Appetite (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "and stuffs, sieves and blends, and reduces his sauces to the consistency of molasses doesn't mean his food is too showy for its own good,..." (more)
Key Phrases: Noilly Prat, San Daniele

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What is there to say about a new Nigel Slater book? Especially one called Appetite. It is exactly what it should be. This is the book he has been heading for all along. It is about food, to be sure, but it is also a statement of his personal philosophy, which seems to amount to this: that our appetites are founded in pleasure; and that we must interrogate those pleasures, and take them very seriously indeed, if we are to eat as well as we can. To eat well means to eat, and cook, pleasurably. So in Appetite Slater takes food, and cooking, back to where he believes it belongs, back to the realm of sensuous pleasure and comfort. Back to the sheer bliss, as he might say, of putting something warm, soft, and sticky in your mouth.

Very cleverly, he has built his book not around detailed recipes as such--that would be too specific for his purposes--but around the sort of thing that might pop into your head as something you would really like to eat. These are the kinds of food this generous and handsome book celebrates; foods that have a genuine part to play in people's lives. This is quintessential Nigel Slater: laid-back, not claiming any special privilege as a chef ("If I can do it, so can you," he remarks), and all wrapped up in that wonderful, lived-in, squashy prose that hits the spot every time. A feast of a book, from a man with no tricks or gimmicks, who is happily in touch with his own appetites and wants to put us in touch with ours. --Robin Davidson, Amazon.co.uk

Review

The premise of Nigel Slater's mouthwatering new book is summed up in one of the earliest chapters, The New Cook's Survival Guide. The first three bullet points read: 1. Don't think you have to cook every day. 2. You can live on home-made soup and toast. 3. A diet of home-made soup and toast gets boring after a while. In essence, the author takes 100 classic recipes and pulls them apart, teaching readers to use their own initiative - adding ingredients here, taking away ingredients there. We end up with our own personal versions of stews, pastas and puddings and the confidence to refine, edit or simplify these dishes whenever we want. Slater has a wonderfully unpretentious style and there are chapters called Cutting Down the Work, Kids in the Kitchen and even a section on why junk food is so delicious. This is certainly not a book for vegetarians or for those trying to avoid a high-cholesterol diet but, as with all Slater's books, the reader cannot but be carried along by the author's obvious relish for the good things in life and the pleasure he derives from good ingredients as opposed to complicated recipes. The food is exquisitely photographed throughout - chocolate has never looked so chocolatey or fruit so fruity, and Slater's inspiring prose makes him much more than just another cookery writer. This book is set to become another classic. (Kirkus UK) --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Clarkson Potter; 1 Amer ed edition (September 24, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0609610783
• ISBN-13: 978-0609610787
• Product Dimensions: 9.9 x 7.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #496,774 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I adore this book, February 22, 2002

By	Abra Carroll Nardo (Raleigh, NC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Appetite (Hardcover)

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!

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Master Class on Cooking for the Family. Buy It!, February 2, 2006

By	B. Marold "Bruce W. Marold" (Bethlehem, PA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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`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!

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely, Positively Refreshing, November 21, 2002

By	Walter Rich "walterrich" (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews

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.