Another Nigel fan

ALL OF 'REAL FAST FOOD': Cooking (Maybe) Every Recipe from the Nigel Slater Classic

“Maybe I should work my way through the whole book”, I thought, “and then make a blog about each recipe”. This idea is obviously absurd: the book contains 350 recipes, and the idea of typing them all up in any kind of entertaining way is, at best, rather hopeful.

And yet, here we are…"

So wrote the unnamed author of this rather wonderful little blog in his first post on April 30 2015. Alas the last one seems to be March 23 2017 after only 34 posts. He - definitely a 'he' now - well in 2017 - living in Sweden with his wife, who, with a name like Pernilla, is, I'm guessing, Swedish. But our writer is English from London's north-east side and writes his first post soon after the birth of the second child and feeling that "Once again, I’d reached a time in my life where preparing quick, easy, tasty meals was a priority."

For at the age of 21 having left home and moved in with his then girlfriend, later wife, and able to only cook very few things, he "felt "it was time to expand the repertoire a little," found Real Fast Food by Nigel Slater in a nearby bookshop and fell in love because "it revealed the secrets to all those questions you felt you couldn’t possibly ask anyone, for fear of being laughed at."

I too love this book, although it is not the first one of Nigel's that I bought. I did fall in love with his style however, and now buy any Nigel Slater cookbook that I see - which is not very often alas. I console myself that I am not alone, although having, today, reread Jay Rayner's article on it in The Guardian - one of a series on 'best cookbooks':

"And then there’s Real Fast Food, which introduced the world to a particular voice and sensibility; to an endlessly encouraging approach not to the blunt mechanics of cooking, but to the joys of eating and living well. It ripples with good taste. ... By the time you get to the banana sandwich – add bacon, mayo and mango chutney – it reads less like a cookbook, and more like a self-help manual directing you to live your best life and sod the consequences."

I couldn't agree more, and in fact I'm going to follow one of his almost recipes tonight - as I often do. And reading this, makes me think that perhaps I shouldn't pursue my idea of a cookbook for my grandchildren, but instead just buy them a copy of it - or perhaps a little better - Eat - which is an updated version with pictures. Today's youth like pictures.

But back to my lovely little website. Not only does the writer draw our attention to this wonderful book, and by extension to everything from Nigel Slater, but he also inserts his own rather wonderful writing as he describes his renditions of particular recipes. The one shown here is for Pork steaks with lemon and sage - which is obviously not an original idea of Nigel's, but one chosen for its simplicity:

"I dusted the steaks in seasoned flour and fried them alongside a small handful of sage leaves in a mixture of butter and oil, then deglazed the pan with lemon juice and finished off the sauce with yet more butter (which, as Science has quite correctly decreed, is no longer bad for you, so quiet!). ...

A recipe that simple has no right to taste so interesting, and yet it did; the flavour of the sage permeated the sauce subtly, yet with a welcome presence, and the lemon juice provided the perfect foil for the butter and pork juices, which bubbled pleasingly in the bottom of the pan. How easy it is to forget what a radical transformation coating a piece of meat or fish in a virtually microscopic layer of flour can create."

I think there's probably no better way to demonstrate the charm - yes charm - for me at least - of this website than to present three more recipes.

Mozzarella in carrozza - again - not an original recipe but a presentation of a classic. I guess the appeal is the simplicity of it, and the way that Nigel presents it.

"I’d never come across it before, but it follows the standard technique of breadcrumbing and frying something (flour, egg, breadcrumbs, in that order) except, rather than the something in question being a piece of fish or meat, it’s an entire cheese sandwich. The sheer lunatic decadence of that idea meant I had to try it.

Eating them was everything you’d hope; crispy, oozy, stretchy, rich, salty and almost achingly decadent. For the first few moments, I experienced something close to pure happiness at the idea that such a thing as this not only exists, but has a place in the canon of Italian classics. I think this is food best eaten for lunch, alone. If I were to make it again, I’d eat it outside, with a sharply dressed, citrussy salad, perhaps with a very cold beer."

Hot mussels in curry cream - his last post, but with no initimation of it being a last post, which makes me wonder what happened. Parenthood perhaps - just life generally. But such a pity as there are some amusing observations here about mussels:

"a mussel bears no more outward resemblance to a salmon or a prawn than it does to a cow or a chicken (I can see this all heading in the direction of a pub-bore conversation about the fact that actually, not many people know it, but a banana is really a nut*) but seems more a kind of alien species that evolved on another planet and simply landed here on earth on an asteroid and liked it, so stuck around. Their strangeness extends to how and where they congregate, too: as I understand it, if you want to be a mussel farmer, you need do nothing more than throw a rope in the sea and wait. Strange, strange things.

This recipe utilises jarred mussels which takes an already weird thing, and makes it weirder still by preserving it"

This one does not appeal to me I have to say, jarred mussels are more than weird to me - it's a bit of a repuslive idea. But our writer decreed that "it was as satisfying an early lunch as I could possibly have hoped for. Not elegant, not sophisticated, but nice to eat."

Last example: Honey and soy grilled chicken a recipe he has made many times and of which he says:

"One of the great things about it, aside from the fact that what is required is virtually idiot-proof and the results are so delicious, is that it really forces you to learn what cooked chicken looks and feels like, providing as it does quite vague cooking times."

I like reading about ordinary people trying out the recipes written by the professionals. They often give you insights that just aren't there in the actual original recipe as well as sometimes giving you ideas as to how you could vary it. Although there is such a thing as a step too far, as our mystery author says in another of his articles:

"On a recipe [for] gratin dauphinois, you might see a comment that says ‘I tried this last night. I substituted the potatoes for parsnips, and used yoghurt in the place of cream, as we’re trying to reduce our cholesterol intake. I was cooking it for the kids, so I left out the salt and I was in a bit of a hurry, so I cut twenty minutes from the cooking time. Very disappointing results, I wouldn’t recommend this recipe at all. One star.’ It leaves one wondering quite what the author of a recipe is supposed to do. Just suck it up I guess."

I especially admire people who decide to try every recipe in a favourite author's work - an impossible task it seems to me, not just for the length of time it would take. For inevitably there are going to be several recipes that you just don't fancy, and several that are downright repulsive because you just don't like one or some of the ingredients. I tried it myself on a very small and handwritten scale with Robert Carrier's Great Dishes of the World. I think I managed about half a dozen recipes. Julie of Julie and Julia - seems to have done it, and I think Neil Buttery managed all of Jane Grigson's English Food, but I don't know of any others.

Such a pity that our website author focus of today didn't get much further. Maybe he will come back to it when the children have grown and he has more time.

YEARS GONE BY

September 13

2024 - Celery and pasta - a tour of the blogs

2023 - Nothing

2022 - Nothing

2021 - Beauty to tempt you

2020 - Missing

2019 - An obscure coincidence

2018 - Canny marketing

2017 - I knew they were coming so I baked a cake

2016 - It's raining