Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Toast | 2003 | Nigel Slater | Buy |
| 2 | The Kitchen Diaries II | 2012 | Nigel Slater | Buy |
| 3 | Notes from the Larder | 2012 | Nigel Slater | Buy |
| 4 | The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater | 2020 | Nigel Slater | Buy |
| 5 | A Year of Good Eating | 2020 | Nigel Slater | Buy |
| 6 | A Thousand Feasts | 2024 | Nigel Slater | Buy |
Nigel Slater’s first memoir, Toast, is one of the most admired food books of the past few decades. Published in 2003, it tells the story of his childhood in the English Midlands through a series of short chapters, each built around a food memory: a packet of crisps, a tin of soup, a slice of cake. The effect is cumulative and moving, building a portrait of a family and an era from scraps of sensory detail.
The Kitchen Diaries books take a different form, closer to a journal than a narrative memoir. Each records a year’s cooking in roughly chronological order, with recipes woven through the text and Slater’s characteristic observations on seasons, markets, and the rhythms of a kitchen. The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater (2020) and A Year of Good Eating present this approach across different periods of his life. A Thousand Feasts, published in 2024, is the most recent, gathering fragments and reflections in a looser, notebook-like form.
Reading these books in publication order gives a sense of how Slater’s relationship with food and writing has matured, though each stands alone and can be read independently.