree that this book is not for everyone. If you have no time or desire to be creative in the kitchen, and would rather follow precise instructions as to how to concoct a dinner, then probably you'd better skip this book. It is more about art of cooking, not craft.

I like good food...no I love good food. Call me a foodie if you must. I learned how to cook in reaction to an expanding teenage wasteline and a mother that knew how to cook solid, American Midwestern meals, and little else. In her defense, my 3 brothers and I systematically discouraged her from expanding beyond those recipes. Did we actually like Tuna-helper?! Oh how my tastes have changed. And Nigel and I, if we were to cook together, would get along famously I suspect. Since his way of describing dishes encourages an intuitive approach rather than a route-recipe approach. In my day job as a scientist, I get enough of following recipes to the letter in the lab when what we want is the McDonald's approach-exactly the same every time (but hopefully higher quality). I remember taking a cooking class in girl scouts when I was 10 or 11, and the instructor (where do they get these women?!) discouraged tasting, improvising and any sort of individuality. I hated that class. For all of these autobiographical reasons I love this book. If for no other reason that there is a precedent for the type of recipes I give to friends when they ask me how I made something that they just ate!
Buy this book for yourself if you are a free-thinking, and inventive home chef. Do not buy this book as a gift for someone you think should be more of a free-thinker. They will hate it.

If you are the kind of person who likes nothing more than curling up on a rainy day with a good cookbook and dreams of delectable aromas wafting through your house, then this is the book for you. Spending half the day reading and bookmarking and then half the day cooking up a storm to feast on in the evening is my idea of a perfect rainy day in and many of my rainy days have been spent with 'Appetite' and Nigel's friendly tone and comforting cooking. He makes no apologies for his full fat/carb filled comfort food...thank goodness! A little goes a long way. My kitchen confidence gets a good boost with this book too, as Slater deconstructs recipes and informs the reader of approachable alternatives. A informal foodie must-have.

This book has surprised me to no end. At first I wasn't sure what to make of it, but now I'm completely sold. The writing is superb, and the ideas and basic recipes with tons of modifications are amazing. It's an excellent book for even the novice cook with an open mind.