Nigel Slater discusses his garden, cats and cooking

"My kitchen is not large, but a trio of skylights and the fact that the doors open up to the garden make it a hugely pleasurable place in which to cook." Thus begins English food writer Nigel Slater's extraordinary new book, The Kitchen Diaries, taking the reader on an enchanting journey through a year in his kitchen and garden in Islington, North London.

It's much more than a recipe book, although Slater does relate what he has eaten and offers extremely user-friendly recipes for most days of the year. But it's the simple power of his writing, accompanied by photographs, which makes this such a delicious cover-to-cover read.

When Slater advises the cook to keep water at an "excited boil" or an "enthusiastic simmer", you know exactly what he means. He clearly enjoys his garden, describing his spring flowering broad beans as looking "as if a hundred black and white butterflies are climbing up the stems". He occasionally (and briefly) mentions his cats: mog lovers will empathise when he notes that on November 5, "just four of us for Bonfire Night, and there are only sparklers, fireworks being just too traumatic for the cats."

Spend time poring over The Kitchen Diaries, and you almost feel as if you're sitting at his garden table, chatting away through the french doors as Slater prepares a tasty snack to bring outside and share.

On the phone from London, Slater says he first started a diary a few years ago when he redesigned his long, thin back garden. "I kept a little jotterpad of what I was planting where, what seeds I was putting in but it was a little haphazard. Then I went on a diet for several months a couple of years ago, and part of the diet was I had to write down everything I'd eaten, which is a way of getting you to admit to things you'd eaten.

"So I got used to keeping a diary. When I was thinking of my next cookbook — I've not had a cookbook out for five years — I suddenly thought, why not expand on the jottings; make it a diary."

Slater is the Observer's food writer and author of a number of excellent books including Real Fast Food, Appetite and 2003's evocative autobiography, Toast, where he wrote about his lonely childhood, his mother's early death, and the battle for his father's affections between himself and Joan, the sour housekeeper who quickly became his stepmother.

Slater says his own by-no-means-posh kitchen is the antithesis of the claustrophobic fug of his childhood home. "I spent a lot of my childhood in a dark country cottage. When I was looking for somewhere to live, the most important thing was light. When people walk into my kitchen you can see there is a slight disappointment sometimes because you can see they're expecting a very trendy big kitchen with pots and pans hanging from the ceiling and all that sort of thing, and it isn't.

"It's more of a galley really but it's got this incredible light. That's more important to me than all the space and equipment in the world."

The Kitchen Diaries are obviously seasonal in tone, and Slater makes every effort to buy seasonal produce from the small local greengrocers and the farmers' markets starting to spread across London. He's slightly startled that a single sentence in his introduction has created a major flurry: "I have honestly never set foot inside a branch of Tesco [the giant British supermarket chain]."

He laughs. "It's so funny, that one sentence in the book has caused a certain amount of controversy. Tesco now accounts for £1 in every eight spent in this country — it's terrifying. I do shop occasionally in supermarkets, there are some things they're good for — like toilet cleaner, bin bags. But lots of our little shops like greengrocers have closed down because of the march of the supermarkets, so I do try to shop at the little shops."

Slater, as he points out in the book, is no "cooking machine" although he sometimes feels like one. His entry for June 9 tells how "the urge for fish fingers and peas gets the better of me". The purchase of said fish fingers and peas in the corner shop gets him into trouble as "a total stranger turns to me and says, 'Well, well, Nigel Slater with a bag of frozen peas!'"

This happens rather too much, he says. "It's so strange because I am really conscious of what is in my shopping basket because people do look. I know I look at other people's baskets. Where I live, there's quite a few people you see on TV and if I see them in the shops, I look in the basket. I am a culinary voyeur."

Slater has become such a valued figure in Britain's culinary landscape that the National Portrait Gallery has recently purchased a photograph of him. His cats, like Rick Stein's dog Chalky, are almost as famous. "I went to have a look at the photo today, feeling terribly excited about that, and the picture they've chosen is one of me in the kitchen with the cats looking up. It is so sweet.

"The cats get Christmas cards from readers. When people stop me on the street and say hello, they often ask about the cats and we start a cat conversation which is delightful — but I sometimes wonder if they are getting better known than I am."

Slater is not keen on being on television, unlike many of his colleagues. He might do a little telly next year — "there are a few interesting little programmes people have been talking to me about" — but next year he will focus on a new book.

He still finds it rather strange that he has found a career he loves, as a food writer. The food bit he can understand: "It is the majority of my life. If I'm not cooking it, I'm eating it, or shopping for it, or thinking about it."

As for the writing, he muses, "I didn't do very well at school, there was never any sign at all that I was ever going to write for a living. I was working in a cafe ... at that point, I didn't have any clear picture of what I wanted to do. I knew it would be connected with food and I assumed I was going to end up as a professional chef but I wasn't very good at that. I'm OK with home cooking but cooking professionally just wasn't my scene at all.

"How it happened was, at the cafe, one of the customers said she was launching a food magazine and did I know anybody who could test some recipes. I said, 'I'll do it,' and that's how it started. It was sheer luck. Sometimes you think, what would have happened if that hadn't happened?"

Then there's the passion for his garden, so palpable in Kitchen Diaries, no matter the season. March 4: "Snow has fallen as I slept. I fold back the shutters and stare out at the garden without moving for a full 10 minutes." Or August 9: "The sun is so hot I cannot cross the stone slabs of the terrace in bare feet."

"It's a small garden," observes Slater. "People say it's large for a London garden only because it's long. When I moved in, it was all lawn. It was a big decision to put in beds of soil and start growing vegetables. I wasn't sure I'd end up wishing I hadn't done it but I set it up with a garden designer. We've got six little patches and surrounded them with hedges and it's worked.

"I am now in my fourth year of growing things and I've just been writing out my seed list for next year. I could never be self-sufficient but it's that thing of going out on a summer's evening and picking raspberries — it's heaven. It's watching them grow through the seasons, pruning them and picking them."

Given his antipathy to food that's not fresh, Slater's comments in the book are spot-on, discussing modern peculiarities such as the ubiquitous supermarket "pillow packs" of salad greens which turn to mush. "Isn't it weird? It's like magic. What amazes me is how quickly they turn to mush, it's very, very odd. They've done a lot of research into pillow packs recently and they've found there's an awful lot of chemicals being used to wash the greens, a chemical cocktail. I've stopped buying them ... there's something spooky about them."

British reviewer, the food writer William Leith (The Hungry Years), has highly praised The Kitchen Diaries, noting that Slater's writing was "not just about food, but about how food connects you to people", referring back to Toast and Slater's childhood ordeal of "sour, nitpicking" Joan and her "bland, dead" food which effectively accelerated his father's death by heart attack.

Slater says reflectively: "Joan and I both used food as a comfort and as a way of getting my father's attention and affection. I would make things at school — it was very rare for a boy to take cooking lessons instead of woodwork or metal work — and I'd bring lovely things home, only to find Joan had filled the kitchen with cakes and pastries.

"So food was in many ways a comfort but at times a bit stressful because it was used as a weapon."

Slater longs to travel to Tasmania sometime in the near future to visit his sister-in-law who runs a farm — but he can't travel far, for now. "People think I'm mad when I say this but it's getting someone to live in and look after the cats. They are very old — 20, 19 and 17. The thing that scares me, especially with the very old one is the idea that something might happen when I'm not there. It would be a nightmare for the people looking after them and also I want to be with him, dear old thing.

"But when they have gone, I have told all my friends, this is it. I need a break."

Whatever happens, Slater's cats will remain immortal because they are in the diaries. February 21: "It's mid-afternoon, snow has fallen and there is a trail of fox prints to the kitchen door. The cats, huddled around the Aga, look as though they are not amused: 'Oh, that stuff again.'

"Every sound is muffled, the grass across the road sparkles in the streetlights, not a soul passes the front door. It is as if everyone is asleep."

So much more than a cookbook. Lovely.


* The Kitchen Diaries by Nigel Slater, Fourth Estate, $49