Ordinary Gweilo

Fumier recommended this book to me, and funnily enough I had considered buying it last time I was in the UK, but annoyingly I saw it in a bargain book shop (the hardback for £3 or so rather than the £16.99 cover price) but hesitated – on the grounds that if it was that cheap it couldn’t be any good – and then when I decided to buy it I couldn’t remember where I had seen it.

Like ‘Gweilo’ (the last autobiography reviewed here) this is a somewhat unusual memoir. Nigel Slater is a food writer (with a weekly column in The Observer), and he has written about his childhood mainly by reference to the food that he ate (and later cooked). It is broken down into short chapters, most of which have food-related titles.

I can’t find Slater’s exact date of birth, but it must have been in the mid to late 1950’s. This book is about his life as a child in the 60’s and 70’s, which was probably something of a low point for food in the UK. This was after the period of post-war austerity that Martin Booth had escaped by coming to Hong Kong, but before the current generation of chefs and food writers (including Slater) had asserted themselves. Traditional British food was falling out of favour, and it seemed sophisticated to eat tinned peaches, Walnut Whips, prawn cocktail and black forest gateaux. Slater relates one attempt by his well-meaning mother to be more cosmopolitan:

Spaghetti Bolognese

"We . . . are . . . going to have . . . spaghetti, no, SPAGHETTI . . . just try a bit of it. You don’t have to eat it if you DON’T LIKE it." Mum is yelling into Auntie Fanny’s "good" ear. Quite why she thinks there is a good one and a bad one is a mystery. Everyone knows the old bat is deaf as a post in both.

Neither Fanny nor Mum has eaten spaghetti before, and come to think of it neither have I. Dad is waiting for the water to boil on the Aga. The sauce is already warm, having been poured from its tin a good half-hour ago and is sitting on the cool plate of the Aga, giving just the occasional blip-blop.

"I think it must be done now," says my father twenty minutes later.

I assume that everyone reading the book will know that tinned sauce and spaghetti cooked for 20 minutes would not exactly create an authentic result. This is an example of the way that Nigel Slater often makes his point in a subtle way, leaving the reader to draw their own conclusions. By and large, he is careful not to be too critical of the food, happily recording childish delight at tinned Heinz sponge puddings and other delicacies that he would now regard with some disdain. His main complaints are about the way the food was cooked, and sometimes the small helpings.

This was an era when the local grocers shop (with its truckles of cheese and ham on the bone), traditional butchers shop and other stalwarts of the High Street were losing out to supermarkets. Slater mentions his local grocers:

Percy Salt

If you walked along Penn Road past the fish shop and toward the stately pile that is the Royal School for Boys, you came to Percy Salt’s the grocer’s. It was two shops really, a butcher’s on the right and on the left a cool, tiled grocer’s that had sawdust on the floor and where my mother did most of her shopping. It was here she bought the ham that the young assistants in long white aprons would cut to order from the bone; slices of white- freckled tongue for Dad and tins of peaches and thick Nestlé’s cream for us all. This was where we came for streaky bacon, for sardines, and, at weekends, for cartons of double cream.

Arguably supermarkets offered a wider choice, but with less emphasis on fresh local produce and more on tinned and frozen food. Their ham was mass-produced and vacuum packed, and likewise the truckles of cheese were replaced with generic cheddar wrapped in plastic.

This book certainly brings back some memories for me. I can remember having Frank Bentos Steak & Kidney Pie many years ago, and wondering (as Nigel Slater does) why they never seemed to quite how they appeared on the TV adverts. If you’ve never seen one, it’s a pie in a tin with a puff pastry lid. As I recall you open the tin and put it in to the oven to cook for the required amount of time, and then search around for any small pieces of meat in amongst the gravy and pastry. Not exactly a gourmet experience.

Slater’s opinions of the characters in this book seem to be heavily influenced by food. On the very first page of the book he talks about his mother:

Mum never was much of a cook. Meals arrived on the table as much by happy accident as by domestic science. She was a chops-and-peas sort of a cook, occasionally going so far as to make a rice pudding, exasperated by the highs and lows of a temperamental cream- and-black Aga and a finicky little son. She found it all a bit of an ordeal, and wished she could have left the cooking, like the washing, ironing, and dusting, to Mrs. P., her "woman what does."

On the other hand:

Stevie, my brother’s new girlfriend was everything in the kitchen that my mother was not. When she came over for the evening she would always cook something for my brother. She cooked greens that shone emerald on the plate. Mother’s greens had been the colours of army surplus store. Stevie boiled ham hocks and grilled haddocks; she flash-fried liver so it was rose pink in the middle and roasted potatoes so they had crunchy outsides and fluffly white flesh within.

I remember having liver that had been cooked to death, and only later in life discovering that it didn’t have to be that way.

Although Slater makes fun of both his parents and their culinary skills, he appreciated the fact they did make an effort (though he records his disappointment about the time his father forgot to leave some food for him). He loved his parents and forgave them (mostly at least) for their failings in the kitchen. On the other hand, life with his step-mother was not made any more tolerable by the fact that she was a good cook. Anyway, by this stage he was spending a lot of his time away from home, working in a nearby restaurant, and other things were becoming more important than food. Having started out as a seemingly innocent tale of childhood, the book ends with the confusion of adolescence, but Slater remains disarmingly frank throughout.

It’s an entertaining account of what was a very ordinary childhood, and Slater does a good job both of evoking the period and painting vivid portraits of his mother, father and step-mother.  It’s a good light read, and if you ever see it in a bargain book shop, snap it up.