Dear Nigel Slater, please make your fellow food columnist Felicity Cloake’s day. Set up a meeting, buy her a coffee, or better still, invite her round to your house, she doesn’t live too far from you.
There’s a reason I’m playing food writer introduction agency here.
"I love Nigel Slater, he is the person that got me into cooking in the first place," says Cloake, who writes the How to cook the perfect... column in the Guardian and has just published her fourth cookbook, The A-Z of Eating: A Flavour Map for the Adventurous Cook.
Though they write for the same newspaper group, Cloake has never met Slater, but it’s not for the want of trying. “I used to live down the road from him, and I thought, Oh we’re going to be such great mates, I can go and borrow a cup of sugar from him .
“When I got my puppy I was like ... maybe Nigel will fall in love with the puppy and we can be best friends. I used to walk past his house every single day, yet we never coincided, luckily for Nigel, otherwise I would have flung myself at him and said ‘I love you!’ I know we’d be best friends, if only we could meet.
“My parents didn’t have that many cookery books, and then they got Nigel Slater, and I still remember looking through it and it was like a different world, because he was writing about food very passionately and sort of almost poetically.”
Over to you, Nigel, and if you do meet up, I guarantee you’ll have fun as Cloake is a delightful character with a mischievous streak, and an infectious, great dirty laugh.
She is also a respected food writer whose reputation for writing recipes that always work is based on her rigorous and exacting approach. For How to cook the perfect . . . Cloake spends up to a week working on each column. “Depending on what the recipe is, if it’s something involving stocks, or making bread, it could probably take me four days to do all the research and work out which recipes I am going to try; get the ingredients – I spend a lot of time cycling round looking for particular things – and then a day or two testing the recipes and a day writing it up, so it’s quite a big task.”
The pay off, for the reader, is reliable recipes that combine the best bits of other writers’ ideas and her own skill and judgment.
But it does mean she ends up eating rather a lot of whatever she’s working on at any given time. “Recently I did porchetta and first thing I realised was it’s impossible to do a small piece of porchetta because of the way you have to roll it up. I was left with about 10kg (22lbs) of meat.
“I’d found this recipe and once I’d found it, I couldn’t ignore the fact that it existed ... you had to cook it in a water bath for 24 hours and then you had to deep fry the whole thing and I naively stuck it in a pot of oil, not thinking about displacement, science never being my strong point, and the oil foamed over.
“Luckily it was before I got a gas hob, because otherwise I think the whole of north London would have burned up. Even the dog, who had been standing there very attentively, jumped back. It was delicious, but I decided it wasn’t worth the considerable risk to human health, to be honest.”
The A-Z of Eating is the first book she has written that isn't associated with her Guardian column. It's based on the things she absolutely loves to eat, arranged alphabetically, with a bit of poetic licence. Qis for Quiver, for example, features a selection of jellies, mousses and custards.
“Q was a hard one. I was thinking quince and quail, and while I like those things, it would be disingenuous to claim that they’re my absolute favourites.
“I spent probably about a month trying to firm up the alphabet. I didn’t really want to have anything in there for the sake of it, and then finally a couple of friends came over for dinner, sat me down with a bottle of wine and said ‘We are not leaving until we have done this’.”
When it came to P, there was no indecision however. “I wanted P for potato because I absolutely love potatoes. I could fill an entire book with potato recipes. My mum can’t eat potatoes and I think it must be because my [Irish] granny fed her so many growing up. She ate them up until she left home and she’s never eaten them since.”
Cloake’s mother’s family came from Dublin and before that from Mayo, and they are going back in September “ to do a little bit of a pilgrimage”. There’s an Irish landmark, a culinary one, on her horizons too. “I love Ballymaloe, it’s my favourite place on earth. I’ve been there a couple of times and if I won the lottery I would definitely go and do a course there. It’s just like paradise there, isn’t it. Best breakfast of my life, I still think about it now. I really love Ireland.”
The A-Z of Eating: A Flavour Map for the Adventurous Cook by Felicity Cloake, with photographs by Helen Cathcart, is published by Fig Tree, £25
