Nigel Slater was the first cook to insist that photographs of his food be shown without having been touched up. It was the early 1990s, when books and magazines presented gleaming pages of gussied-up dishes next to their recipes. There was, and still is, a craft devoted to primping food pictures. Photographers’ assistants were armed with tweezers, spray bottles, and a bag of tricks: shaving cream that stands in for whipped cream, incense burned to make steam rising from a dish, food colouring and dish soap sprayed on a half-raw chicken to make it look plump, brown, and crispy.
Slater, a magazine food editor at the time, brought the camera right down to the real roasted chicken, capturing the glistening ooze and crispy bits stuck to the pan. There were burnt edges in baking tins and char rather than glycerine on the vegetables. This was real food that you could almost smell. He started the fashion for more authentic, messier food photography and the dishes to go with it.
Slater, a reserved, amiable man, describes himself as “a cook who writes” — as well as being a long-running columnist at the Observer magazine, he has published half a dozen books on food.
His writing is luminous, often tender, and in an age of macho chefs and TikTok cucumber-salad sensations, his food is nourishing and sustaining.
A Thousand Feasts is more a memoir than a recipe book. As well as kitchen diaries, the record of what he cooks and eats — published in book form several years ago — he keeps notebooks that chronicle a life lived mostly in the kitchen, but also in the garden and on many trains and planes, headed for faraway destinations.
He is the equivalent of an Impressionist painter, dabbing bright pictures on the page: “Eating rosewater ice cream from a shop in Beirut whose walls are riddled with bullet holes” is one brief entry; another is from Lapland where he drinks a cocktail made from the fresh green tips of spruce. It is clear from this collection that Slater’s heart is in the East, in Japan and South Korea.
He writes that, when bathing at night in Korea, one sees ghosts in the swirling mist that rises from the water, soft, slowly moving clouds.
He loves not only the unusual food but also the culture of the region. “In Japan hotels allow you to eat in your pyjamas, a ritual I heartily endorse. (Even the lowliest accommodation here comes with new toothbrushes, doll’s house tubes of toothpaste and soft, much-worn and washed nightwear.)”
He adores the purity and restraint of the cooking, such as when in a restaurant in Kamakura, a “small basket appears at my table and a tiny dish of salt. In it, a single wisp of new season’s bracken in tempura batter, the fern caught in the process of slowly unfurling.”
In his descriptions of his home and garden one gets the idea that Slater is almost monastic: the muted colours of his stripped-back house, his pleasure in single pieces of handmade pottery and plain wooden spatulas, his monotone garden with the tiniest pulses of colour from a rare rose or flower.
There isn’t a crumb I don’t like. The shattered crust of a baguette; the rounded pink and yellow remains of a slice of birthday sponge; the last currant from an Eccles cake or flake of puff pastry from a sausage roll.
— Nigel Slater in A Thousand Feasts
But don’t be misled; his appetites are huge and catholic.
“There isn’t a crumb I don’t like,” he writes. “The shattered crust of a baguette; the rounded pink and yellow remains of a slice of birthday sponge; the last currant from an Eccles cake or flake of puff pastry from a sausage roll. There are the spongy, butter-coated crumbs from a crumpet; a lost nib of candied peel from a hot cross bun or the sugary rubble that lies at the bottom of a dish of apple crumble.”
Ascetic as he can be, he’s also not holier-than-thou. “Few lines in a book have infuriated me more than the one by a writer of books about ‘healthy eating’who insinuated that if you find yourself drinking alone then you may have a drink problem. Oh, do fuck off and get a life. A glass of wine on your own, like tucking into dinner by yourself, is as life-enriching as one shared with friends.
”Slater’s real autobiography was titled Toast. It became a bestseller and was transformed into a sellout play that toured the UK. In it he described his ghastly childhood in Wolverhampton, with a stepmother straight out of a fairytale.
Perhaps that is why he is so quietly alive to the world, finding beauty in the most fleeting moments, the smallest details of nature. This book is both an invitation to observe closely and a reminder that feasts abound in the world, if only we search them out.
From the August edition of Wanted, 2025
