Nigel Slater > Quotes

“It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you. ”
― Nigel Slater

“Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?”
― Nigel Slater

“I am a winter person, never happier than on a clear, frosty morning.”
― Nigel Slater, Tender: Volume II: A Cook's Guide to the Fruit Garden

“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. Maybe that goes back to trying to please my dad, I don't know. It's like parenting in a way I suppose.”
― Nigel Slater

“I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.”
― Nigel Slater, Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table

“Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light.”
― Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater

“Almost anything is edible with a dab of French mustard on it.”
― Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater

“It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality.”
― Nigel Slater, The Kitchen Diaries: A Year in the Kitchen with Nigel Slater

“I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.”
― Nigel Slater, Real Cooking

“Pamper a tomato, overfeed it, overwater it and you will get a Paris Hilton of a tomato.”
― Nigel Slater, Tender: Volume I: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch

“Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape.”
― Nigel Slater, Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger

“A healthy attitude to eating I am concerned about the current victimisation of food. The apparent need to divide the contents of our plates into heroes and villains. The current villains are sugar and gluten, though it used to be fat, and before that it was salt (and before that it was carbs and . . . oh, I’ve lost track). It is worth remembering that today’s devil will probably be tomorrow’s angel and vice versa. We risk having the life sucked out of our eating by allowing ourselves to be shamed over our food choices. If this escalates, historians may look back on this generation as one in which society’s decision about what to eat was driven by guilt and shame rather than by good taste or pleasure. Well, not on my watch. Yes, I eat cake, and ice cream and meat. I eat biscuits and bread and drink alcohol too. What is more, I eat it all without a shred of guilt. And yet, I like to think my eating is mindful rather than mindless. I care deeply about where my food has come from, its long-term effect on me and the planet. That said, I eat what you might call ‘just enough’ rather than too much. My rule of thumb – just don’t eat too much of any one thing.”
― Nigel Slater, A Year of Good Eating: The Kitchen Diaries III

“...I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in 'greens' than it is in meat - both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that go beyond me and those for whom I cook.”
― Nigel Slater, Tender: Volume I: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch

“Believe me when I tell you that there is no lie quite so obvious as the one where you try to protest that you have washed your face ready for bedtime while you are still sporting an enormous ear-to-ear purple smile of dried Ribena.”
― nigel slater, Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table

“You can't smell a hug. You can't hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding.”
― Nigel Slater

“Garlic as fresh and sweet as a baby's breath.”
― Nigel Slater, Notes from the Larder: A Kitchen Diary with Recipes—A Cookbook

“Mit unserer Psyche stimmt etwas nicht, wenn wir glauben, wir müssten uns selbst mit dem Backen von Petit Fours abquälen.”
― Nigel Slater, Appetite

“A casserole of oxtail and prunes. This gives a perfect quantity for two. I would have done the recipe for four, but can't imagine ever getting four oxtail-loving people around the table at the same time.”
― Nigel Slater, Notes from the Larder: A Kitchen Diary with Recipes—A Cookbook

“Nichts ist so nützlich und vielseitig wie ein kaltes Brathühnchen.”
― Nigel Slater, Einfach genießen. Kochen Schritt für Schritt

“I am not getting into the rarebit versus rabbit argument. Whatever you call it, it is still cheese on toast.”
― Nigel Slater, Notes from the Larder: A Kitchen Diary with Recipes—A Cookbook

“A brush of green olive paste is worth pursuing.”
― Nigel Slater, Eat: The Little Book of Fast Food

“A small meadow of dill and lemon thyme, tarragon and lemon verbena, set amidst Attar of Roses and Prince of Orange pelargoniums. I create a pretty enough landscape that is culinary and medicinal, tucking in pots of marigolds and nasturtiums here and there.
The sun hangs low, a breeze sets in and my work is done, I run my hands through the tallest fronds and gently ruffle the leaves-- trails of aniseed and pepper, chocolate and lavender, rose and lemon dance on the breeze. There are hints of cinnamon and curry, camphor and orange, mint and something I can't quite put my finger on. My hands smell of Greek hillsides and Provençal fields, an Elizabethan knot garden and a Parisian apothecary, but they also smell of long lunches in the garden. As I head in to make supper it dawns on me that spring has finally slipped into summer.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“My energy and curiosity may be renewed but the larder isn’t. There is probably less food in the house than there has ever been. I trudge out to buy a few chicken pieces and a bag of winter greens to make a soup with the spices and noodles I have in the cupboard. What ends up as dinner is clear, bright and life-enhancing. It has vitality (that’s the greens), warmth (ginger, cinnamon) and it is economical and sustaining too. I suddenly feel ready for anything the New Year might throw at me.”
― Nigel Slater, Notes from the Larder: A Kitchen Diary with Recipes—A Cookbook

“Gießen Sie sich einen Schluck ein, bevor Sie anfangen zu kochen.”
― Nigel Slater, Einfach genießen. Kochen Schritt für Schritt

“A dust from the indoor spice market has permeated my clothes, my hair, my lungs. The ghost of ground ginger and pepper, fine and soft like talcum powder. Dust, on this trip, has been the dust of fatigue. But not today. This is dust that energises and lifts the spirits, that makes my eyes tingle and my nose run.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“A sea urchin in its spiky shell. Saffron-orange flesh cupped in a shell of black spines, served on a bed of green conifer leaves.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“A second-hand bookshop draws me in a as a moth to a candle. Each shop is a small shrine to the power of beauty and words. Tightly packed shelves of old hardback novels; heavy tomes on art and design; teetering piles of poetry. There are copies of the Children's Encyclopedia used as a doorstop and wooden crates of paperbacks going for a song. Some are rare, with a price to match, others a fraction of their original cost. A book for everyone, I guess.
Yes, it's the thought of words put together with such care, the pages whose surface has been worn by years of handling; the tired bindings and torn-edged covers where a book has been in less kind hands than it should. (A chance to give a damaged book a kinder home.) But even more, it is the smell that makes me want to enter every second-hand bookshop I pass. A smell that is dusty, a cross between an old leather saddle and a country church.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“I ponder the idea of breakfast: a slice of chilled melon, a bowl of skyr or a slice of yesterday's summer pudding I know is part-submerged in a puddle of crimson juice in the fridge. I could cut a slice of treacle bread or fetch a short crackle-crusted baguette from the shop to eat with ice-cold butter. There is rice to steam and eat with luminous purple and green pickles from Japan, cold peaches from Provence and thin slices of air-dried ham from Italy. I could make a bowl of porridge.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“On a deep bed of rice sits a neat rectangle of grilled eel fillets, a dish I could easily choose as my last supper if I could eat it here, in Japan. Those bronzed pieces of fish, shiny, soft enough to cut with chopsticks and tantalizingly savory, are the food I dream of when I am on the plane, and are now sitting in their shining box, dusted very lightly with fine green sansho pepper. What I refer to as Japanese dust-- the ground dried berries with notes of pepper and citrus.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“There is a bit of a scrum at the salad stall as fifteen Guardian readers all try to get at the wild rocket at once. We might have a Zen-like appreciation of a single, perfect organic onion, but it makes us no less capable of elbowing a fellow shopper in the ribs when we have to. This is food after all, and we are happy to fight for it if needs be.”
― Nigel Slater, Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table