Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

Nigel Slater

Language: English

Pages: 256

ISBN: 1592407064

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


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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Money. A good way round sharing was to buy Sherbet Fountains – those tubes of acidic white powder wrapped in red-and-yellow paper with a stick of liquorice poked down the centre. You dipped the liquorice into the sherbet and sucked it. Not only did its staggeringly acid sweetness make your eyes water, you could have it all to yourself. At least I did. No one ever asked to suck my liquorice. For some reason Sherbet Fountains were considered girls’ stuff. Like Refreshers and Love Hearts. Nobody.

Ballgown. I open the deep drawers in her dressing table and sniff her cardigans, her long evening gloves, her hankies. I open Mum’s jewellery box and pull out her pearl necklace, her cameo brooch and another gold one in the shape of a feather. The one she always wore with her mushroom twinset. Even the quilted lining of the box smells of her. Halfway along the rail in the wardrobe is her crinkly white petticoat, the one she wore under her ballgown when she and Dad went out for the evening. When.

My father as a threat to get me to do what she wanted, neither did she hug me when he was looking yet freeze me out when he wasn’t. Mummy had never had a ‘blue rinse’ put in her hair or clear varnish on her nails. Mummy never said ‘nigger brown’. Mummy never used air freshener. I just keep staring at the rose, the petals, the long yellow stamens, stem, the fat red thorns, wanting to say so much. Wanting to tell him how the woman he is going to marry nags me from the moment I get up in the.

It. The film credits rolled up the screen and all of us stirred slightly, stretching our arms and untangling our limbs. Stuart suggested a walk to the river. ‘I’m not moving an inch,’ said Beany, who was by now almost asleep. ‘Come on then, we’ll go on our own.’ Stuart bounced up and pulled me to my feet. It was an awkward walk. Long silences, which I didn’t know how to fill (I couldn’t forget he was my employers’ son), accompanied by a sick feeling in my stomach and a desperate need to pee. He.

Drapes, the vast high-backed sofas and the potted palms. A bit of red velvet goes a long way to a boy brought up with G-Plan. After a week or so I started to spot the flies in the ointment. An ancient chef the size of a toby jug who used white bread in the trifle because he couldn’t be bothered to make sponge. ‘Bah, they’ll never know and if they do they’d be too embarrassed to say.’ The wine waiters who ‘miscounted’ the number of bottles of champagne sold at weddings and who could later be seen.

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