Nigel Slater has written about cooking and
eating for many years but here he looks back at the food and drink he grew up
with to lure the reader into a nostalgic account of the tastes he enjoyed or
endured as a child of the fifties and sixties – such as tinned ham, Instant
Whip and sherbet fountains.
This alone would be entertaining,
particularly if like me you are of that generation. But Slater uses his
remembrance of food past as a framework to support his account of growing up
through at first oblique, then more direct, references to his parents, siblings
and other adults he encounters, all seen through the perspicacity of youth but
interpreted with the wisdom of experience.
The connection between food and feeling is
well established, and the subtitle of the book – the story of a boy’s hunger –
surely relates to an emotional rather than nutritional shortfall in his
upbringing. Not that he is angry or bitter, more regretful in hindsight of
opportunities missed to give and receive love surely felt but rarely shown.
The writing is good with entertaining turns
of phrase and brutal honesty in parts. A nice feature of the writing is the way
the language matures subtly as the narrator moves through adolescence, making
it seem more contemporaneously written than it actually is.
It’s a fine book, the description of the
foodstuffs brought back memories I could taste and his childhood memories are both
painful and funny (Adrian Mole-like) and the two strands are bound together
without artifice to give an unusual and rewarding read.
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