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
This review is from: Toast (Mass Market 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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Life in Food, March 24, 2005
"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."
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So many flavors, so many feelings, November 29, 2004
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.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
