Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger
This gap is what makes Nigel Slater’s new book, Toast, richer than the average food memoir. Slater, author of several best-selling cookbooks in the UK and the beloved weekly columnist for the Observer, has written a very English book, and its foreign qualities are both totally charming and oddly challenging. A slim 238 pages, Toast embodies both the strongest and the weakest traits of the genre.
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Toast tells the tale of Slater’s middle-class British childhood near the city of Wolverhampton in the 1960s and 70s. His mother is dying of asthma, although he doesn’t know it, and his gardening-mad father is by turns unreachable and mean. The book is structured around food, built of small, often one- or two-page chapters with titles like “Cold Lamb and Gravy Skin” or “Sherbet Fountains.” Scenes of cooking and eating, meditations on what their family ate or the food he sneaked, pull readers through the story, through his mother’s death and his father’s distressing remarriage to the cleaning lady.
Slater is incredibly good at using food to describe the general atmosphere–“We lived in a world of tinned fruit,” he writes early on–but food is also his tool for conveying meaning, defining class, and understanding his parents. “Crisps . . . were banished for the same reason that baked beans were, and fish and chips in newspaper, mushy peas, evaporated milk, and sliced bread in plastic,” he writes. “My parents considered them to be ‘a bit common.’…Quite how they explained away their predilection for tinned mandarin oranges and Kraft cheese slices is a matter for speculation.”
The notoriously reclusive Slater surprised English readers with the personal revelations in his book, and since its release last year Toast has won several awards, including a British Book Award for best biography. The book’s attention to detail and barrage of product names have also spawned a powerful nostalgia for the now-vanished packaged and grocery store foods popular in England in the 60s and 70s. These qualities provide the most obvious barrier for Americans to enjoy–or even understand–the book.
By this measure the genre is well served by Toast. Slater can both convey the immediacy of a kid’s worldview and tell a good story. For instance, you can feel simultaneously the heartbreak of his mother’s illness progressing and the self-centered disappointment a kid would feel when his mom is too tired and sick to make her mash anymore and uses dried potato flakes from a box that don’t taste as good. Sometimes, though, Toast is so successful at depicting a myopic, child’s take on things it leaves an unavoidable desire for more shape or bigger, more measured narration.
