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Executive Times |
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2005 Book Reviews |
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Toast:
The Story of a Boy's Hunger by Nigel Slater |
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Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Nourishing I was skeptical when I picked up Nigel
Slater’s memoir, Toast:
The Story of a Boy's Hunger. After all, what could be all that
interesting in a food writer’s memoir of his coming of age, especially
recollections of the food of his youth? As it turns out, Toast
is a tasty memoir, well-written and packed with the poignancy of the ups and
downs of growing up followed by grief and loss. Yank readers will value the
appendix that explains some of the foodstuffs referenced in the text that may
be unfamiliar. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 40-49: Cheese
and Pineapple We rarely had visitors who stayed to eat. We had never
even been to, let alone given, a dinner party; despite having a dining table
that could seat twelve. But there were friends who would appear now and
again, usually couples so similar as to be
indistinguishable from one another. They had names like Ray or Eunice. All
the men wore ties and cardigans. The women wore twinsets.
The sort of women who talked about their “dailies” and would never leave the
house without a brooch. I do remember them all laughing a lot, but I never
understood what about. Everyone was taller than me. It was as if I wasn’t
there. It was my job to pass
around the room with the food. Oh God, the food. “Now, dear, you make certain
that everyone gets a cheese football, won’t you?” my mother would say. Our
place in local society seemed not to depend on whether we had a double
garage (we had) or which golf club my father belonged to (he didn’t). It was
more a question of whether you had Huntley & Palmer’s Cheese Footballs or
not. The pièce de résistance
was a grapefruit spiked with cocktail sticks holding cubes of cheese and
pineapple. The preparation was always a bit of a performance: draining the
syrup from the tinned pineapple, cutting the Cracker Barrel into even-sized
chunks, finding the cocktail sticks that would usually end up at the back of
the gadget drawer covered in a dusting of flour. I hated doing it. Few things could embarrass
a would-be chef quite as much as having to hold out a whole grapefruit
speared with cubes of Cheddar and tinned pineapple on cocktail sticks to men
in cardigans. The worst of it was that
everyone thought I had done the food. “He wants to be a chef,” my father
would say, as I held up the spiked grapefruit to the Masonic Worshipful
Master’s wife, who had a tight perm and lips like a cat’s bottom. When it
came to offering the dreaded grapefruit to everyone else, I would throw my
head in the air and flay my nostrils in disapproval. “Don’t pull a face like
that,” my father once snapped, “you look like Kenneth Williams.” But I had to
let everyone know my disdain for my parents’ catering arrangements. After
all, if I had done the food, they would have had prunes wrapped in bacon. Apples I played in the garden
mostly, away from the road and
the big boys with their plastic footballs that stung my legs. “I’d rather you
played where I can see you,” warned Mother, so that suited me fine. Long
borders ran either side of the lawn, white rhododendrons, pink- and saffroncolored azaleas, purple Michaelmas
daisies, and, in deepest summer, dahlias, spiky ones as big as a dinner
plate, maroon and white and gaudy yellow. In one corner was an apple tree,
not ours, but most of it overhung our garden, so that come late August its
fruit fell into the mauve-and-white phloxes below. If I stood on tiptoe I
could just reach the apples hanging on the lower twigs, flat-topped apples,
pale green and rose like Turkish delight, with snow-white flesh that had
ripples of pink running through it. They tasted of strawberries but smelled
of the scented phlox that grew underneath them. I could reach these apples,
unlike the fruit of the three trees in our garden whose branches were, even
on tiptoes, just out of reach. I could get to the glue bands my father put
around their trunks though, and used to peel off the flies and wasps they
trapped, pulling them by their wings until their bodies came apart. Uncle Reg
used to come around once a week, on a Thursday evening, bringing with him a
white paper bag of Cadbury’s Flakes, Aztecs, Over the summer Uncle Reg came less and less often, his bags of sweets getting
bigger with each visit. Sometimes he would bring flowers for my mother. Then
one day he stopped coming altogether. I heard my mother on the phone telling
someone that he had died. I never saw the lovely Uncle Reg
or his sweets again. There was no limit to how
many of next-door’s apples I was allowed to eat. So I just kept eating them
throughout the summer. The largest always fell first, right down through the
pink-eyed flowers on their tall stems. At first, I would stretch down into
the flowers to pick up the apples until one day I got stung by a wasp hiding
in the half-eaten side underneath. Another time there was a maggot jerking
its way through the flesh, which I might have missed and eaten if it hadn’t
been for its tiny dot of a black head. From then on I went in foot first,
turning each fruit over with my toe, inspecting for anything that might sting
or wriggle. Cream
Soda Nobody
tells me anything. They
talk in whispers over my head, in hushed tones when I’m sitting drawing my
usual pictures of Scottish hills or gluing model planes together. (I’m very good
at shading heather and frankly draw nothing else, inspired no doubt by our
last holiday, when we drove back from Friday afternoon is when
the pop man comes. During the summer holidays I wait around for him to arrive
so that I can get at the dandelion and burdock before my brothers do. The
bottles are heavily embossed and have screw caps that are almost impossible
to undo. Favorite: D & B; second favorite: cream soda; least fave is plain lemonade which I leave for everyone else. I
think my dad drinks it. I like dandelion and
burdock because it makes me burp really loudly, but the best flavor is
actually cream soda. I don’t know how they get something clear and pale green
to taste creamy but they do. “I don’t know how you can
drink that stuff,” says our daily, Mrs. Poole, grimacing like a haddock eating mustard. Mrs. Poole has long gray hair
tied in a plait around her head. Bits of hair, dry and floaty,
splay out at all angles so that her plait looks like a viper in a nest. She
is fat with a big bottom, actually a vast, flat bottom that sways as she hoovers the sitting room and seems to have a life of its
own. You always knew when Mrs. P. had been, the house smelled of lavender
polish and stale “That stuff’ll
give you wind,” huffs Mrs. P. “Actually, everything
gives me wind.” “Like you needed to tell
me that. I hear you aburpin’ an’ abbowin’ all the time. If your father was to hear those
noises you make he’d ban you from drinking all that POP. Sometimes, I’m
surprised you don’t go bang.” “Well, if I do, then
you’ll just have to mop me up, won’t you?” Cream soda never seems as
cold as the other drinks. The bubbles are softer, and don’t get up your nose
and make your sinuses burn like dandelion and burdock or orangeade. Cream
soda looks as if it is going to taste of lime but is instead rather more
fleeting, vanilla perhaps. Whatever flavorings they use it is rather like
drinking a sponge cake. Setlers The most forbidden of places was my father’s bedside
drawer. I had never been told not to go there; I just knew it was out of
bounds. A secret place. An ivory-colored drawer set in a glossy black table,
gold handle, its perfect patina interrupted only by a ring burned in the top
by a hot mug. My mother’s, on the other hand, was an open book. A jumble of
tissues and hairpins, powder compacts, and violet cachous. Home to one of the
many Ventolin inhalers tucked discreetly around the
house. His drawer was neat, and
smelled of the cortisone cream he smoothed into his hands each year in the
autumn when a weird rash would flare up. There were several opened tubes of Setlers, a little blue Masonic book with dashes where
some of the words should be, and a fat gray-and-maroon packet of Durex. There were several menus from dinners he had been
to, often with the signatures of those who attended on the inside and some
strange badges that I guessed were something to do with his Masonic uniform. Setlers were as much a part of my father’s DNA
as his pipe and his Daily Telegraph. The chalky white tablets went
everywhere with him; half and quarter packets were in every jacket pocket,
including the one in his suede waistcoat, and in the glovebox
of the car. Ten times a day he would rub his sternum and tear another strip
of wrapper off his indigestion pills. He would nibble them when he drove and
when he watched television. I have even known him take one after supper,
“just in case.” Setlers were my dad’s worry beads. If indigestion presented
itself as a side effect of worry, it might also be taken as a symptom for
coldness, short temper, impatience, and deceit. He suffered all of these, as
did we. The filthiest of Dad’s
stomach medicines was kaolin and morphine. A thick and creamy white crust
that floated on a thin transparent liquid, he called it K et Morph. He would
shake the glass bottle for a good two minutes, holding the cork in place
with his thumb before he tweaked it out and took a swig, sometimes two, from
the bottle. He shuddered as he swallowed during what had become a daily
ritual. He always had something disgusting in his mouth, a Setler, a glug of kaolin and
morphine, his pipe. When it wasn’t one of those it would be Senior Service or
a Mannekin. I flinched on the rare occasion he
kissed me, even though I wanted him to. Sunday
Roast The kitchen at York House is in its
usual Sunday chaos. Through the clank of pans, I can hear the crackle and
spit of roast beef coming from the Aga. My father
is in the greenhouse, doing whatever it is that middle-aged men in
greenhouses do. Through the hatch I can see steam, which means Mother is
draining the beans. Beads of condensation cover the leaded windows. The odd
trickle forms pools on the window ledge. York House 15 a solid, hall-timbered family
house, built for new money, with its warren of utility room, scullery,
greenhouse, and downstairs lavatory. Fashion has it that multicolored venetian blinds now hang at the leaded-light windows. The
garden is somewhat typical of the time; its neat lawn broken by three apple
trees with daffodils at the base of their trunks. A majestic willow hangs
over the pond and there is a long and winding path around the back. There are bluebells along there, and here and there clouds of Roasts are done in the Aga in the main kitchen, vegetables (beans, peas,
carrots) on the cream Belling in the scullery. The output from the hottest of the Aga’s two hot
plates often disappears at the crucial moment. Sunday lunch is almost
guaranteed to bring out a sudden drop in temperature. My father says it has
something to do with the hot-water supply. Right now the scullery is
hot enough to melt lead. Though to be fair most of the heat is being given
off by my mother, who finds Sunday lunch a meal too many Her hatred of it is
pure and unhidden. She starts to twitch about it on Saturday afternoon. The
beef, the potatoes, the beans, the carrots, the gravy, oh God the gravy Horseradish
sauce may or may not appear. It is my father who looks after the twiddly bits, the mustard, “horserubbish,”
and the Yorkshire pudding—which he makes in an old roasting tin, one huge
pudding, which he cuts into podgy squares. He doesn’t do the gravy; but I
suspect we all wish he would. He has a thing about
carving the roast. It is like he imagines he clubbed the animal to death and
dragged it home through the
snow like a caveman with a mammoth. Not to carve the Sunday joint would be an
admission to not being quite a man. How this equates with his love of
salmon-pink begonias is another matter. Heinz Sponge
Pudding Part of the inevitability of Sunday lunch was Heinz Sponge
Pudding. I savored every last crumb, be it raspberry jam, ginger, sultana,
or chocolate. The last two were what I hoped for when I found the kitchen fugged up with steam and the sound of the tin rattling in
its saucepan. The label would fall off and float in the water. I got to learn
which one we were having by the smell. Sweet cardboard tinged with chocolate,
dried fruit, or ginger. To my nose the jam one just smelled of sweet cardboard.
There were days when my mother let the pan boil dry and the beloved sultana
sponge would burn in its tin. My father would feign nonchalance. It hid his
exasperation at having married a woman who couldn’t boil water. A Heinz Sponge Pudding
serves four. Just. If we were six for lunch we got two puddings, which meant
seconds. If there were five of us my mother would say, “Oh, one’ll do, I won’t have any” But she always would. We always had cream with
our sponge pudding. Nestlé’s from a tin, which allowed us to avoid the heartache
of watching Mother try to make custard. The cream, so thick you could stand a
spoon up in it, was always scooped out of its shallow, white-and-blue tin
into the gravy boat and passed around the table. There was a fight, albeit a
silent one, to get to the cream jug before Auntie Fanny Brought up in a
family that had never known cream, she was making up for it now, taking
almost half the jugful. You could barely see her
slice of pudding under it. “Are you sure you’ve got enough cream there,
Auntie?” my brother would say, followed by a glaring scowl from my father. He
aimed it at It was essential to get
the cream before Fanny for another reason. She had a hooked beak of a nose.
An Edith Sitwell sort of a nose. And on the end of
that beak there was a permanent dewdrop of thin, clear snot. I can never
remember her without it, apart from a few seconds after she wiped it with her
flowery hanky and tucked it up the sleeve of one of her baby-blue or lemon
cardigans. When she got to the cream
first, five pairs of eyes would focus intently on the glistening bud at the
end of her nose, everyone willing the shining bead not to drop until she
passed the cream jug on to someone else. Except me. I prayed that one day it
would happen, and wondered what everyone would do if it did. Would we have to
open another tin? Would my father cover Auntie’s embarrassment by just
stirring it in and slopping it over his pud? I sat
there, my fists clenched in my lap, willing, begging it to happen. I would
have relished it. Even more so if no one but me had noticed. There are times to smile and times to
wince on the pages of Toast.
Some episodes are sweet, while others are certainly sour. All in all, Toast
is a well-written memoir. Steve Hopkins,
February 25, 2005 |
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ã 2005 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2005
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Toast.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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