Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 31 Dec 2018

The Christmas Chronicles by Nigel Slater

The last piece I wrote for Letterpress covered a slender essay about Japanese aesthetics – ideal for those seeking something to help them recover from the rigours of Christmas. Well, just to show I am capable of fairness, here is a very different book indeed – and ideal for those who are reluctant to let Christmas go: Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles, a book that doesn’t just celebrate Christmas but positively cheers every aspect of winter and the festive season.

I can’t imagine why I should, but I do feel a little sorry for Nigel Slater. Yes, he may be swiftly assuming a kind of minor national treasure status, but what isn’t often acknowledged is just what a terrific prose stylist he is. Even when his memoir Toast was reviewed HERE on Letterpress the praise was qualified: “This isn’t great literature,” Terry Potter wrote, “but equally it’s not negligible and disposable…” Talk about damned with faint praise! I’m joking, but you do see what I mean.

Anyway, I spent the hurly-burly days of Christmas – when one can be fortunate in carving out much reading time at all let alone being able to concentrate on great or classic literature – completely immersed in, and thoroughly enjoying, Nigel Slater’s The Christmas Chronicles, his love affair with Christmas and all of the varied but austere pleasures that winter offers.

Slater subtitles this large book ‘notes, stories and recipes for midwinter’, but I’ll be perfectly honest: I skimmed the recipes. I’m a great fan of Slater’s food writing and have followed his Observer column for pretty much the whole time he has written there – now twenty-five years and counting – but I’m  not the sort to read recipes for pleasure. Or at least, not very often. Fortunately, The Christmas Chronicles is only partly made up of recipes, and those who like Slater’s carefully crafted but apparently effortless prose – his unmistakeable voice, precise, sensuous, intimate, full of pleasure and appreciation – will relish the fact that this book offers a very large amount of it.

He manages to cover not just Christmas but virtually every aspect of Winter lore – everything from drinks to gingerbread to the best candles; the bitter cold, the bare trees, every cooking and eating experience you can think of from the crammed and opulent to the frugal and abstemious; the subtleties of reflected snow-light; the pleasures of preparing food for loved ones… The fact is, there can be few chefs who write as well or as pleasurably about the small intimacies of daily life, the rituals that console us, the sharp melancholy pleasures of observing time passing.

His prose has an intensely observed quality about it and this same rapt attention is echoed in his own, often gorgeous location photographs, and in the deeply saturated food photographs – touched with tones of pewter, lichen, slate, the iridescence of frosty grass or birds’ feathers – of his long-time photographer, Jonathan Lovekin.

At one point Slater writes: “The winter sky has a clarity and gentleness that I find more pleasing than the harsh, screaming colours of summer. Softer tones, those clean, arctic blues, the whisper-soft greys and pin-sharp paper whites, are the skies I want to live under…” At another he  praises “The stillness of winter. Snow on a twig. A berry imprisoned in ice. The quietness of a frozen lake…” I don’t think it’s fanciful to say that even if one knew nothing about Slater, a close observation of the colour palette of the photography that habitually illustrates his work tells you pretty accurately what his aesthetic outlook is. And it is also interesting to note – and I hadn’t before – how deeply influenced he is by Japanese aesthetics and indeed by Japan, which he says he visits virtually every year.

Of course, you don’t get this good by slacking and Slater is nothing if not driven. With typical pithy accuracy he may describe himself as “a cook who writes” but in truth this barely scratches the surface of what he actually does. His workload seems positively Stakhanovite: the weekly column (everything has to be shopped for, cooked, tested, photographed, written up, checked minutely for accuracy), the endless stream of books, the TV series, the foreign translations and launches…

We must be thankful that in the driven, helter-skelter life of the chef-writer-TV personality Slater is still able to step back now and then and give us something as lovely, as deeply enjoyable and as beautifully produced as The Christmas Chronicles.

Full disclosure: sadly not my copy – I swiped this off my older daughter who was looking forward to reading some of it over Christmas but was unable to pry if from my fingers.

 

Alun Severn

December 2019

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