Nigel Slater Quotes

You can't smell a hug. You can't hear a cuddle. But if you could, I reckon it would smell and sound of warm bread-and-butter pudding.

Food has been my career, my hobby, and, it must be said, my escape.

No matter how bad things get, it's impossible not to love someone who made you toast. Once you've been through that crusty surface to the soft underneath and tasted the warm, salty butter you'll last forever.

Pamper a tomato, overfeed it, overwater it and you will get a Paris Hilton of a tomato.

Real food meas big-flavoured, unpretentious cooking. Good ingredients made into something worth eating. Just nice, uncomplicated food.

My energy and curiosity may be renewed but the larder isn't. There is probably less food in the house than there has ever been. I trudge out to buy a few chicken pieces and a bag of winter greens to make a soup with the spices and noodles I have in the cupboard. What ends up as dinner is clear, bright and life-enhancing. It has vitality (that's the greens), warmth (ginger, cinnamon) and it is economical and sustaining too. I suddenly feel ready for anything the New Year might throw at me.

Good kitchens are not about size; they are about ergonomics and light.

Well let's face it, who on earth besides antique dealers and gay couples actually still give dinner parties?

A brush of green olive paste is worth pursuing.

Believe me when I tell you that there is no lie quite so obvious as the one where you try to protest that you have washed your face ready for bedtime while you are still sporting an enormous ear-to-ear purple smile of dried Ribena.

It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.

I understood that if ever one wanted to live with someone you cooked for them and they came running. But then it is my idea of hell these days, living with someone. The idea of sharing your life with someone is just utterly ghastly. I know why people do it, but it's never a good idea.

It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality.

I am a winter person, never happier than on a clear, frosty morning.

I have become more interested than ever in the effect of a diet higher in 'greens' than it is in meat - both in terms of my own wellbeing and, more recently, those implications that go beyond me and those for whom I cook.

I cannot go any further without mentioning my favourite biscuit of all time, now sadly, tragically, extinct. The oaty, crumbly, demerara notes of the long-forgotten Abbey Crunch will remain forever on my lips. I loved the biscuit as much as anything I have ever eaten, and often, in moments of solitude, I still think about its warm, buttery, sugary self.