Nigel Slater on how his memoir Toast became a phenomenon

On the 20th anniversary of his bestseller, Nigel Slater tells how it all began … and how it went to stage and screen

Toast is 20. But the memoir that chronicled my childhood (cooking, eating, crying, and a few other “ings” a wiser author might have left out) started life as neither book, film nor stage play, but as an article in the Observer.

I was unsure about the idea. A request for a piece about the food I had grown up with. Did my editor know that my childhood had been a catalogue of sliced white bread, Jacobs’ Cream Crackers and Sugar Puffs? That I refused to eat any meat that wasn’t roast chicken or a lamb chop and any vegetable save frozen peas? I pondered how a story whose gastronomic highlights were arctic roll and butterscotch Angel Delight would go down with the readers. Surely the food of my father’s childhood, where his broke single mum brought him up on bread and dripping and soup made from bones begged from the butcher, might produce a better story.