Nigel Slater reverse-engineered his stepmother's lemon meringue pie from her bin
As a boy, Slater fought his stepmother for his father's affection using food. She would not share her recipe for his father's favourite pie, so he counted the eggshells she threw away and timed his visits to the kitchen, piecing the method together over months or even years.
Slater was born in Wolverhampton on 9 April 1956, the younger son of a factory owner. His mother died of asthma in 1965, when he was nine. His father later married Dorothy Perrens, who had been the family's cleaner, and died two years after that. At school in Worcestershire, Slater was one of only two boys taking cookery at O-level, and he liked writing essays too.
He trained in catering at Worcester Technical College, earning a diploma in 1976, and cooked in restaurants and hotels around Britain. In 1988 he became food writer for Marie Claire, and in 1993 he began the personal, memoir-flavoured columns for The Observer that made his name. Early books such as The 30-Minute Cook sold the idea of simple, comforting food without fuss.
Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, published in 2003, took his readership far wider. It covers his childhood, his grief, his feelings about the adults around him and his growing awareness that he was gay; he called it the most intimate memoir any food writer had produced. A spot on the Richard and Judy Book Club made it a best-seller. He told The Observer that once he was free of his father and stepmother, cooking was all he wanted to do.
The book became a 2010 film, with Freddie Highmore as the teenage Slater and Helena Bonham Carter as his stepmother, and later a stage play commissioned by The Lowry that sold out, went to the Edinburgh Fringe and reached The Other Palace in London in April 2019. On television he fronted Channel 4's Real Food Show in 1998 and the BBC's Simple Suppers from 2009. His two-volume Tender tells the story of his own vegetable garden and what grows in it.
Source: Nigel Slater
