Tender by Nigel Slater

Tender – never has a food book been more appropriately named. It took writer and TV cook Nigel Slater five years to write this two-volume homage to fruit and veg, the fruit part of which will be published later this year, and it’s a work in which his tenderness towards the subject in hand shines through.

Slater is no less accomplished a writer than he is a cook. How many other cook books could evoke such imagery as this when introducing a starkly simple recipe for slow-roasted tomatoes with thyme and mozzarella?

Late summer, the sun high, the vegetable patch is filled with slow-moving bees and tiny, piercing-blue butterflies. The day stands still, baking in the sunshine. The cats lie silently on the dusty stone terrace, too hot to move. It is the day for a lunch of melting softness. I wander into the kitchen on bare feet to roast tomatoes and break open a milky, silky buffalo mozzarella.

Who could resist any recipe that follows an introduction like that?

The layout is as beautiful as the prose. Lavishly illustrated, laid out using Adobe Garamond, and even with a font note at the back, it is almost too good for use in the kitchen, and I’m sure I’ll end up copying out the recipes I want to follow onto scraps of paper rather than propping it open on the worktop.

Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patchis a book for reading more than using, so it’s as well that the prose is as flowing as a well-written novel.

But it’s more than just a cook book. Tender is organised vegetable by vegetable, each chapter opening with a short essay on the vegetable in question, followed by advice on both growing and cooking. It is a wonderful inspiration for anyone who – like me – wants to try new vegetables in their garden but isn’t sure which to choose. Perhaps that’s because you know you can trust Slater’s advice. He’s been there and done it himself: he famously dug up his lawn to plant a series of vegetable beds although, as he himself admits, not quite enough of them to be truly self-sufficient.

There is a refreshing honesty to what he writes, too, that should give us all hope, as if he can’t grow a decent cauliflower, then why should we?

The cauliflower is regarded as a bugger to grow, or at least to grow well… With luck and a fair wind, you could have a vegetable to be truly proud of. I have never grown one good enough for a soup, let alone a show. But I will keep trying.

My copy of Tender was a gift, and one that was so well chosen. It is beautiful, engaging, and an inspirational read through the darker winter months.

Rating
Price £30 (£12.99 from Amazon UK)
ISBN 0007248490
Publisher Fourth Estate Ltd

Related posts:

1. Nigel Slater on growing your own
2. Victory Cookbook by Marguerite Patten
3. Popular Blagger posts of January 2010
4. Vegetable Growing Month by Month: the best veg-growing book ever?
5. Why should you grow your own?

Tagged as: book, cookery, nigel slater, tender, vegetables