by Nigel Slater
The next thing I knew I was lying outside on the marble steps of the hotel, slowly coming round in the warm summer air, feeling white, cold, shaky and sticky.
To this day I have never managed to taste steak Diane.
Cold Roast Beef
The chefs at the hotel were all in their twenties, though some of them acted considerably younger. For many of us – and for me – it was the first time away from the watchful, hopeful eyes of our parents, which allowed us to drink, smoke and shag at will. The flip side of the coin was that we never had any clean socks or pants. It also meant we grew our hair longer than was perhaps wise. At one point mine touched my shoulders, fine when it was a bit greasy and stuck to my head, but bad news after a wash when I suddenly had more hair than Farrah Fawcett-Majors.
No one ever really dated at the hotel. You never managed to go out for a drink or to see a movie. You just worked all day, slept in the two hours you got off between clearing away lunch and setting up for dinner, then met up in bed at night. Every night. On your days off you just slept (and slept, and slept), tucked up under the sheets, trying to get over the previous seventy-two hours’ work and six sleepless nights.
If the hours sound grim let me tell you that life itself was anything but. It is truly amazing just how much you can put up with when you are getting regular sex. Seventy-two hours a week is fine so long as it is punctuated with copious quantities of hot, sticky summer-nights’ shagging. That, I now know, is why so many hotels have live-in accommodation. It’s the only way they can get any staff. ‘Accommodation available’ after a job advertisement is the proprietor’s way of letting prospective staff know that no matter how isolated the hotel they will still get laid.
The problem with having quite so much sex is that, like ice cream, you just want more and more. There is never a point at which you say, OK, enough’s enough. One night, just before I went to my room, I slipped up the back stairs to the empty banqueting kitchen to sneak some supper. I had pinched a couple of soft bread baps from the carvery kitchen and fancied a sandwich with some of the rare roast beef I had seen them slicing and laying out on silver trays for the next day’s conference. I thought nothing of the cold-room door being open, such sloppiness was hardly unusual among the trainee chefs. There, in front of the silver trays of cold roast beef was Terry, one of the sweeter young chefs, his back towards me. He glanced fleetingly over his shoulder, a coy, schoolboy-style grin slowly widening from ear to ear. Terry was just popping his cork into a slice of soft, rose-pink roast beef.
The Wimpy Bar
I get a phone call from my brother. He says that Joan has sold up and moved back to the Midlands, and she is suggesting that I move in with her. Quite where she thinks I will work in her neck of the woods is a mystery, and Adrian cracks a joke about me getting a job at the Wimpy Bar. I don’t like to point out that a girlfriend and I have just been banned from the one in Worcester after a drunken binge that ended up with her throwing up over her Coca-Cola float. I point out that they may not even have a Wimpy in Wolverhampton.
I have no idea why Joan should want me on the scene again, assuming that she has, like me, said good riddance. I can only assume that the hoped-for reunion with her family hasn’t happened or has not turned out to be quite the picnic she would have wished. I am not sure why, but the thought makes me sink into a black hole. I know how much she was looking forward to meeting up with her two estranged daughters again, and indeed, just after Dad died, there had been a flurry of letters and Barbara, the eldest, had made brief contact. Joan would be distraught if this didn’t work. Perhaps you can’t just walk in ten years later and say ‘your dinner is on the table’ as if nothing had happened.
I get a handful of coins from the bar and go to the telephone box in the staff quarters. I stand there for a full three or four minutes waiting impatiently behind a Spanish waiter, who is jabbering away at the top of his voice, the coins getting sweaty in my hand. I am honestly not sure what I am going to say, I guess I just want to know she is all right. Then suddenly, as the waiter punches another coin into the slot, I turn and walk away.
Pommes Dauphinoise
When my father was alive our eating out had been confined to the Berni Inn in Hereford. We usually skipped starters (I think we once had the honeydew melon but Joan said it wasn’t ripe) and went straight to steak, fat ones that came on an oval plate with grilled tomatoes, onion rings, fried mushrooms and wonderful, fat golden chips. We drank lemonade and lime except for Joan who had a Tio Pepe, and then had ice cream for afters. Sometimes my aunt would take me to the Gay Tray in Rackham’s store in Birmingham where we would queue up with our gay trays and choose something hot from the counter, poached egg on toast for her, Welsh rarebit and chips for me. There had been the odd afternoon tea taken in seaside hotels (two-toasted-teacakes-and-a-pot-of-tea-for-two, please) and tea taken at garden centres (four-coffees-with-cream-and-four-slices-of-coffee-cake, if you would) and, once, a memorable tea eaten in Devon with slices of home-made ginger cake, scones, cream and little saucers of raspberry jam. But that was it really. Eating out was something other people did.
My last year at catering college I met Andy Parffrey (boxer’s nose, public school, played rugby at weekends). He had a stunningly beautiful girlfriend called Lorella. ‘You can’t possibly marry,’ I pleaded one lunchtime over too much lager in the college pub. ‘Lorella Parffrey sounds like something you’d eat with a long-handled teaspoon.’
Andy was no more impressed with our syllabus of œuf mayonnaise, sole véronique and sauce Espagnole than I was. We sat together, cooked together, cribbed together. We even took an evening job together at a gentle Queen Anne country house where they served cheese soup, veal cutlet and ‘desserts from the trolley’. But Andy knew about things I had never even dreamed of: restaurants where they baked salmon in pastry with currants and ginger, where pork was grilled and topped with melted Gruyère, and where they brought brick-red fish soup to the table with toasted croutes, grated cheese and rust-coloured rouille. He spoke of restaurants with names from another world: the Horn of Plenty and the Hole in the Wall, the Wife of Bath and The Carved Angel.
While Andy and I spent our weekdays together, his weekends and evenings were reserved strictly for Lorella. It took weeks of persuading to get him to go out for dinner, but when he did it became a regular thing. We clocked up visits to several of the better known local restaurants, and would often drive for an hour or more to get to some place on which The Good Food Guide had bestowed its prestigious ‘pestle and mortar’. Each meal was a gorgeous discovery: tongue with a verdant green sauce; crab tart with buttery pastry; fish soup brought to the table in a white china tureen; quenelles of pike as big as meringues; rabbit with bacon and mustard sauce. We had main dishes that reeked of garlic and basil and rosemary and lemon. Puddings flavoured with coffee and bitter chocolate, almonds and elderflowers. I had never imagined food like this, presented on simple white plates without tomatoes stuffed with peas or piped turrets of potato or roses made from tomato skins. This was food that was made simply to be enjoyed rather than to impress.
Thornbury Castle was surrounded by softly striped lawns and rows of Müller-Thurgau vines. As we drove through the arched gateway, we saw a woman approaching the back door with a wicker basket piled high with field mushrooms, and a young girl in jeans and a striped butcher’s apron sprinting back from the walled garden with a handful of dill fronds. Walking towards the front door, me in a rather dodgy sage-green jacket, Andy in blue pinstripe and a tie with a knot as big as my fist, we caught the faintest scent of garlic coming from the open kitchen window. The summer air was still and warm and dense, heavy with garlic, mown grass, lavender, tarragon, framboise and sudden wafts of aniseed.
White wine came in tall glasses with long, thin stems, tiny beads of condensation frosting the outside; little anchovy puffs arrived fresh from the oven with a dish of fat olives the colour of a bruise. We sat on chairs at either side of the fireplace, admiring the tapestries,
the jugs of lilies and the polished panelling. The handwritten menu offered familiar things: chicken liver pâté and onion soup, but also things that were new to me: chicken baked with Pernod and cream, salmon with dill sauce, and lamb with rosemary and apricots. I chose chicken with tarragon sauce. Andy had the veal paupiette, which arrived the size of a Cornish pasty and with a dark, sticky sauce flecked with matchsticks of tongue, parsley and gherkins. The food was like that Joe Yates had talked of, food from another world.
Then something came along that was to change everything. It was the simplest food imaginable, yet so perfect, so comforting, soothing and fragrant. The dish contained only two ingredients. Potatoes, which were thinly sliced and baked in cream. There was the subtlest hint of garlic, barely present, as if it had floated in on a breeze. That pommes dauphinoise, or to give its correct title, pommes à la dauphinoise, was quite simply the most wonderful thing I had ever tasted in my life, more wonderful than Mum’s flapjacks, Joan’s lemon meringue, and a thousand miles away from anything I had made at college. Warm, soft and creamy, this wasn’t food that could be a kiss or hug, like marshmallows or Irish stew, this was food that was pure sex.
The Bistro
‘You mean you’ve never been to London?’ said Andy, incredulous. You’d have thought I had just admitted never having heard of the Beatles. And with that we climbed aboard the college coach to Victoria and the dubious delights of a catering exhibition called Hotelympia.
Like most students forcibly attending such annual events we whizzed round the show’s corporate stands quicker than you can say automatic-napkin-dispenser, then headed for somewhere, anywhere, less mind-numbing. We grabbed our two friends Sally and Clare, who had just been ‘moved on’ from the exhibition’s hallowed Salon Culinaire for laughing at a sugar-icing replica of the Eiffel Tower (first prize), and fell into the nearest pub.
I had never been in a gay pub before. In fact, I’m not sure I even knew such a thing existed. Andy swore he only realised when he went to the men’s room, though he chose not to elaborate on exactly what gave the game away. Whatever, he emerged shaken rather than stirred. Something I put down to his having been to public school. The four of us spent the afternoon getting quietly but paralytically drunk, then heading back to St Ermin’s, our hotel in Victoria.
I had no intention of sleeping with Sally, nor she with me. It just sort of happened. Andy and Clare would occasionally toss a pillow at us and mutter something about having to get up later to go out for dinner. I told them we were just working up an appetite. Either way, I walked around with that I’ve-just-had-a-shag look on my face for the rest of the weekend. We took in the soft red plush carpets of Fortnum & Mason and the echoing marble of Harrods Food Hall. We tiptoed round Jackson’s of Piccadilly and waded through the streets of Chinatown with its rank and exotic odours and rails of glistening mahogany-coloured ducks. We drank cocktails in the 007 bar at the Hilton, more in the modern splendour of the Inn on the Park, and then still more at a bar in Shepherd’s Market that Andy had chosen specifically in the hope of showing us some upmarket hookers. ‘I think we must be a bit early,’ he said, clearly disappointed at the dearth of working girls. Clare and Sally went off to visit some friends of theirs who lived in Wimbledon. Andy and I went out to dinner and we all arranged to meet up again later.
Our meal was in a cosy, scrubbed pine bistro with low ceilings and pretty waiters who flirted with everyone, regardless of age or sex. I had yet to realise this was purely a matter of soliciting tips rather than an out-and-out mating call. A bistro where the flickering candles ensured an atmosphere just that bit too romantic for two guys to be comfortable dining together. Especially for one who played rugger at weekends. It didn’t help that the waitresses clearly assumed we were a couple, even though we did rather play up to it. Or at least I did, partly to wind Andy up, partly because it felt strangely comfortable. The meal was absurdly rich – Campari sodas followed triangles of fried Camembert in breadcrumbs with a redcurrant and orange dip, then portions of saltimbocca the size of Jersey. We finished with profiteroles and hot chocolate sauce, pretty much the obligatory dessert that year. Andy had suggested a Chinese but I refused, making up a tale about being allergic to monosodium glutamate. It was one thing to have a shag in front of your more worldly best mate, another thing altogether to admit you had yet to master chopsticks.
Toast 3
I failed my exams, much to everyone’s amusement. ‘You’d have been all right if they hadn’t included your accounts and economics results,’ scoffed one of my lecturers who knew numbers had never been my thing.
I turned up in London one Tuesday morning with a backpack and just enough money for a couple of rounds of toast and a frothy coffee at a café on the Strand. I asked an old guy emptying rubbish bins in the dark, stinking loading bay of the Savoy if they had any jobs and he just pointed towards the flaking, subterranean corridors that wound their way under the hotel. He was still there, hosing down his vast garbage skip, when I emerged with a crisply starched white jacket over my arm, bearing the proud legend ‘Savoy Grill’.
‘They don’t have anywhere for me to stay,’ I shrugged. He shook his head and gave a weary little laugh, like he had seen it all a million times before. ‘Best thing you can do is walk up to Piccadilly Circus and stand outside Swan & Edgar’s,’ he said. ‘There will be someone who’ll ask you if you want a bed for the night soon enough.’
‘What, just like that?’ I asked.
‘Yes, son,’ he smiled. ‘You’ll be fine, you’ll be just fine.’
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Louise Haines, Araminta Whitley and Allan Jenkins for their support, patience and encouragement, and Justine Picardie, who commissioned the short story, first published in the Observer, on which this book is based.
About the Author
NIGEL SLATER is the author of a collection of bestselling books including the classics Real Fast Food, Appetite and the critically acclaimed The Kitchen Diaries. He has written a much-loved column for the Observer for eighteen years and is the presenter of the award-winning BBC series Simple Suppers. His most recent books are the bestselling Tender Volume I-A cook and his vegetable patch and the companion volume Tender Volume II-A cook's guide to the fruit garden.
Praise
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
‘An ingenious and touching treat’
Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year
‘Toast follows a recipe – boyhood blues without bitterness – that looks simple yet is actually hard to pull off. Slater manages it’
Guardian
‘Delightful…singular and original’
Evening Standard
‘The genius of his food writing comes from an obvious belief that food and happiness share the same organ in the brain’
LYNNE TRUSS, Sunday Times
‘A banquet of unlikely delectations…England’s answer to Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential’
Daily Telegraph
‘Proves he can write mouth-wateringly about families and life too: I gobbled it up’
Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
By the same Author
Real Fast Food
The 30-Minute Cook
Real Cooking
Real Good Food
Nigel Slater’s Real Food
Appetite
Thirst
Real Fast Puddings
The Kitchen Diaries
Eating for England
Tender—Volume I
Tender—Volume II
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
Hammersmith
London w6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2003
This edition published by Fourth Estate 2010
Copyright © Nigel Slater 2003
Nigel Slater asserts the moral right to be identified as
the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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