 |
| Find
Articles On: |
|
 |
|
| TV
Shows: |
|
|
|
| Extras:
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Openly
gay food writer Nigel Slater is perhaps best known for his cookbooks
(Real Fast Food and Real Fast Desserts, for
instance) and his food column in London's The Observer.
Slater has entered another realm with his tasty memoir Toast
(Gotham Books, 2003/2004, $25), which combines his food memories
from his childhood with close and personal observations of his
youth and his family. I had the pleasure of speaking with Slater
about his book via a transatlantic phone call shortly before the
second leg of his reading tour.
|
AfterElton.com:
On the morning of this interview, Oprah Winfrey did a show on food and cooking.
Maya Angelou was one of her guests and she was on the show to talk about
her new cookbook. As someone in the food literature industry, how do you
feel about someone such as Maya Angelou writing a cookbook?
Nigel
Slater: I think it’s great. I think that everybody probably
has at least one, if not many, recipes to share. Also many thoughts about
food and how it affects their lives. Some people genuinely seem to use food
as fuel, and nothing else. And other people are completely obsessed with
it. Somewhere in amongst that lot is something that just works for you food-wise,
whatever sort of food you eat. I guess I’m a bit curious, a bit nosy,
about what people eat and why they eat. Anybody who tells me about food
and cooking – I’m really quite interested. AE:
I would usually save this kind of question for the end of an interview,
but I know that I am not the only of your readers who is eager to know
if you have started writing the second volume of you memoirs, since Toast
ends with you as a young man, fresh out of school, arriving in London.
Let me put it this way, it left me hungry for more.
NS:
Well (laughs), I’m glad to hear that. Thank you. But I’m not
planning to write a sequel. What I didn’t want to do was to trespass
on people’s privacy. That was not my intention. I tracked down most
of the people involved in Toast who are still alive, and asked
them if it was okay, and everybody was fine about it. But if I published
a sequel it would involve a bit too many people who are living who don’t
want bits of their life in print.
AE:
That’s very respectful.
NS:
Yes, well, maybe. But also because I think the really interesting bits
of my story was growing up with this terribly dominating dad and a mom
who I loved to bits but obviously I lost very early on; and then having
to fight with the woman who replaced her. That was really the story that
I wanted to tell. Who knows, maybe I will decide in a few years to tell
what happened next (laughs), but not at the moment.
AE:
Because of your relationship to food throughout the book and then your
later career in food service, was there ever a doubt in your mind that
you would go to work in the food industry?
NS:
No. It was always there. I think, partly, because I wasn’t a great
achiever academically at school, I was in the lower end of the class.
At the time there was that thing that cooking was that thing that you
could kind of rely on, if you weren’t that strong academically.
That was always there – I knew I could do it. There was an interest
and a passion, but there was also this need for food, because I used,
and I still do to a certain extent, use food as comfort, it was meant
to be. There’s also this other thing, which I hadn’t realized
until recently, that in the food world, if you go and work in hotels and
restaurants, you have these live-in situations, almost like a little family.
When I think about it now, it was this surrogate family, who has all moved
away from home, living in these staff quarters of a hotel or restaurant
or whatever. I kind of think that in a way that that was partly what attracted
me to working in the food service industry, was that I finally had a family
(laughs).
Page
1 / 2 - Next
|
|
