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Nigel Slater: Eating for England

2014-12-22T09:28:24+00:00

Editor's Note: Nigel Slater reflects the adaptation of his food memoir by dramatist Sarah Daniels

As a teenager, I had always thought my aunts and uncles to be much more fun than my parents and in particular my father’s rather grand elder sister, Elvie. Something of a matriarch, she was always referred to as my Godmother rather than my aunt, and lived with her timid husband in a neat, suffocating house on the outskirts of Birmingham. Death by cushions.

Elvie was mostly benign, kind and exceptionally generous to her youngest nephew. We had a lot of things in common, from small mannerisms and physical resemblances (we both have big ears and get attacks of the giggles at inappropriate moments) to a similarly silly sense of humour. I thought of her as a safe harbor when things times at home became troubled at home.

Elvie had decided to leave her mother’s dark Handsworth home, with its outside loo and tin bath that had to be filled from a series of kettles boiled on coal fired kitchen range, and work at becoming a successful middle class lady. She studied books on etiquette and lost her midlands accent, she became rather prim and a little arch, and would rather have died than be seen without a brooch, or to be caught leaving the house without a silk scarf and gloves.

I had mentioned my godmother in my memoir Toast but she remained somewhere in the background, appearing only at Christmas and birthdays. Several readers had commented how much they wanted to know more about her. When the idea of illuminating her character in a drama was put to me, I was particularly keen, having felt she been previously overshadowed by my parents and stepmother. Having often felt she was worthy of an entire book to herself, I welcomed the suggestion of Eating for England wholeheartedly.

I loved Sarah Daniels’ script from the moment I read it. Sarah had spotted, behind all of Elvie’s faux grandeur, her extraordinary and occasionally ridiculous sense of humour. Yes, Elvie had a dark and it has to be said unpleasant streak, but she had been good to me throughout the difficult years and I was exceptionally fond of her.

I had hardly dared to mention whom I hoped would play my aunt, because to do so would have inevitably led to disappointment on all sides. The phone rang and my agent told me that Celia Imrie has agreed to play Elvie. Had the producers read my mind? Had I let my wishes slip? Who knows. And then, the news that Julian Rhind Tutt was to play my younger self. I couldn’t have been happier.

I was in the middle of filming a new television series for BBC1 when the invitation came to join the cast and crew of Eating England during recording. My chance to meet both Celia and Julian and to watch the scene where I take tea with my aunt being recorded. And let me tell you, dear listeners, they really did have tea. There were scones and jam and cream, pots of steaming tea and all taken at a laid table, exactly as it would have been. No sound effects of teaspoons in cups dropped into saucers by the engineers, but real steaming tea, being poured and, I seem to remember a glass of budget fizz. I wanted to stay longer.

Elvie ended her days in a rather lovely home for the elderly in Birmingham, looked after by kindly nurses. Her quaint, rather snobby ways lasted right till the end, barely speaking to the other residents whom she considered ‘not really my sort of people, dear’. She had warned me “and Nigel, if you even think of putting me in a home, I shall come back and haunt you.” And of course she has, every time I look in the mirror.

Nigel Slater

Listen to 15 Minute Drama: Eating For England

Speaking with your mouth full - Radio 4 at Bristol Food Connections

2014-04-30T11:38:20+00:00

Editor's Note - As part of the city-wide food celebration Bristol Food Connections, which runs from 1 to 11 May, the BBC will host BBC at Bristol Food Connections.

Very excited about the line up at Bristol’s Food Connections festival. Hundreds of things to see and do (and eat). We’ve been thinking hard about the literary end of the food festival – planning events where words and food collide and where it really is ok to speak with your mouthful. And so…

Opening the festival on May 2nd is a special edition of Poetry Please raiding the larder of language for its most delicious descriptions of food. Reading the poems will be, among others, Pippa Haywood and James Fleet (who, for me, will always be Tom from Four Weddings and A Funeral no matter what else he does).

On Sunday May 4th we’ve got Beer Writer Pete Brown joining Harriett Gilbert on A Good Read. He’s promised to bring Brillat Savirin’s magnum opus the Physiology of Taste. No I hadn’t heard of it either but it’s probably shaped your sense of eating without you even knowing. And after that we’ve got top Writers Helen Dunmore, Helen Cross and Edson Burton reading short stories on the subject of food chains – be they emotional, industrial or psychological.

Oliver Twist

Michael Rosen and the Word of Mouth team are putting together a whirlwind tour through food in our great novels. If you ever wanted to know what Oliver Twist wanted more of and what really was the food of love in Shakespearean times then come join us for ‘Reader, I Marinated Him… (with apologies to Charlotte Bronte)

Countryfile Presenter John Craven will choose Isambard Kingdom Brunel as his Great Life with Matthew Parris.

John Craven

Where better to discuss the engineer than in a big tent on the waterfront at Bristol – a place shaped by Brunel and still in the shadow of his magnificent steam ship the SS Great Britain. And for dessert, Neil Stuke, who plays Billy Lamb, the senior clerk at Chambers in BBC One’s Silk, chooses his favourite and funniest pieces of writing about food, helped out by two actors. Neil’s a keen cook, who was runner-up in Celebrity MasterChef. His father was a chef, and Neil himself is so passionate about food he bought and runs his own farm shop.

James Cook is the Editor of the Poetry and Arts Unit for BBC Radio in Bristol.

Sheila Dillon presents this year's BBC Food & Farming Awards, in a special programme on Monday 5th May, revealing the "best of the best" in British food and drink.

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BBC Food and Farming Awards - An Update

2013-06-21T13:56:41+00:00

We’ve big news about the next BBC Food & Farming Awards!

Usually at this time of year we’d be asking you to send in your nominations in our annual search for the best of British food and drink; from food producers to retailers, dinner ladies to street food cooks and farmers to drinks producers.

This year marks a departure for the awards we launched with the support of HRH, The Prince of Wales, back in 2000. Each year they’ve grown; both in terms of the range of food and drink categories we cover, to the number of nominations you send us.

This year, to reflect the continued rise in food and drink ideas across the UK, the growth of businesses and food projects in towns and cities in every region, we’ve ambitions to make these awards even bigger.

We want to raise their profile to ensure they reach as big an audience as possible and to ensure the awards provide the biggest platform yet in order to celebrate the people, businesses and organisations whose valuable work often receives little or no recognition.

The first big change is that the Awards will become a spring event and so we’ll be starting the nominations process later. This means we can stage our annual ceremony at time when food production in Britain is gearing up, and a time of year when we provide you with a far more adventurous and exciting ceremony.

And that’s where the other big change comes in. Our venue for the Food & Farming Awards in May 2014 will be Colston Hall in Bristol. It’s a prestigious theatre in a city that reflects many of the exciting trends in food and drink underway in the UK, from inspirational community work to a vibrant hub for new and young businesses. Most of all, this venue will allow us to have the highest level of public participation ever seen in the history of the awards.

We’re also starting to plan a wide range of public events based around the BBC Food & Farming Awards, and across Bristol, that will allow us to celebrate, share and demonstrate stories of British food and farming.

In the next few months, through the Food Programme, our websites and other BBC output we’ll start to outline in more detail the plans we’re developing for the Awards and other events next May in Bristol, how this year’s nominations process will run and also explaining how you can get involved. We think it will be worth the wait.

Listen to 2012's Food and Farming Awards

The Food Programme

Can't See, Will Cook

2012-10-03T13:04:36+00:00

Editor's Note: Can't See, Will Cook is a short series included as part of the In Touch programme on Radio 4. Here, reporter Richard Lane talks about the series. Listen to clips of the recipes discussed in Can't See Will Cook or download them on the In Touch website. PMcD

It's Saturday morning. I've a strong coffee in a mug and Radio 4 on in the kitchen. Bacon and mushrooms on the grill, toast in the toaster, and a couple of eggs spitting in the pan. It's an easy routine repeated in kitchens up and down the country but, crucially, neither easy or routine if you're blind.

The smoke alarm goes off - because I've forgotten to turn on the extractor fan - Simpson, my dog starts to howl at the noise (and adding to it!) Breakfast is a miserable offering of burnt eggs, a surviving rasher of bacon and some black toast. A grim and dispiriting experience. Things could only get better....

That happened five years ago, and despite taking many culinary strides forward since then, I have not tried to repeat the fry-up. What I did manage to do was to convince the In Touch team to let me present a series of cookery items on their programme.

Listeners offered their favoured and most practical recipes and we set out to track down competent and imaginative visually impaired cooks who could demonstrate how cooking with little or no sight could be fun, safe, and creative.

The response was immediate, and within weeks we had Can't see Will Cook, launched and under way. Our first stop was to Ann Scroggie, sadly now no longer with us, with her no-nonsense Mrs Beaton approach to fish pie in her home near Motherwell; next stop, south-west London, where partially sighted Ben gave a masterclass in how to cook up a superb Thai Chicken Curry while deploying his magical garlic roller. In Cheshire, we met Gill Burrington who does all her cooking (including her signature Spanish Pork Stew) in an electric wok. Rory Roberts in west Wales, when not telling me off, made an unforgettable festive Nut Roast; Janet in north London showed me how to make Lemon Drizzle Cake, then back up north to Preston for Kathy Lester's Creole Fish Stew and Dry-Roasted Cabbage (yes, really); Maxine Turkington, ably assisted by husband Syd knocked up a speedy and delicious summer three-course menu, and Ian Macrae treated us to his favourite fishy dishy, Cod Eleanor, to the accompaniment of music of Lindisfarne. And we ended with Mohamad Khalife's memorable Lebanese feast ... fantastic.

I've enjoyed some delicious food, put on weight and most importantly I've gained confidence in the kitchen. I hope listeners can benefit similarly.

Richard Lane is a reporter for Can't See, Will Cook.

Hear audio clips from Can't See, Will Cook
Download the programmes (available for 4 weeks)
Find out more about the programme In Touch

Send us your nominations for the BBC Food and Farming Awards: You have until 14th August

2011-08-09T12:44:00+00:00

We go into this year's 12th BBC Food and Farming Awards with food prices up and less cash around. But what's clear from surveys and the fortunes of the supermarket chains is that price isn't everything in the decisions people are making about food in tough times: quality and localness are still big draws.

Not that the awards are about posh, expensive food. Last year's Takeaway prize was won by Mr Dutchy's Caribbean in Northampton. Our judge, former Michelin Guide inspector Simon Parkes, was impressed: the dishes were freshly cooked, authentic, tasty and a good meal could be had for a fiver.

Our best food producer was young baker Alex Gooch: his bread costs a lot more than a supermarket's white sliced loaf, but then you can live off his loaves. And you won't have tasted anything better than his sourdough, or his rye fruit loaf or, in fact, anything he bakes. The winning market was Stroud Farmers' Market. Although it's in the Cotswolds, it's not posh: it's a market that brought a town centre back to life and is packed with producers selling food in at all price ranges.

When The Food Programme and Radio 4 set up the BBC Food and Farming Awards in 2000, we did it not just to hand out well-earned plaudits. We wanted to wake people up to the importance of food, to the way it shapes society and us.

All through the years when cheap food at any price was the standard policy in the UK, hundreds of producers, cooks, farmers and chefs kept faith with the idea that food matters. Then in the post-BSE world, as it seeped into the public consciousness that perhaps knowing where your food came from was important, their values spread. But top-notch bakers, such as Alex Gooch and last year's BBC Food Champion Richard Bertinet, as well as cheese-makers, farmers, butchers, cooks, campaigners for abattoirs and allotments, veg growers and shopkeepers, are still not honoured in the way they deserve for making the UK a more civilised place.

So help us give them their due. Send us your nominations for Britain's food champions. Do it now and make the UK a better place! To nominate and get more information, go to the BBC Food and Farming Awards website.

Sheila Dillon is the presenter of Radio 4's The Food Programme.

Make your nominations for the BBC Food and Farming Awards 2011 before the 14th August.
Picture from the archive: "BBC European Service: Danish Section 24/02/1954 © BBC. A London housewife talking about her preference in butter. A programme broadcast in the BBC Danish Service surveys the demand for butter in Britain where butter rationing ends on 8th May 1954."

Searching for our lost minerals

2009-09-24T06:00:18+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00mw2nk

Drive through the southern Highlands between Braemar and Pitlochry at this time of year and they look pretty bleak. After thirty miles of bleached heather it comes as a shock to see a splash of colour on the horizon. Drive closer and you come to a couple of acres of luxuriant vegetation on an exposed hillside, 1000 feet above sea level - trees heavy with apples as big as your fist and storybook-sized turnips bursting from the soil.

For Costing the Earth we've set our new presenter, Dr. Alice Roberts - fresh from TV's 'Coast' - the challenge of tracking down the minerals we've lost from our staple foods in the past seventy years. Perthshire growers, Moira and Cameron Thomson are convinced they've found them again, languishing as waste in their local quarry. By adding rock dust they believe they can mimic the action of ice ages, recharging the soil with the vital minerals that should make their way into the fruit and veg they grow.

Alice and I tucked into some incredibly sweet gooseberries and munched on freshly pulled endive while Cameron pulled parsnips out of the ground, in search of one big enough to really impress us. Giving up, he took us back into the farmhouse to show us a frozen head of broccoli that could feed a family of five for a week. Over coffee Cameron took pencil and paper to explain his theories of geological shifts, climate change and shifting ice sheets. There's nothing Alice likes more than a good scientific argument so I sat back and sipped my coffee as they tore into each other over the crashing impact of ice sheets on the Highland landscape.

When I finally steered Alice back to the car Moira waved us off with the news that the inspiration for their theories- and their vocation over the past twenty years- came from a Radio 4 programme they heard in 1983. I'll leave the scientists to judge the detail of their ideas, but if Radio 4 inspired those gooseberries thriving on a blasted hillside then we've contributed just a little to civilisation.

Alasdair Cross is Producer of Costing the Earth

Costing the Earth - The Great Mineral Heist is broadcast at 0900 on Monday 28th September and repeated at 1330 on Thursday 3rd October.
Farming Today covered the soil depletion story this morning at 0545. Listen again.
The picture shows Moira and Cameron Thomson and is used with their permission.

Sheila Dillon's week

2009-07-24T17:05:23+00:00

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/ffa/2009/introduction/

Lunch yesterday at one of London's poshest restaurants - not, as many people think, what I normally spend my life doing, but a chance for me to eavesdrop on a meeting about the future of Slow Food UK. In Italy Slow Food is a powerful political force, in the UK it's been a lot less than that which has greatly aggravated SF's founder Carlo Petrini. The result is UK Slow Food has a new chief exec, American-Italian dynamo Catherine Gazzoli, hot from the UN, ready to do some shaking up and convince us class-ridden, good-food-wary Brits that food matters. I think Catherine could easily outperform Tony Blair in the Middle East, but changing the food culture of the British Isles is an altogether harder task.

Lots of compliments at the meeting about our Food & Film programme two Sundays ago. The food world is a bit like the entertainment industry - you were wonderful darling - so I don't take compliments too seriously, but that was a programme I'm particularly proud to have presented. One of the Food Programme's brilliant producers understood that it would cast a new light on our food system if we looked at it just through the eyes of film makers, both here and abroad. We're living through a golden age of documentary making - documentaries that are being watched in cinemas, village and church halls all over the world (while fewer and fewer are appearing on our television screens. Something wrong somewhere).

Making the programme I interviewed Nick Francis, who with his brother Marc directed Black Gold, a documentary about the coffee business. I met them first with producer Rebecca Moore when The Food Programme went to Cancun to cover the World Trade Organisation meeting. Nick and Marc were there following the coffee story, documenting the relationship between developing countries and global decision-making on "free trade". The Cancun scenes in Black Gold are some of the most powerful in the whole film. Since the film was released in 2007 the issues it highlighted have taken over the brothers' lives.

And the film has been screened all over Africa and the Americas, spelling out for all to see a world where a cappuccino costs around £2.50 but the Ethiopian farmer who produced the beans - generally agreed to be the finest on the planet - will get perhaps 5p a kilo. And as the film tells us one kilo of coffee beans makes about 80 cups of coffee. The arithmetic isn't difficult. This is one of the reasons Ethiopian farmers and their families are going hungry, need food aid and are getting out of coffee growing. Insane? As we say at the Food Programme - understand food and you're a long way on the road to understanding the way the world works.

Meanwhile we're gearing up in this little corner of the open plan on the 6th floor at Broadcasting House for this year's Radio 4 Food & Farming Awards - the 10th. A decade since Prince Charles handed out the first gongs.

Gearing up seems the right expression... adjusting the criteria for each award, appointing the judging panel (Chair, Raymond Blanc, plus Alex James, Rose Prince, Mark Hix, Simon Parkes, Lord Haskins, for starters), constructing the trails for Radio 4, setting up the website to take in nominations, starting a filing system for each of the nine categories, getting the help of a smart young intern for a couple of weeks. And then wondering how the hell the producers are going to cope with organising the judging, and recording, with at least one judge, at each place, on each short-list - 24 sites in all and if other years are a guide they'll be scattered from the Orkneys to the Scillies--all the while continuing to turn out The Food Programme every week. Every year it seems overwhelming, every year it's exhaustingly fascinating.

Sheila Dillon is presenter of The Food Programme

Make a nomination for the 2009 Food & Farming Awards.
Some photographs of Sheila Dillon and producer Rebecca Moore in the studio on 23 July 2009.
Paul Levy's blog post about the changes at Slow Food UK in The Guardian.
The Financial Times reports on a plan by Ethiopian migrants to market Fair Trade coffee in the UK.
The Guardian's special report on WTO Cancun.