Nigel Slater

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2005

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the cookery writer Nigel Slater. The British public have taken Slater and his recipes to their hearts and - crucially - their kitchens in recent years, encouraged by his philosophy that cooking need not be daunting. Don't cook to show off, he says, or because you feel you should - cook for enjoyment, and comfort. Choose good ingredients, cook them simply, and above all - relax.

Slater's passion for food grew out of a lonely, neglected childhood in which his only comforts were culinary. Born in Wolverhampton in the late 50s, his mother died when he was just nine leaving a gap in his life which he tried to fill with comfort food. Against his father's wishes, he fantasised about being a chef, later leaving home to go to catering college and then work in a variety of restaurants around the country. After testing recipes for a new magazine, he first came to public attention as food editor for Marie Claire.

Currently food editor of the Observer, Slater's books are both popular and critically acclaimed. His 2003 memoir Toast won biography of the year at the British Book Awards, his cookbook Appetite won an Andre Simon for Cookbook of the Year in 2000, and Slater himself has won the Glenfiddich Trophy and Cookery Writer of the Year Award in 1999.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Teddy Bears Picnic by Henry Hall and Val Rosing Book: Derek Jarman's Garden by Derek Jarman Luxury: Howard Hodgkin's painting Learning About Russian Music

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a food writer. He's very much a one man band. He always cooks his own recipes in his own kitchen for the photographs and generally does the washing up afterwards as well.
0:40.0	His style is straightforward, the best ingredients, cleverly combined and served to satisfy and relax.
0:46.0	His childhood was miserable, so food became his escape, buttered toast, gammon with pineapple,
0:52.0	Arctic roll, all were his friends.
0:54.7	After catering college, too much so veronique, not enough crusty peasant flavours, he worked in a
0:59.3	number of hotels and restaurants before starting to write for magazines.
1:03.7	Eventually he became food editor of the observer where his easy, tasty approach found
1:09.0	favour with a wide audience.
1:11.0	His books are now bestsellers and regularly win awards. I make what I call
1:16.1	real food, he says, food with a proper heart and soul that tastes good. He is Nigel Slater. So what Nigel imagining that you were wasting away on this
1:26.2	desert island and could have one last meal before you meet your maker? What would it be?
1:31.2	Well I often think it might be Sunday lunch but what I
1:35.6	really want as my last meal is a slice of cake and a cup of tea but it has to be my
1:41.8	favorite cake which is coffee and walnut a proper
1:44.3	old-fashioned sort of village fate cake. I'm very disappointed I thought you were
1:48.8	going to have roast pork with wonderful crackling and doofanois potatoes and all sorts of things. with crackle like it used to does it?
2:03.0	No, it's the breed of pigs.
2:05.0	It's the old-fashioned varieties with their wonderful tough hides
2:09.0	that roast so beautifully and you can still get them
2:12.0	and you rub some salt into that crackling and
	...

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