Greenfeast Read online

  That the books are here at all is due to the constant support and patience of everyone at 4th Estate, especially Louise Haines, my editor for as long as I have been writing. Thanks too, to everyone at The Soho Agency and United Agents.

  The recipes, as always, have been a collaboration with James Thompson and it was once again a joy working with photographer Jonathan Lovekin, with whom I have worked every week for over thirty years.

  The books are designed not just to look pretty on a shelf – but to be used, day in day out, in the kitchen. Compact, tactile, easy to use. Books that look better with use. (I love the way a book settles in with use and opens flat at the most cooked-from pages.) The fact that they are everything I hoped them to be is due to Tom Kemp, Julian Humphries, David Pearson, Chris Gurney, Gary Simpson, Jack Smyth and to everyone at GS Typesetting and Neographia.

  While many recipes are new to this collection, several started their life in the pages of the Observer magazine, and I thank Allan Jenkins, Harriet Green, Martin Love, Gareth Grundy and the entire team for their continuing support and encouragement.

  Now, here’s the thing. There is no point in anyone putting pen to paper, or more accurately, fingers to a keyboard, no reason for cooking and illustrating and printing and publishing, if there is no-one to send those words and pictures out into the world. I want to shout a sincere thank you to the booksellers of the world who continue to fill our lives with so much joy. The booksellers who look after our books, who embrace new volumes whilst keeping older, much-loved titles on their shelves, and especially those who recommend books to those of us who walk through their doors, hungry with anticipation. There is almost nowhere I would rather be than within the walls of a good bookshop.

  Thank you one and all.

  Nigel Slater, London, September 2019

  A note on the brushstrokes

  Many of us are placed on this planet in such a way that we experience all four seasons. For our cultures they constitute a deeply ingrained metaphor for growth and change, reinforced throughout our lives by seeing almost every plant (and certainly the ones in this book) attempting to reproduce itself annually, seasonally, in lockstep with the Earth’s tilt and orbit. We even map the seasons on to our lives: as someone who has reached ‘autumn’ I finally understand what older people have been telling me all my life and also the impossibility of any younger person understanding a word of what was said!

  Spring and summer represent a forever forgetful beginning. The cold, barren, enclosedness of winter is gleefully abandoned the moment the sun begins to rise higher and sooner in the sky. There is a looking-forward to the growth, energy and abundance which are about to follow. The later seasons, however, tend to be soaked in a melancholy regret for all that exuberance and naivety; redeemed, certainly, by the warm, homely comfort of hibernation but also by the knowledge that longer, warmer days will come round again.

  However, when it’s one’s life being measured by the seasons, there is no going round again. There is no undoing of the awful mistakes, no reliving of the youthful joy. There is a much deeper appreciation of what life is; a much bolder outlook on the importance of error, of hesitancy, of not having all the answers, of being more and more open to possibility.

  The brushstrokes in this book are, again, not pictures of things. Each one is a record of a thought or feeling or simply a movement manifested through my use of a square-edged brush for a few concentrated seconds. They are informed by what came before, but they have a knowingness, a memory about them which was not possible for those in the first book. I’ve let them be a little more idiosyncratic and sometimes not so sure of their path.

  The square tip of the brush is like a large version of the end of the quill pen used by medieval scribes. The shapes it makes are mostly determined by the directions and angles I choose to push the brush around, rather than the pressure which informs the marks made with a pointed brush. Each brushstroke is ultimately derived from a letterform practised over and over again to the point of abstraction and together they define a kind of illegible but meaningful text.

  It’s a small relief to me to be able to record my existence in this very intimate and precise way for the very brief time the brush is in contact with the surface. These strokes are like deciduous leaves providing temporary evidence of the tree from which they fell.

  Tom Kemp

  A note on the type

  The text is typeset in Portrait, designed by Berton Hasebe in 2013. Portrait is a modern-day interpretation of the early Renaissance typefaces, first made popular in Paris and cut by Maître Constantin. His influence can be seen in the work of the famed punch cutters of the next generation, Claude Garamond and Robert Granjon, whose work is so familiar to modern day readers.

  The cover type is set in Brunel, an English modern designed by Paul Barnes and Christian Schwartz in 2008. Brunel in turn was based on the first moderns issued by the Caslon foundry in 1796. The name is derived from the Anglo-French engineers Sir Marc and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

  About the Author

  Nigel Slater is an award-winning author, journalist and television presenter. He has been food columnist for the Observer for over twenty-five years. His collection of bestselling books includes the classics Appetite and The Kitchen Diaries and the critically acclaimed two-volume Tender. He has made cookery programmes and documentaries for BBC1, BBC2 and BBC4. His memoir Toast – the story of a boy’s hunger won six major awards and is now a film and stage production. His writing has won the James Beard Award, the National Book Award, the Glenfiddich Trophy, the André Simon Memorial Prize and the British Biography of the Year. He lives in London.

  nigelslater.com

  Twitter @nigelslater

  Instagram @nigelslater

  Also by Nigel Slater:

  Greenfeast: spring, summer

  The Christmas Chronicles

  The Kitchen Diaries III: A Year of Good Eating

  Eat

  The Kitchen Diaries II

  Tender, Volumes I and II

  Eating for England

  The Kitchen Diaries I

  Toast – the story of a boy’s hunger

  Appetite

  Real Food

  Real Cooking

  The 30-Minute Cook

  Real Fast Food

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