Toast [Hardcover]

Nigel Slater (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2004

A deliciously evocative story of childhood in 1960s suburban England from one of the United Kingdom’s best-loved writers, Nigel Slater

Toast is the truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. In each chapter, as Nigel Slater takes us on a tour of the contents of his family’s pantry—rice pudding, tinned ham, cream soda, mince pies, lemon drops, bourbon biscuits—we are transported…

His mother is a chops-and-peas sort of cook, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental stove, a finicky little son, and the asthma that would prove fatal. His father is a honey-and-crumpets man with an unpredictable temper. When he is widowed, Nigel’s father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen and the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his affections. As he slowly loses, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary gifts and we witness the birth of a lifelong passion for food. Nigel’s likes and dislikes, aversions and sweet-toothed weaknesses, form a fascinating backdrop to this exceptionally moving memoir of childhood, adolescence, and sexual awakening.

With a new preface and glossary for American readers, this British bestseller and national award winner is sure to delight foodies and memoir enthusiasts on this side of the pond. Possessed of the subtlety and wit of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and the disarming frankness of Anthony Bourdain’s page-turning Kitchen Confidential, Toast is a treat to be savored.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Slater, celebrated in Britain for his food columns in London's Observer, recalls his childhood in great and moving detail, interweaving his hunt for oral gratification with prose portraits of his family. His mother, utterly devoted to him yet something of a kitchen klutz, could not make up for the physical abuse that burst from his conflicted father. Slater's mother's early demise and his father's remarriage to the family's cleaning woman did little to enhance the sensitive lad's self-image. What joy the boy found stemmed from occasional culinary successes out of his mother's kitchen and from an endless, stereotypically English cascade of sweets. Readers of Slater's accounts of eating out in the 1960s may come to believe that the British really invented fast food, something for which Americans generally shoulder blame. Slater's hunger for both food and human love are achingly recorded. American readers may find some of this memoir tedious and obscure since Slater obsesses over the seemingly boundless output of British candy factories, never employing a generic term when there is a regional trademarked noun at hand. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

'Acutely observed, poignant and beautifully written…Slater tells his heartbreaking story with great subtlety. The theme of food and love is a fascinating one and I have never seen it better handled.' Daily Telegraph'He recreates with moving honesty and laugh-out-loud comedy the hopes and fears of boyhood. Remarkable.' Observer'”Toast” connects emotions, memory and taste buds. Genius.' Lynne Truss, Sunday Times'A talent for prose as simple and pleasurable as his recipes.’ Sunday Telegraph'Exquisitely written…You read this remarkable memoir partly cringing, partly marvelling at Slater’s hallucinogenic retrieval of times past. He is the Proust of the Nesquik era.' Independent'It achieves a remarkable freshness…[and] reveals a gift for doleful, Alan Bennett-like comedy.' Guardian‘This touching memoir proves [Slater] is more than a cookery writer. Its emotional impact will touch a chord with many.’ Sunday Mirror‘Wonderful, precise…extraordinary.’ Matthew Fort‘It’s bitter-sweet, it’s a book to be consumed in a single sitting, a book that slips down really nicely. However you want to put it, “Toast” is delicious.’ The Oldie'This book should be treasured for its prose…and for its vision of a world seen through the senses.' Independent on Sunday'[A] touching odyssey through childhood tastes, treats and tortures.' Sunday Times'Toast is served up with seasoning and flair…Vivid and moving.' Observer --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Gotham; First Edition edition (October 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592400906
• ISBN-13: 978-1592400904
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (42 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #802,565 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Brit's Baby Boomer Food Recollections Lend Resonance to All Our Food Memories, February 14, 2006

By 

Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Toast (Paperback)

Food writer Nigel Slater is a man after my own heart, as he, like me, relates episodes of his childhood, through the food he ate at the time. I am not familiar with many of the foods he references since they are Brit-specific, for example, oddities such as grilled grapefruit, space dust, angel delight, cheese-and-onion crisps, arctic roll, and heinz tinned puddings. At the same time, I feel his descriptions are so illustrative that it is easy to sense what these concoctions taste like. He also captures the ambivalent feelings consumers had in the 1950's and 60's about accepting modern convenience foods, especially with his mother's culinary pride and his own fastidious palette on the line. Even more personally, Slater shows how he used food as an emotional substitute for a mother who died early and a distant father, who vented his frustration through abuse and ultimately remarried the family cleaning lady as if to destroy the family nucleus intentionally. However, the author does not dwell on the emotional impact of these events but rather uses his edible memories as the catharsis to which we could all relate.

The author can be a cipher as he is hesitant to incur the risk of sharing too much of his personal history. The wider significance of the people in his life is never explained, and as a reader, I don't miss this dimension since Slater is so engaging in his narrative, the focus of which is almost entirely on himself - through breakfasts, lunches and dinners. He is full of hilarious anecdotes such as his overachieving stepmother who sounds like she would put Martha Stewart to shame or taking nightly walks with the dog and a candy bar to observe couples making out in the back of cars. Slater eventually finds a substitute family working after school in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant, and he describes the mundane tasks as if they are pioneering adventures, whether it amounts to preparing prawns for a cocktail or defrosting ready-made meals. The timeline of his story is thankfully limited. It begins with burnt toast and ends as the author, just out of school, finds employment in a restaurant in London. Slater converts the recollections in between into precise sensory memories that attain emotional resonance. This is not sentimental writing by any means, as he evokes time, people and place with a palpable realism in his energetic prose. Like Ruth Reichl and Anthony Boudrain, Slater makes his own idiosyncratic exercise in culinary history a winning childhood memoir.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Life in Food, March 24, 2005

By 

MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Toast (Hardcover)

"My mother is scraping a piece of burned toast out of the kitchen window, a crease of annoyance across her forehead..." So begins Nigel Slater's amusing tribute to his life in food and the food in his life.
Each chapter begins with a food item and Slater riffs off of that to tell the story of his life and of his family: "Cake holds a family together. I really believed it did. My father was a different man when there was cake in the house....if he had a plate of cake in his hand I knew that I could climb up onto his lap."
We forget sometimes just how important home cooked meals mean/have meant/continue to mean to us. The food doesn't have to be great but it has to be prepared with care and of course served with love to mean something to us. What Slater has done is to take the ordinary, the everyday and elevate it to the sublime. And even though he writes about his childhood in England and the foods he fondly and not-so fondly remembers, his memories are so personal and the words to describe them are so lovingly related that they cease to only be of a particular time or place...they become universal: "You can't smell a hug. You can't hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding."

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars So many flavors, so many feelings, November 29, 2004

By 

E. Woontner "eiw" (Fairfax, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Toast (Hardcover)

Beautiful, funny, sad coming-of-age story, a swirl of flavors and emotions in an England in transition, where the type of chocolate bar you ate defined who you were, and the hippies were still threatening and terrifying for the middle class, stiff upper lip kind. I enjoyed it immensely and praise the ability of the author in making this reading almost an olfactory and savoring experience. The story is almost too predictable, and maybe not so important as the way in which food, memories and emotions are strictly connected.