Real Cooking

"Yes, I have chosen that one because I think that is the only one of his books you really need. He is the worst TV performer, but I like him because he is a shy, gay loner who loves food and cooking and does the TV because it comes along and is part of the package. He doesn’t have a family. As we know from his autobiography Toast , his family background was a bit awful. He doesn’t seem to have any mates. He doesn’t do that Jamie Oliver thing of “I am going to cook up something lovely for all my mates!” It is all a big performance with him. Yes. But with Nigel he stands there alone looking a bit sad in his kitchen. Oddly, his TV show doesn’t really gel that much with the writer. When I first read him I thought, interesting, he is gay. And you could tell. There was something about the aesthetic in terms of cooking and his indulgence and the way he talked about it which suggested he was not absolutely of the mainstream. He used a whole chicken and would really focus on the sticky bits on the pan underneath the bird, which struck me as something that a big glunky hetero twat like Gordon would never think of. And, although I am not gay, it was very much the way I felt about food – the idea that cake mix is tastier than cake, the perfection in a burnt roast potato that you can never get in a perfectly cooked one. You could imagine that Nigel, the same as me, would take a belly pork out of the oven and then stand there, while his guests were in the kitchen, mopping the fat up with stale bread and eating it, not even bothering with the joint. There is something offbeat and quirky and brilliant about him and he is also a very good writer. Like Fergus Henderson, he is very direct in his writing and he doesn’t try to show off. He just happens to have it all."