Description
Bestselling cookery writer Nigel Slater's mantra is 'recipes don't rule'. 'Appetite' is the revolutionary book that will help all cooks to have fun making anything from a baked potato to Christmas dinner. Inspiring and irresistible, 'Appetite' takes a hundred simple classics and casts aside the insecurities of normal recipes. Ingredients are listed, followed by a suggestion of how much you might need, i.e. 'double cream -- start with 100 ml then see how you go'. Readers will be liberated to use their own judgement, indeed actively encouraged to skip half the ingredients for pared-down versions that will teach them the essence of a dish. Recipe titles reflect this approach -- 'a cheap spaghetti supper', 'a big pork roast', 'a curry to make you sweat'. Slater's typically unpretentious style and ready wit put the fun back into food in this beautifully illustrated book. The first half is packed with instructive, funky photographs and covers all the basics -- from 'getting rid of the three-course-meal tyranny' to 'why junk food is so delicious'. A long and helpful section will tell you where to get hold of everything worth eating. Written partly for the non-cook, this will be varied enough to attract more experienced cooks and people who bought 'Real Food' and want another helping.
What is there to say about a new Nigel Slater book? Especially one called
Appetite. It is exactly what it should be. This is the book he has been heading for all along. It is about food, to be sure, but it is also a statement of his personal philosophy, which seems to amount to this: that our appetites are founded in pleasure; and that we must interrogate those pleasures, and take them very seriously indeed, if we are to eat as well as we can. To eat well means to eat, and cook, pleasurably. So in
Appetite Slater takes food, and cooking, back to where he believes it belongs, back to the realm of sensuous pleasure and comfort. Back to the sheer bliss, as he might say, of putting something warm, soft, and sticky in your mouth.Very cleverly, he has built his book not around detailed recipes as such--that would be too specific for his purposes--but around the sort of thing that might pop into your head as something you would really like to eat. These are the kinds of food this generous and handsome book celebrates; foods that have a genuine part to play in people's lives. This is quintessential Nigel Slater: laid-back, not claiming any special privilege as a chef ("If I can do it, so can you," he remarks), and all wrapped up in that wonderful, lived-in, squashy prose that hits the spot every time. A feast of a book, from a man with no tricks or gimmicks, who is happily in touch with his own appetites and wants to put us in touch with ours.
--Robin Davidson, Amazon.co.uk
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