A Thousand Feasts by Nigel Slater: A bacon sandwich is good for your health – your mental

A THOUSAND FEASTS by Nigel Slater (4th Estate £20, 368pp)

A typical Nigel Slater moment, in Goa, India. He’s in the back of an ancient Morris Oxford cab, with crocheted antimacassars washed and ironed by the driver’s mother, when the car is suddenly pounded by ‘raindrops the size of cherries’.

It’s a monsoon. The driver can’t see out, and stops the car. He passes Slater a tiny mango from the pile on the seat beside him.

It tastes divine. ‘A trickle of nectar is running down my chin, stinging my naked, sunburnt thighs. The flesh is sweet and honeyed, soft as ice cream. The sky is charcoal and crimson. Neither of us knows if the car will start again.’

Both of them start laughing hysterically. ‘It crosses my mind,’ Slater writes, ‘that there may be worse ways to die than in a monsoon, laughing, with mango juice on your lips.’

Thus begins Slater’s collection of short, sensuous snapshots of his life as a widely travelled food writer.

In Greece, he relishes thyme-flavoured lamb ‘roasted in a tin as old as time’. In Lebanon, he eats ‘flatbreads, warm and patchily charred from the griddle, folded over crumbled white cheese, tearing them apart and dipping the smoky bread and salty cheese into bowls of rose-scented jam’.

The culinary exoticism sometimes lurches into downright weirdness. In Tehran, he’s served sheep’s brain before 8am. In Japan, he eats crab guts as part of a ‘multi-course snow-crab dinner’: ‘thick, jade-green-and-grey slime’ eaten from the shell. ‘You will either think of this as a treat beyond all treats, a gift from the gods, or something from The Exorcist.’

For all of us who cook from Slater’s inspiring recipes, it’s a pleasure to be in his eloquent company, even if he does lapse into pseudery in the snatches of prose dotted between the longer snapshots.

A tiny cube of tofu ‘sits in a clear, glistening moat of ponzu sauce on an old blue and white dish. I have genuinely never seen anything more beautiful’. Rice is ‘silent, white, pure. Sitting quietly in its bowl, devoid of adornments, it is quite the most beautiful thing on earth’. A haiku-like entry goes: ‘Picking a basket of deep-pink roses for petal jam.’

Home and Away: Slater’s book is stuffed for of culinary nuggets and indulging descriptions

That rose-picking moment is a glimpse of Slater’s life at his lovingly restored Georgian home in London, where he describes the leftovers after a typical garden summer lunch: ‘The rind of a piece of melon, a speck of San Daniele, a smudge of burrata, and a peach stone.’ The book is really a collection of Instagram posts in prose.

Although we often see him in the luxury of a foreign hotel, padding about in slippers or sitting by a log fire sipping a glass of red wine after a massage, I preferred it when he described more down-to-earth home pleasures.

On his return from a foreign trip, he makes and eats a bacon sandwich. His rules are that it must be ‘slightly too large to eat in polite company’, ‘never elegant’, and ‘not cut into triangles’. And don’t worry about its unhealthiness: ‘A bacon sandwich improved my health enormously … by which I mean my mental health.’

This, after all, is the boy who was born in 1956 in the Midlands, where the family kitchen ‘smelled of warm ironing and wet dog’.

Though relishing the expensive delights of the celebrity author, he remains nostalgic for the food-related thrills of his childhood, such as the glass of fruit juice on a doily as a first-course item, and the pleasure of dipping his finger into the icing sugar that collected in the corners of the tin of fruit ‘travel sweets’ in the glove box of his parents’ car. He admits that, to this day, he still bites the heads off jelly babies.

I’d rather read that kind of thing than this more smug entry: ‘We are sitting in the panelled bar of an ageing “grande dame” hotel in Mayfair. A cocktail or two with [his business partner] James after a long and blissful lunch elsewhere to celebrate my OBE’.

A taste of home: Nigel Slater adores an inelegant bacon sandwich

At home in his basement kitchen with flagstones on the floor, exquisiteness reigns. A house rule is: no shoes or laptops in the drawing room. Slater’s daily habits include: rising before six every morning; two cups of green tea per day, the morning one from an ash-glaze mug, the afternoon one from one of his collection of tea bowls; a spoonful of yoghurt first thing and last thing before bed; and daily writing by candlelight with a fountain pen.

I’ve never questioned having a plastic washing-up bowl, but Slater has unsettled me on this point. His washing up bowl is made of glazed earthenware (‘more pleasing to me than the plastic variety’), and his washing-up brush has a wooden handle (‘I have an unnatural hatred of plastic washing-up brushes.’) His chopping board is ‘a piece of pale elm’, his writing desk ‘a piece of Japanese elm’, with three bottles of ink ‘as beautiful as perfume bottles’.

As for other personal likes and dislikes, Slater doesn’t like sharing puddings in restaurants, or being asked ‘what is your favourite food?’ by members of the public. (He lets on that it’s probably plain crisps.)

He adores his row of pickled vegetable jars in the fridge and delights in non-polished cutlery, especially what he calls ‘the benign intimacy of a spoon’. He loves a packed lunch, but has ‘a pathological fear of travelling with a banana, due to an unmentionable incident involving a duffle bag on a school trip to Ludlow’.

He describes, enticingly, his perfect adult packed lunch enjoyed on a train journey to York: a rye bread sandwich filled with salmon and cucumber, a repurposed Neal’s Yard glass yoghurt pot of cold roasted vegetables, and a slice of ginger cake.

Slater admits he has devoured it all before the train has even left the station. I can see why. It sounds irresistible.