A Thousand Feasts

Gabi’s Review

The thousand feasts in Nigel Slater’s sumptuous memoir are not only of a culinary nature. Food writer for The Observer, renowned chef, television presenter and author Nigel Slater offers the reader sensual cameos of joy from his own life. Did you ever fancy a natural vanilla ice-cream topped with flakes of gold leaf, eaten under Japanese cherry blossom trees?These are food and travel vignettes certainly, but with the eye of a connoisseur for the finest quality experiences that can be extracted from both place and taste. In Slater’s own words: “There is so much to feast on. The sight of a wave of snowdrops under the gnarled branches of an oak tree; the crisp pages of a new diary; a battered wicker basket of dumplings fresh from the steamer.”  With such finely detailed, carefully crafted writing, you know you are in good hands.

His recreations from diary entries, featuring countries like Japan, Korea, India, Iran, Greece, and at home in the UK,artfully evoke a scene before inviting your tastebuds to join the party. Here’s just one example: “Odd chairs and a long, cushioned bench run down the full length of the table, itself covered with an old white cloth embroidered with dark-purple wisteria. Dotted among the ice-blue tumblers and assorted vintage cutlery are single Gertrude Jekyll roses in glass jars and tall stems of deep-pink Japanese anemones.” Vivid and sensually appealing, Slater’s writing is also beautifully restrained. 

What also infuses the book is the value of Japan’s practices of all things slow and artful. One memory, for example, is less about the food consumed and more about the restorative slumber that follows, cocooned in the freshest linens and lulled by the fall of deep and gentle Kyoto rain. In another example, Slater is acutely aware of how “a flash of vivid colour” in a garden, a wall or a plate “will annoy or energise, depending on the mood.” But whatever the mood, he understands how the mere presence of such colour allows him “to appreciate the sleepy, hushed, muted palette of my life all the more.” Here, as throughout the book, Slater is influenced by a Romantic concept of nature as both sensorially heightening and psychologically beneficial. 

If a book can offer a ‘real’ experience through the process of using words, Nigel Slater’s A Thousand Feasts is the closest I have come to feeling I was there too, right beside him.

Publisher's Review 

THE INSTANT #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

From award-winning writer Nigel Slater, comes a new and exquisitely written collection of notes, memoir, stories and small moments of joy.

'Nigel Slater’s prose is the rarest delicacy of all: exquisite yet effortless, filled with heart, tenderness, yearning and humour' - Elizabeth Day

For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned while at his kitchen table, soaked in a fisherman’s hut in Reykjavik, sitting calmly in a moss garden in Japan or sheltering from a blizzard in a Vienna Konditorei.

These are the small moments, events and happenings that gave pleasure before they disappeared. Miso soup for breakfast, packing a suitcase for a trip and watching a butterfly settle on a carpet, hiding in plain sight. He gives short stories of feasts such as a mango eaten in monsoon rain or a dish of restorative macaroni cheese and homes in on the scent of freshly picked sweet peas and the sound of water breathing at night in Japan.

This funny and sharply observed collection of the good bits of life, often things that pass many of us by, is utter joy from beginning to end.

‘I loved this. It is a secular book of hours – thoughts and pleasures beautifully cadenced and generously placed’ - Edmund de Waal

‘ Nigel Slater has a magical capacity to find beauty in the smallest moments. A nourishing, sustaining book’ - Olivia Laing

‘His evocative, uplifting observations are a balm for life: a prose-poem for eaters and a spiritual companion for thoughtful cooks. A true and enduring joy’ - Nigella Lawson

‘You can’t always feel buoyant and grateful but noticing – and getting pleasure from – the seemingly insignificant is a good way to live. As he says, feel the “small moments of joy”’ - Diana Henry