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Nigel Slater Is Serious About His Tea
Photo-Illustration: Sarah Kilcoyne
When Nigel Slater moved into his London home in 1999, his garden was little more than an unkempt lawn; now, it’s a lush oasis divided into four “rooms.” He’s published many books in the 25 years since he began cultivating it, and he’s onto another: A Thousand Feasts, a memoir out this week. It includes personal reflections along with a collection of what he calls “small moments of joy” — many of which, as he writes, have to do with food.
Monday, September 23
I think of my cooking as quite rough-edged and unrefined, but making a cup of tea involves a detailed ceremony in this house. I cannot drink tea in the traditional British manner, brewed strong and served with milk and sugar; I prefer light herbal varieties like the lemon verbena that I buy in individually sewn cotton bags from the Parisian tea company Mariage Freres or the green teas that I pick up at Postcard Teas.
I stop short of following the precision of an ancient Japanese tea ceremony; it is probably more accurate to say that I just make a bit of fuss about it. All my green teas are Korean or Japanese, kept in tin caddies made by Kaikado, a company in Kyoto that has been producing them by hand since 1875. I like to choose the right cup for the right tea, alternating between six different varieties. (I told you.) Today it is the turn of Shizuoka Secret, a green tea from Hyonyama on the South coast of Japan. It is supposed to be brewed with water at 70 degrees Celsius, but today I guess the temperature, pouring it onto the tea leaves before it has cooled, so my tea is a little bitter. I sip it with a slight feeling of shame.
Tea comes with cake or cookies. This afternoon it is Einkorn oat cookies from Quince, my local bakery. I call them crack cookies. They manage to be sweet and salty, soft and crunchy all at the same time. A cookie that pushes every button. I keep a squirrel store of them in a golden cookie tin I reserve for treats. At Christmas it holds chocolate marzipan or Lebkuchen. I feel no shame because I have already racked up 6,000 steps to get to the bakery and back.
I spend the entire rest of the day at my desk. I have recipes to test, too, which is the least enjoyable side of my work, the painstaking recording of each ounce and every minute of a recipe. When I cook for myself, I rarely get the measuring scales out. For my column or if I am writing a cookbook, everything must be accounted for in detail. Many cookery writers farm out their testing to others, but I like to do my own, though it can be frustrating when something doesn’t work as I had hoped or I forget to write something down. I can’t always read my notes either. Was it 25 or 35 minutes?
Tonight, I am testing a pungent Thai dressing for cauliflower with chile, fish sauce, and soy sauce. The balance of aromatics is wrong, and the sauce is too strong; I will have to try again another night. I eat my slightly too salty cauliflower while reading a proof copy of The Scapegoat, a book about the handsome Duke of Buckingham, who shared his bed with no less than three British monarchs. The duke’s sex life sounds even more salty — and a lot more fun — than my dinner. I drink rather a lot of water.
Tuesday, September 24
I have a small and very green garden. Layer upon layer of Cornus Kousa and Japanese maples, pittosporum, and ferns. Today is a gardening day. Katie, who helps me with anything that involves a ladder — I am not good with heights — arrives and we work in the rain, moving a small tree to a less shady place and clearing up wet leaves. It seems to rain almost constantly now, and life is beginning to feel like a scene from Blade Runner.
We stop for lunch, drenched and cold, our arms scratched from dealing with a net of brambles. We wolf down spinach and feta pies shaped like sausage rolls, which I buy from La Fromagerie, a cheese specialist a few yards from my door. I warm them up in the oven but get distracted, and the pastry is now ominously dark. I tell myself they are “fashionably burnt” like the best sourdough baguettes.
I pick up an assortment of tomatoes from my local Turkish grocer: those perfectly ripe, end-of-season fruits that it would be a crime to cook down into a sauce. I share this house with James Thompson, who is half Irish and half Spanish. His version of pan con tomates — tomatoes grated onto hot, olive-oil-drenched toast — is something I have not quite mastered. (I suspect he uses a heap more garlic and olive oil than I do, but it could just be a case of having the right genes.)
His work at the Great Oven, an initiative that involves setting up giant community ovens in places of conflict and feeding the displaced, takes him away for months at a time. I miss his cooking, so I have a go with some airy white bread and the largest of the tomatoes — a ridged, dark-fleshed beauty. On the side, I curl a few slices of Iberico ham. A simple supper. My version is fine, but not as good as his, which just makes me miss him all the more.
Wednesday, September 25
My early-morning eating often follows an almost unshakable ritual. A single piece of fruit on a wavy, rectangular green Japanese plate. A shallow bowl of berries and another of Bircher muesli, which has lately been rebranded as “overnight oats” — a move I feel is possibly a little disrespectful to its inventor, the Swiss physician Maximilian Bircher-Benner.
I add a slice of ripe cantaloupe with soft, golden flesh that seems to glow against the dark glaze of the plate. The berries today are blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries, the last of which are sweet, bland, and bloated; they pop as I eat them. Each mouthful feels like tucking into a plate of eyeballs. Wild blueberries are smaller and bracingly sour but impossible to find in my part of the world.
There’s also espresso, as always, made with a Brazilian blend called the Baron from Climpson & Sons, a chocolaty, almost nutty blend of beans that I grind, somewhat hit or miss, myself. I allow myself two only. Any more and I shake like a basil bush in a storm.
I have yet to meet a fish cake I don’t like. Tonight’s is salmon with chopped dill and a thin coating of bread crumbs. I make a bowl of hollandaise sauce on the side. I used to be scared of this egg-and-butter sauce and its tendency to split. But since I discovered the trick of never letting it get too hot, it no longer holds any terror. The knowledge that if it does split, it will come back into a smooth emulsion if you chuck an ice cube at it and whisk like a demon also helps.
Frustratingly, one fish cake is never quite enough and two is, well, too many. I eat my soft yellow fish cake with golden sauce and spinach on the side, then watch an episode of Slow Horses. It is a brilliant series, yet tonight’s episode is so violent I am grateful to have finished my supper first. I find it absurd that some viewers can get into a fizz over the sight of a nipple yet happily watch someone being beaten to a pulp.
Thursday, September 26
A celebratory lunch for the release of my new book, A Thousand Feasts. I don’t go in for launch parties, unsure of what they really achieve, so my editor of many years, Louise Haines, and I go out for a quiet lunch at Spring, Skye Gyngell’s restaurant at Somerset House, also home to the Courtauld Art Gallery.
They bring water but no bread as is the norm nowadays. The room is calm and light filled, the whole place running like a well-oiled engine. There is a quiet buzz of what, looking at the amount of quietly expensive clothes in the room, may be business deals. I don’t drink, so we are brought homemade tonic water, which might be just the most delicious nonalcoholic drink I have ever been served in a restaurant. Lightly fizzy water with notes of black pepper, lemongrass, and jasmine. We order another and toast the book.
My salad of tomato and red-fleshed peach comes with a softly oozing mound of stracciatella cheese and shimmering green oil made with lemon verbena. Scattered with blackberries, the salad is quiet perfection, as are so many of the offerings here. The staff have checked to see if we have any allergies. Mine is so rare and not life threatening I don’t bother to mention it. As I start to eat what is on my plate, I feel my throat closing, and my voice becomes hoarse, a sign that the seed mixture scattered over the soft white cheese contains the flax to which I have a mild allergy. The dish is so delicious I decide to carry on, amused at the thought of tomorrow’s possible newspaper headline: “Cookery writer chokes to death at his own book launch.”
The meal proceeds with no further drama, although I am now speaking in whispers. Three plump cushions of gnudi stuffed with ricotta follow, the plate decorated with courgette flowers and a lemon-leaf sauce, then, for dessert, the crispest apple tart with a perfect egg of buckwheat ice cream. The star of the show is a plate of roast potatoes tossed with black garlic and sour cream, a treatment that seems unusually robust for this temple of gentle cooking.
A book signing follows at the LRB Bookshop, a long-established and much-loved bookshop close to the British Museum. There are people waiting even as I walk in, copies of the book in their hands. I worry how long they may have been there, even though I am on time. I sit downstairs at a table clothed in green baize, a pile of books and my publicist at my side. I am offered herbal tea and a plate of sugar-crusted cookies one of the staff has brought back from Costa Rica.
Some of the guests bring gifts: beeswax candles and bars of chocolate with popping candy, an exquisite origami crane, handwritten postcards and letters. All delightful. It strikes me that almost every name I am asked to dedicate a book to is unusual this time. There are no Toms or Sams, Susans or Freds; every name seems to have a spelling that I must ask to be written out. There are a host of beautiful Irish names whose pronunciations give no clue as to their spelling. Siobahn, Nieves, Aoife are but three.
Friday, September 27
To the Lighthouse Club gym for the first time this week. (More shame.) Women’s Wear Daily recently described my gym as a “celebrity safe haven,” presumably because the club’s well-hidden door and guarded client list makes the club safe for them rather than from them.
George, my trainer of many years, gives me an usually tough time today after I foolishly mention a few pieces of cake that have passed my lips during the week. I could, of course, just lie about it, but that would destroy the precious bond we have. George works me especially hard because he knows that despite that bond, I have been known to underestimate.
Lunch at the gym. What matters to me is that food is delicious, not whether it is deemed “healthy” or not. I would rather eat something full fat, sugar laden, and delicious and die prematurely than suffer a longer life of fruit smoothies and protein drinks. But then I speak as someone whose annual medical check actually contained the word amazing this year, a fact I may have milked somewhat.
I tuck into a vegan black-bean burger in a brioche bun and a brown cardboard bowl of chickpea, avocado, and tofu salad, also vegan, from the club fridge. It is more delicious than its ingredients would suggest. I start to walk home, glowing with the smugness that comes from a morning at the gym and a vegan lunch. Halfway there, I give up and call an Uber.
Friday night is the only night of the week I don’t cook. I will pick up a tray of assorted sashimi and sushi from the Japan Centre in town or have something delivered to me at home. This has been a hectic week, and I make myself feel better with an order of eel donburi, possibly my favourite takeaway super of all.
The eel is soft and glossy with its sauce of mirin, rice wine, and soy. It sits atop a bowl of steamed white rice. I regard every mouthful as a moment of joy.
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