Back to thinking about food again. No surprise. Many a fine reviewer has commented on Nigel Slater’s autobiography, Toast – and rightly so. What I want to think about is how it added permission to evoking nostalgia about food – and in brilliant prose.
Not an easy thing to write about, food. I thought I could, and then I started wrestling with it again last month, when doing my ingredient a day posts. Turns out that foods we love now, because we loved them way back when, can actually be hard to write about.
It’s fine to set the scene, fine to talk about how you felt when you tried them, how you seek them out since. But conveying the tastes, the eating experience, as it was at the time?
Sure, we have lots of phrases to talk about restaurant food, or quality of food in markets. But many of our strongest likes and dislikes form way before we have those expressions to hand. So dipping back into the past, conveying Just How It Felt…and then helping others to experience the same…well, hats off, I say.
Part of what I liked about it was that I knew some of the locations he wrote about. I could put myself in his shoes a little more, knowing the landscape, the local culture, and how people might respond to certain foods.
But what most of us like is that Toast is not about highbrow food – for all of Nigel Slater’s food accolades since. His evocation of different types of sweets, different tastes from packet products, familiar set meals, is of its time.
There are some of those tastes which we wouldn’t choose to revisit – there are others where it tasted just fine, whether or not it’s seen as a ‘proper’ ingredient now or not.
That’s also why Nigella Lawson comes up with reworkings of things like salad cream. Why Heston Blumenthal sets out to make giant fruit pastilles. I don’t feel the need to go out and buy a cookbook that is all about recipes with marmite, or HP sauce, but in moderation, it works.
I’m guessing it’s particularly relevant in the UK, because of the food revolution that took us from salad cream to mayonnaise; from instant to filter to macchiato, thanks darling. So many more ingredients available to us, better quality produce, access to specialist products – it changes the whole landscape, at home as well as in restaurants.
But I did like prawn cocktail when I was little. And I still do. I threw caution to the wind recently and bought barbecue beef Hula Hoops – because they used to be my favourites. I don’t care too much that the pink sponge in Battenburgs is particularly pink – it’s meant to look like that.
I know. I was there. Food is one of the most potent time travelling devices there is. Or why would the food critic in Ratatouille be brought up short by eating the dish of his childhood?
Proust was grateful for his madeleines. I’ll pass on Angel Delight, for the record. But thanks, Mr Slater, for encouraging us in sticking to the magnificent food obsessions of our childhoods.