Making plans for Nigel

Nigel Slater is awesomely popular, and a diamond geezer to boot, which partly explains why he is so popular. He is self-deprecating, he dedicates his books to his cats, and he both understands his food and loves his food.

His books are a testament to the finger-lickin', fun-lovin' side of eating, written with breathless enthusiasm (I mean, we can do the breathless enthusiasm, but beside Nigel's gushing torrent of hyperbole about grub, we are as understated as a John McGahern short story) and his food works: cook anything, but anything, from any of his tomes, and you will get a good result.

So, all this makes it even more perplexing that we and Nigel seem to have gotten separated from each other somewhere along the line. We admire the work, enjoy the iconoclasm that is so evident in his new book 'Appetite' (4th Estate, £25) but we find we no longer use the books as sources of ideas. We keep going back to Deborah Madison, and Alice Waters, and Simon Hopkinson, and Richard Olney, and Jane Grigson and Marcella Hazan, but Nigel stays on the shelf.

We know we are out of touch with the general consensus in this regard, for Nigel shifts tons of copies of everything he writes, and to be honest we are at a loss to explain why we don't connect any more.  Maybe it's the same sort of thing that people say about the singer Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau: you can respect the man and respect the work, but somehow you find you don't play the cd's very often. Perhaps it's because we maybe don't eat in the same sort of way that Nigel does, and his books are as much about a style of eating as they are about cooking. But, Nigel fans will love 'Appetite' to bits, and they will cook finger-lickin' successes from it for years to come. Maybe we're just getting older and weirder.

Appetite by Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate £25)

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text © John & Sally McKenna
illustrations © Ken Buggy