Books That Built Me: Toast

I stole Toast from my mum’s bookshelf the summer I turned twenty. We didn’t tend to read the same things. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever taken a book recommendation from her before. But something about the spine and simple title caught me. Maybe it was the fact that I was deep in my pasta-and-beans university cooking era, or maybe it was just that I’d heard Nigel Slater’s name and wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

I was expecting the story of yet-another-nepo-baby-chef. What I found was the total opposite. This wasn’t some glossy food memoir from a life of privilidge. It was a delicate, sharp, funny, and deeply personal story of a slightly odd, slightly lonely queer kid who cooked his way through grief, confusion, longing, and adolescence. I recognised more of myself in those pages than I expected to. The crushes not quite spoken aloud. The way food became language, comfort, and sometimes armour. The subtle seasoning of memory through meals.

Slater’s structure was genius. Each chapter orbiting a specific food, each bite soaked in time and place and emotion. It was the first time I’d seen food used not just as flavour, but as plot, framing. As a quiet act of resistance.

I’d written a few autobiographical pieces before this, mostly to untangle my own feelings, but Toast gave me a new way to think about personal narrative. How you can theme a life through something tangible, simple, and relatable. How sense memory can say more than exposition ever could.

I’ve re-read it a few times over the years. Once when the 2010 film came out (it’s good, but the book is better), and again during moments where I’ve found myself reflecting on family, pressure, and how we unpick the stories we’ve inherited. Toast reminds me that survival doesn’t have to be loud or dramatic. Sometimes it’s just finding a way to make something warm, and share it.

There are lines and moments that have lingered. Let’s be honest, if you’ve read it, you’ll know exactly why I can't look at a Walnut Whip without a giggle and a sigh. But what’s stayed with me more than any individual scene is the quiet determination that runs through it. A life lived gently, but with defiance. A refusal to be anything other than oneself, no matter how strange or soft that self might be.

Toast was both comforting and transitional. It met me at a moment where I was still baking and had no idea what kind of cake I'd end up being. It offered comfort, humour, and a kind of soft permission to keep figuring it all out in my own time.

Toast was one of the books that built me. Which one shall we devour next?