The Kitchen Diaries Nigel Slater

This is one of my favourite books about food. Nigel Slater is too little known here in Australia, his writing on food is at once thought provoking and gets to the heart of why we eat and the pleasure we get from it. Nigel has been a hero of mine for some time. He is not a chef but someone who loves his food. His TV shows as yet unknown here, link food and our lives so well.

His best current show is called A taste of my life and on each show he traces the life of a well known person through the key foods they have eaten. Family and friends contribute but rather than be a chef he is a cook who looks at the link between what we eat and who we are.

This book is a great introduction to what cooking is really about. Good food and friends. For me Nigel's philosophy of food is one I share. This is not a recipe book. It tells us what he he thought about food to cook and why he chose to cook some things. This was the first book that convinced me that a food diary was a good idea.

This was the first in print that i am aware of and is really a great read. it won't be the only book by Nigel that i will mention. It is not a cook book though so maybe if you don't like food books you might borrow it rather than buy it. It follows through a year looking at what Nigels feels like eating and how he prepared it, It does not give a recipe for every day and a lot of it is about what he sees in the food. An enjoyable book to sit down with.

Nigel is my sort of cook, some quotes:

"Food is, for me, for everybody, a very sexual thing and I think I realised that quite early on. I still cannot exaggerate how just putting a meal in front of somebody is really more of a buzz for me than anything. And I mean anything."

"Eating, and that feel of food in the mouth, is all part of comfort and affection and warmth, and I think that a lot of the reason that I turned to food was because I was actually quite a lonely child."

He also was the one who introduced Nigella to the world.

It deserved its awards, but as I said its more about food than a cookbook.