100. Nigel Slater

(My hundredth blog post. Cool.)

Nigel Slater did not teach me to cook. No, Jamie Oliver has that honour, as the first proper difficult thing I cooked as an adult was his prawn and pea risotto. Soon after that, however, I found that I needed something a little more ... considered, than Jamie, and there, waiting in the wings, was Nigel.

Nigel took over from Jane Grigson at the Observer and he is beloved throughout the land for his faultless, never-fail recipes, and for a writing style that is intimate without being cloying, and beautiful without being distracting. It's possible that I have learned as much about good writing from Nigel as I have about good cooking. I hope so.

I own most, if not all, of Nigel's cookbooks, but for me his piece de resistance was The Kitchen Diaries. Here he brought together everything that makes him special - for me - as the book is part diary and therefore memoir, part seasonal guide, and part recipe book. If I'm feeling down, or tired, or otherwise below par, I pick up this book. It never fails to soothe me, and soon I'm feeling much better. And hungry! Of course I also pick it up when I'm looking for a new recipe to try, and frequently when I want to see what he was cooking on a particular day in a particular month.

For Nigel, cooking is a way to show people that he loves them, and I have come to realise that that is true for me, too. Few things give me greater pleasure than cooking for and eating with someone dear to me, and it is largely thanks to Nigel that I have a fund of recipes to choose from.

I met him, a few years ago. He signed a couple of books for me in his lovely copperplate handwriting, and he was charming and shy, and a giggler. His books have always felt like friends in the kitchen, and meeting him did nothing to lessen that feeling, only accentuate it.

I have lots of other cookbooks now, and I've probably got to the stage where 9 times out of 10 I don't need to use a recipe - but Nigel is my default mechanism, the place that I start, and his writing is a sanctuary.

(His bread never works, though. NEVER.)