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I must be one of the few people in the UK who has not watched a cookery programme, nor read any food columns in magazines or newspapers. I was invited to review two autobiographies of celebrity chefs, and I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about the lives of Nigel Slater and Nadiya Hussain, and how food has played such an important role in their attachment history. As my schedule is so busy, I decided to listen to both books on audible both narrated by the authors, and hearing their voices, their tone, their stresses, helped me to connect with them on a different level as opposed to the written word. I will start by reviewing Toast, followed by Finding My Voice, and concluding with a brief comparison. I have used frequent direct quotes to stay close to the voice of the author.
This autobiography begins with Slater, at the age of eight, as he remembers his mother always burning the toast in the morning and he affectionately states, “it is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you” (p. 1). Her attempts at making Christmas cake were likewise disastrous and he describes how they were “made with neither joy nor love” (p. 2). Slater believed that “cake holds a family together” (p. 4) and one of the few warm memories he recalls of his father is when he states, “My father was a different man when there was cake in the house. The sort of man I wanted to hug rather than shy away from” (p. 4). Slater describes how, when he was eight, his mother handed over the icing of the cake to him and he felt “that it was a relief to get it out of her hands” (p. 5).
The book is not divided into chapters but headings of a culinary nature, such as bread and butter pudding, sherry trifle, spaghetti bolognese, arctic roll, and Bombay duck. Some of these were his mother's attempts at introducing new foods on the
family menu of the early 1960s. Slater's family considered themselves to be the new middle class as his father owned a factory and his own