Toast

I’d read a bit of Nigel Slater’s autobiography Toast in The Observer. I don’t really read, although sometimes glance through, his articles on food in The Observer Magazine. I kinda know what he looks like and I think it may have been him (or some other well known chef) at the end of Toast giving the young actor, that plays his character, his first start in the kitchen in The Savoy. It was beautifully worked, a matching not just of styles and some god-awful jumpers that we wore in those days, but of the endless hectoring tone that adults had then of eating because it was good for you. Helena Bonham Carter an aristocratic name, with a pretty face, played Nigel’s dad’s cleaner, later his second wife, after Nigel’s mother died. The working class mother and the upper to middle class son did not, thankfully, bond over a shared soufflé or lemon meringue pie. Ken Stott , donned a thick pair of NHS specs, to play the perennially grumpy dad whose body was the battle ground for their affections. A master-class.