Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

by Nigel Slater

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1592400906
• ISBN13: 9781592400904
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Gotham Books
• Length: 238 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.9" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

A memoir where food is the main character

Some reviewers here say that as Americans they couldn't relate to this book. Well, not this American. Food is, after all, food. Brit or American we each have a relationship with food that transcends the mere physical (as our ever expanding waistlines would attest). So does the author and this is what he writes about, food...and his memories of it, food...and family, food...and sex. An engaging read from the get go, instantly you are in this book and in the life of little Nigel. Written in 100% Sensory Detail Surround you see what he sees, you feel what he feels, you smell it, taste it. Of course all is told with his customary wit and no holds barred humor. The only drawback to this book? Don't read it if you're on a diet, it will make you hungry.

Surprisingly funny at times.

This book was an impulse purchase, so I didn't know what to expect. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is reflective, sweet, and even absolutely hilarious at times. Even when the author writes about sad subjects, humor comes through. I thought that being a reader from the U.S. added more pleasure to the reading, as there were new and interesting (for me, at least) British food references that I enjoyed reading about.

Not just another food memoir!

Food memoirs crowd the shelves these days. This one really takes the cake. It's not so much about food as a in-depth psychological portrait of a child, and ranks with the best of that genre. It's traumatic, chilling, heartwarming, and uses the barebones, elliptical writing style of a young child to create dramatic effect. It's a quick, easy read and very moving. The last bit is not so good, when he covers his adult life and talks more about being a chef (it starts to sound like Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential - which is a tired genre). But the first 3/4 is fantastic as a piece of writing.

A Brit's Baby Boomer Food Recollections Lend Resonance to All Our Food Memories

Food writer Nigel Slater is a man after my own heart, as he, like me, relates episodes of his childhood, through the food he ate at the time. I am not familiar with many of the foods he references since they are Brit-specific, for example, oddities such as grilled grapefruit, space dust, angel delight, cheese-and-onion crisps, arctic roll, and heinz tinned puddings. At the same time, I feel his descriptions are so illustrative that it is easy to sense what these concoctions taste like. He also captures the ambivalent feelings consumers had in the 1950's and 60's about accepting modern convenience foods, especially with his mother's culinary pride and his own fastidious palette on the line. Even more personally, Slater shows how he used food as an emotional substitute for a mother who died early and a distant father, who vented his frustration through abuse and ultimately remarried the family cleaning lady as if to destroy the family nucleus intentionally. However, the author does not dwell on the emotional impact of these events but rather uses his edible memories as the catharsis to which we could all relate. The author can be a cipher as he is hesitant to incur the risk of sharing too much of his personal history. The wider significance of the people in his life is never explained, and as a reader, I don't miss this dimension since Slater is so engaging in his narrative, the focus of which is almost entirely on himself - through breakfasts, lunches and dinners. He is full of hilarious anecdotes such as his overachieving stepmother who sounds like she would put Martha Stewart to shame or taking nightly walks with the dog and a candy bar to observe couples making out in the back of cars. Slater eventually finds a substitute family working after school in the kitchen of a hotel restaurant, and he describes the mundane tasks as if they are pioneering adventures, whether it amounts to preparing prawns for a cocktail or defrosting ready-made meals. The timeline of his story is thankfully limited. It begins with burnt toast and ends as the author, just out of school, finds employment in a restaurant in London. Slater converts the recollections in between into precise sensory memories that attain emotional resonance. This is not sentimental writing by any means, as he evokes time, people and place with a palpable realism in his energetic prose. Like Ruth Reichl and Anthony Boudrain, Slater makes his own idiosyncratic exercise in culinary history a winning childhood memoir.

Excellent memoir of adolescent's life and tastes. Read It.

`toast, the story of a young boy's hunger' is a memoir by noted British culinary writer, Nigel Slater, described in his flyleaf biographical blurb as `a national treasure'. Foremost among his accolades for this book is a blurb at the top of the front cover by his nibs, Jamie Oliver. Since I have not read any of Slater's other books, I cannot offer any opinion on the `national treasure' label, which I would tend to reserve for only those culinary figures of the very highest order, such as Elizabeth David and Julia Child. Regarding Sir Jamie's comment, I will attribute that to the fact that Mr. Slater is, in fact, a very good writer who does not, like Oliver, dictate his books into a tape recorder and have all the writing done by a copy editor. But I'm getting too far afield. This particular book is a personal memoir covering a lot more than simply his food preferences as he was growing up. The flyleaf accurately compares the book to Tony Bourdain's `Kitchen Confidential' and Ruth Reichl's two memoir volumes, `Comfort Me With Apples' and `Tender at the Bone', but I think neither of these comparisons quite captures the tone of these memoirs. Like Bourdain, there are some later chapters recounting life in the back of the house of some major English restaurants, but the book is really not `about' these things. Like Reichl, Slater has a mother who is simply not a very good cook, although she does manage to avoid risking the poisoning of her guests by using spoiled food. Oddly, the writing which comes to mind when I read this book is the pieces by Jean Shepherd in, among other books, `In God I Trust, All Others Pay Cash'. There is one huge difference, however, in that Shepherd's writing is not memoir, but satire. His stories are simply not true. The purpose of the comparison is to point out how entertaining Slater's writing can be, in spite of the fact that he is recounting incidents from his own life from the age of about 8 years to the age of about 20, after leaving catering school (English version of the CIA or Johnson and Wales). Practically all mini-essays are given the title of a type of food. Among these one to three page long recollections are three essays, including the first, entitled `toast'. One thing few culinary memoirs do well (Reichl's books are a notable exception) is to give a thorough understanding of what it is in the person's life which drove them to take up cooking. This book does an excellent job on that point, even though Master Slater has some very odd gastronomic aversions as a child to expect him to become a major culinary journalist. For example, he seems to physically unable to eat eggs or drink milk. There is nothing said about an allergy, and Master Slater has no problem with ice cream or custards, so it must just be a psychological thing. Slater's family life in this period is such that it is simply impossible for him to ignore the fact that his mother dies of respiratory disease when he is in his early teens and his