Toast (Paperback)

~ (Author) "MY MOTHER IS SCRAPING a piece of burned toast out of the kitchen window, a crease of annoyance across her forehead..." (more)
Key Phrases: prawn cocktail, sponge pudding, salad cream, Auntie Fanny, Walnut Whip, Percy Salt (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

/ 'Nigel is a bloody genius.' Jamie Oliver / 'The greatest cookery writer of them all.' Guardian / 'The pick of the bunch ! bubbling with ideas, suggestions, hints and personal opinions that genuinely help you to make your own mind up about how and what to cook.' The Times / 'He's a genius.' Matthew Fort, Guardian / 'Slater remains the reigning champion, a writer incapable of uninspiring sentences.' Daily Express / 'No one writes more temptingly about food.' Independent / 'My kitchen god' Red --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description

Toast is Nigel Slater’s truly extraordinary story of a childhood remembered through food. In each chapter, as he takes readers 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 was 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 was to prove fatal. His father was a honey-and-crumpets man with an unpredictable temper. When Nigel’s widowed father takes on a housekeeper with social aspirations and a talent in the kitchen, the following years become a heartbreaking cooking contest for his father’s affections. But as he slowly loses the battle, Nigel finds a new outlet for his culinary talents, and we witness the birth of what was to become 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.

A bestseller (more than 300,000 copies sold) and award-winner in the UK, Toast is sure to delight both foodies and memoir readers on this side of the pond—especially those who made such enormous successes of Ruth Reichl’s Tender at the Bone and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Gotham (October 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592401619
• ISBN-13: 978-1592401611
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #224,890 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 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 (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent memoir of adolescent's life and tastes. Read It., December 15, 2005

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

`toast, the story of a young boy's hunger' is a memoir by noted British culinary writer, Nigel Slater, described in his flyleaf biographical blurb as `a national treasure'. Foremost among his accolades for this book is a blurb at the top of the front cover by his nibs, Jamie Oliver. Since I have not read any of Slater's other books, I cannot offer any opinion on the `national treasure' label, which I would tend to reserve for only those culinary figures of the very highest order, such as Elizabeth David and Julia Child. Regarding Sir Jamie's comment, I will attribute that to the fact that Mr. Slater is, in fact, a very good writer who does not, like Oliver, dictate his books into a tape recorder and have all the writing done by a copy editor. But I'm getting too far afield.

This particular book is a personal memoir covering a lot more than simply his food preferences as he was growing up. The flyleaf accurately compares the book to Tony Bourdain's `Kitchen Confidential' and Ruth Reichl's two memoir volumes, `Comfort Me With Apples' and `Tender at the Bone', but I think neither of these comparisons quite captures the tone of these memoirs. Like Bourdain, there are some later chapters recounting life in the back of the house of some major English restaurants, but the book is really not `about' these things. Like Reichl, Slater has a mother who is simply not a very good cook, although she does manage to avoid risking the poisoning of her guests by using spoiled food.

Oddly, the writing which comes to mind when I read this book is the pieces by Jean Shepherd in, among other books, `In God I Trust, All Others Pay Cash'. There is one huge difference, however, in that Shepherd's writing is not memoir, but satire. His stories are simply not true. The purpose of the comparison is to point out how entertaining Slater's writing can be, in spite of the fact that he is recounting incidents from his own life from the age of about 8 years to the age of about 20, after leaving catering school (English version of the CIA or Johnson and Wales).

Practically all mini-essays are given the title of a type of food. Among these one to three page long recollections are three essays, including the first, entitled `toast'. One thing few culinary memoirs do well (Reichl's books are a notable exception) is to give a thorough understanding of what it is in the person's life which drove them to take up cooking. This book does an excellent job on that point, even though Master Slater has some very odd gastronomic aversions as a child to expect him to become a major culinary journalist. For example, he seems to physically unable to eat eggs or drink milk. There is nothing said about an allergy, and Master Slater has no problem with ice cream or custards, so it must just be a psychological thing.

Slater's family life in this period is such that it is simply impossible for him to ignore the fact that his mother dies of respiratory disease when he is in his early teens and his father dies when he is near his twenties. It is amazing to me that he can write of his parents with such equanimity when they were not very demonstratively loving toward young Nigel and seemed to have a typical non-intellectual obtuseness toward their child's more adventurous or inquisitive instincts.

That is not to say that Master Nigel was a model of intellectual sensitivity. He was quite capable of being quite selfish, sometimes at the most regrettable times, as when he wished that his mother would die for having forgotten a mince pie ingredient, and actually being but two weeks away from her long expected death, just before Christmas.

As culinary memoirs go, this may rival those from Ms. Reichl, just a cut below the great memoirs by M.F.K. Fisher. It is to be read for pleasure; there is no significant culinary wisdom to be gleaned from these pages!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Oh, please!, July 7, 2008

By	K. Neilson "Happy Feet" (Huntington Beach, Ca. United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Do not put this writer in the ranks of Reichl, Bourdain, or Child. Mr. Slater may write well enough, but he has essentially nothing to say. I grew tired of the endless lists of British candies and other treats that had no relevance for me as an American. I kept waiting to be won over, but the author evokes no foodie buzz, at least for this reader. Perhaps I wouldn't have been so disappointed if the book hadn't been so hyped. Read Julie Powell ("Julie & Julia") or MFK Fisher for food humor or Kathryn Harrison for child abuse, but this book is bland enough to be neither. So Mum kept burning the toast...and burning the toast... and burning...