An honest love of fuss-free food is what makes Nigel Slater a true man of the people, says Tamasin Day-Lewis. Portrait by David Loftus.
"I always wanted to cook. I made a little cookbook when I was eight or nine and painted pictures of all the cakes and tarts." The Real Nigel Slater is in his kitchen, which begins at the front door with a library of shelves and floor-to-ceiling hooks, stacked with pots and pans - the well used paraphernalia of a serious cook - and a bunch of bananas. It looks like the set of a cookery programme, except that most cookery programmes these days are so gimmick-driven that you have to strap your kipper to the manifold or cook up a storm at sea in a force nine before your series is commissioned.
Nigel resisted the small screen resolutely, but has just finished his first series for Channel Four, wooed by the promise that he could do something "very, very accessible, home-cooking and nothing cheffy". He passed a trial day making omelettes and talking to camera, and the series was bought.
His reluctance is understandable even on slight acquaintance. "I don't want to do the celeb thing. I get very panicky even at a book signing. I sign in the stockroom with the staff. I can't cope with the big table in Harrods, I feel like a lemon."
There is a gentleness at the heart of Nigel Slater, whose early culinary offerings were in part an attempt to win his father's affection. "My mother died when I was nine. My father, an engineer, who was very strict and Victorian, fell in love with our cleaner, and they ran away to the country from Wolverhampton. We moved to a cottage on the Worcestershire-Herefordshire border, roses and honeysuckle round the door, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and I didn't see anyone from one day to the next." A rigid code was obeyed, with no talking at the table. Meals were strictly meat and two veg, with wine on Christmas Day, Mateus Rosé.
The problem was that Nigel's stepmother was also clear about the way to a man's heart, and she had had rather more practice than he had. "It was a battle for my father's affection. I'd make a Victoria sponge at school, and bring it back proudly, only to find that she'd baked for Europe - and she was a great cook. All I remember of my own mother's cooking was her burning the flapjacks."
When most boys were still perusing the lower shelves of the newsagents for The Eagle, Nigel was busy amassing the Cordon Bleu Cookery series, and drooling over the delights of brandy snaps and caramel oranges, and baking, the intricacies of which have run like an unbroken seam through his life, from that first Victoria sponge to today's scones and lavender biscuits.
Homely, wholesome, honest - Nigel belongs to the uncluttered school of cookery. He is a quintessential home cook, with zero tolerance of "buggered about food. I just can't bear it. I love roasting a piece of meat in the oven simply, with oil and herbs."
When Nigel's father suffered a fatal heart attack - "I had a suspicion, never confirmed of course, that my stepmother had fed him to death" - he left home to do catering at Worcester Tech. He was horrified to discover, on leaving, that after four years of studying classical French cooking, "everyone was in the grip of nouvelle cuisine." Bloody, fanned duck breasts in a puddle of sauce bore no resemblance to what he'd been learning to cook.
He picked up The Good Food Guide and, spotting Thornbury Castle, suggested to a friend that they went there for dinner. That was it. "I knew I'd got to work there. I wrote to Kenneth Bell, who offered me a live-in job for £8 a week. The joy is, the kind of food we cooked there is still my favourite kind of food - 1970s bistro food, coq au vin, duck à l'orange, Saint-Emilion au chocolat."
I suspect, more than anything, that it was the peaceful nature of the place that embedded itself somewhere in Nigel's cooking psyche, and that it was a home from home, something that he has created through his food ever since he lost his own.
"It was a peaceful kitchen and it looked out over a vineyard. I didn't realise how different it was to other kitchens. At six in the evening we'd go out and pick fennel and dill from the garden. It was just like cooking at home. Bliss. There'd be a knock at the door, and a woman would come in with a basket of mushrooms she'd picked. The first thing I learned about was flavour. At college you would make a sauce, but not with the dish it was going to go with. Even if it's only pan juices and cream, it's an integral thing." Life in a professional kitchen "came as a real shock".
After a year of comparative bliss, Nigel felt it was time to move on and, ill equipped to deal with a lethal weapon-style Hell's Kitchen, unknowingly enrolled at The Box Tree in Ilkley. "I was so unhappy. It was a tough, men's kitchen. There were fists flying and fights over the hotplate. It was an all-drinking, all-swearing, hard, professional kitchen." He was put to work on pastry, bread and cakes, back to the hearth of cookery, to his first love, baking, but it was not enough to alleviate his unhappiness. "I ran away. I didn't dare say I was leaving, but I checked the book and there weren't many bookings that night. It was a Monday."
He went to St Ives, where his sister-in-law had a B&B, and spent the summer there. "I loved the knock on the door. I'd do it again tomorrow, DB&B." Comparative peace, a new home, but Nigel still thought he wanted to be a chef. So, at the end of the season, bags packed, he headed back North to work for John Tovey at The Miller Howe.
The John Tovey experience was pure theatre, of the pantomime variety. "Curtain up" happened when the lights dimmed - "a flicker too much and he'd be on to you," says Nigel - and the diners took their seats for Act One, the first course. The food arrived on cue, with synchronicity across the dining room, and it was "good, not fancy food," Nigel continues, "although everyone had to finish at the same time!"
By now, we are thickly buttering the scones that he has made from a Geraldene Holt book he has finally managed to track down in Scotland. "What do you think?" With slightly awkward honesty I reply, "Perfect crust and texture, but very sweet." He agrees. By the time I taste the lavender biscuits, I know how good a cook he is. They are perfumed, crumbly and buttery, with the sort of taste you want to bottle. Bliss, as Nigel would say.
His Miller Howe season was a short one. A miniature mutiny was taking place in the wings. "We began quietly to take the piss. Each afternoon we would make fairy cakes with hideous fluorescent pink icing and cover them with bright green glacé cherries. We made ice cream sundaes decorated with pineapple rings and whole, peeled bananas so explicit they used to silence the room. The owner would have died if he had seen them." It was time to move on. In London, Nigel began the transition from haute to bas cuisine, defining his food with signature simplicity, not as cuisine at all, but as "making something to eat". He also ended that phase of his life: "I realised I was never going to be a proper chef."
After a stint as a waiter at the Savoy, and another "blissfully happy" epoch at Justin de Blank's in Duke Street, there came a temporary wobble that nudged Nigel into the profession that he has now made so much his own. Refusing to move to another branch, he was fired, but snuck back to work when Justin wasn't there. Then a letter arrived. Nigel recalls the episode with characteristic schoolboy glee. "I got a letter from Justin, saying he remembered asking me to leave!" At which point, the other break came. Asked to test some recipes for the new A la Carte magazine, Nigel told the editor Jenny Greene that one was horrid and the other didn't work. "She told me to have a go at my own. My first piece was about apples. I did an apple and stilton strudel, and I've watched it go all round the world with people claiming it as theirs." From there, he went on to a feast of different jobs cooking for photographs, until he pestered the new Marie Claire magazine into becoming their food writer.
Five years later, when The Observer launched its Life magazine, Nigel was asked to be food editor, with his own column. He accepted with his usual self-doubt. "I'd only got CSE English and Domestic Science, and I'd only done captions and recipes for Marie Claire." He took it on and, in the time-honoured and tested way, never looked back. "It just seemed to come so easily. I sent the first piece in, and we took the pictures - grilled peppers. I was so excited when the first edition came out." So were Marie Claire. "The editor had never phoned me before, but rang and ordered me to leave The Observer immediately." He left Marie Claire.
Not unnaturally, the publishers' courtship ritual began. It was a slow-burn seduction. Louise Haines at Michael Joseph spotted, I suspect, that Nigel is deep-down sensible, and only succumbs to what he wants and knows he can do - and at first he is convinced he can't do it. "I'd written and told her I couldn't do a book. The idea of being an author on their terribly smart list, well, I thought, how do I fit into all this? Then she took me to lunch at Launceston Place, and told me there was a gap in the market, that when she got home exhausted from work, she didn't always want a Marks & Spencer ready meal, she wanted to cook something." Resistance was cast aside, and Nigel, finding her pleas as irresistible as the comfort food that is the very diet of his existence, complied. Real Fast Food, published in 1992, became what is known in the trade as a "word of mouth" book.
From the initial 3,000 copies that sat shelf-bound and unshifting for their first few weeks, was spawned an unforeseen stampede that left publishers and bookshops open-mouthed and empty-handed. Reps went rushing round with bundles of reprints, and now on its 20th printing, Real Fast Food has sold nearly 250,000 copies. Real Fast Puddings, Real Good Food, Real Cooking and this autumn's Real Food have reached a real audience that celebrity chefs must be aching to emulate.
The thing is, they don't have the appeal Nigel has, the casual grace of his writing, its sensuality, which separate him from most of his peer group. His writing is driven by his no-fuss, you-can-do-this-too style, and by the fact that he's just like one of his readers, simply hungering after a good dinner.
He evokes a sense of warmth, a full belly, and with his simmeringly sexy, uninhibited prose, could inspire the most recalcitrant cook to reach for the nearest pan. He even has the cheek to tell them why they can't bear cooking and cookery books. "I want people to relax, to stop thinking they've got to put on a show. The nicest things are the simplest. They've been made to feel they can't do it by a generation of celebrity chefs and their 28-ingredient recipes. I want to get them to pare it right down. My column is about how food fits into my life. I find food incredibly sexy. On one of the programmes, Nigella Lawson and I tore a duck to pieces and ate it. Food is such a sexy thing, and I want to bring that out."
After three hours in the kitchen with Nigel, I am aware that I have stepped briefly into the life of one of those rare human beings who is genuinely excited and fulfilled by what he does. Better still, he is gratified and amazed by the response he gets. He answers each of his readers' letters by hand. He might be running out of "Real" titles for his books, but I doubt not that the term will be applied to his food and his style of cooking for a long time to come.