Warm, generous, unshowy… No wonder the cookbook became an instant classic
One day in 1992 the phone rang at Books for Cooks, the famed specialist bookshop in London’s Notting Hill. It was answered by Clarissa Dickson Wright, then still a few years off finding fame as one of the Fat Ladies. The caller, who didn’t identify himself, wanted to know whether they had copies of the newly published Real Fast Food by Nigel Slater. “And Clarissa just enthused down the phone at me, told me it was a marvellous book,” Nigel says now. “That’s when I knew it was all going to be all right.”
It’s a delicious, if familiar slice of understatement from Nigel (don’t expect the journalist’s formality of surnames here; he’s both friend and colleague). Real Fast Food was not a lead title for Penguin books. It was published on such a tight budget it has no photographs. And yet it swiftly became such a massive success that sales reps had to drive around restocking bookshops from copies they carried in the boot.
