Pasta, cooked by someone else: Greenfeast Spring, Summer by Nigel Slater

#FiftyTwoCookbooks, Week Eight

As an indicator of how things have gone this week - as I sit on the sofa and tap this out on my laptop - last week’s cookbook from Pitt Cue is still lying on the arm of the chair where I left it seven days ago. I haven’t spent much time at home since last Monday due to some large changes happening at the restaurant, and work has been even more hectic than usual, but this weekend saw the finish of the frenzy - so now - now - I have time. A week too late.

It’s a feeble excuse: usually there is always time to cook a Nigel Slater recipe. Many of those featured in “Greenfeast. Spring Summer” are little more than assemblages of delicious ingredients with haiku-esque descriptions preceding the simple cooking instructions. Admittedly, my midwinter/new year-based optimism (or: why a spring/summer cookbook features this early in the calendar) did eliminate a significant percentage of the featured recipes, and the lack of fresh produce currently available in the UK (as a result of - depending on who you ask - Brexit, war in Ukraine, abnormal weather conditions, the lack of a trade deal with Morocco, the Northern Island Protocol, Prince Harry & Meghan Markle) kiboshed several more. 

Way back in Christmas 2006 I received a copy of Slater’s The Kitchen Diaries. It was this book that first inspired me to start writing about food and, I suppose, led me down the road to the destination at which I now find myself. The Kitchen Diaries, along with his earlier Real Food, were two books that my wife and I doubled up on when our cookbook collections were first introduced to one another. This, we decided, was so significant that we even chose a passage from Real Food as one of the readings at our wedding.

During lockdown I discovered a clutch of Slater’s early TV shows on Channel Four’s on-demand service, which provided as much comfort as his recipes, and I often turn to his work to remind myself that good food doesn’t have to be complicated in order to be delicious. No-one writes about the simple pleasures of a chip butty, bangers and mash or a fish pie with the same enthusiasm as he does. 

But with time and tide against me this week, the task of ensuring this project didn’t falter fell to my better half. Which in some way, was hugely appropriate: there is great joy to be had when, on getting in late from work, there is food - proper food, real food - waiting for you. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate composition, and in many cases, it doesn’t even have to be hot. Just the simple pleasure of finding a plate or a bowl or a baking tray complete with something delicious on it or in it is enough to nourish the body and soul before bed. 

It was late. It was dark. It was cold. I hadn’t eaten since lunch - eight, nine, ten, who knows how many hours ago. But there, hiding in the shadows of the kitchen, waiting happily on the cooker, was a large dish of oven-baked pasta. Not hot, but not yet cold. Baked orecchiette with kale and blue cheese - a wintery recipe that she’d picked out from the forest of freshness, hidden amongst the tomatoes and aubergines and salads that populate most of Nigel’s book. I forgot to photograph it, and ate it on the sofa (the same sofa I’m sitting on right now, next to Pitt Cue) with a large blob of tomato ketchup on the side – and as it warmed me inside and out, I started to realise that everything was going to be ok.