A Thousand Feasts Quotes

“A small meadow of dill and lemon thyme, tarragon and lemon verbena, set amidst Attar of Roses and Prince of Orange pelargoniums. I create a pretty enough landscape that is culinary and medicinal, tucking in pots of marigolds and nasturtiums here and there.
The sun hangs low, a breeze sets in and my work is done, I run my hands through the tallest fronds and gently ruffle the leaves-- trails of aniseed and pepper, chocolate and lavender, rose and lemon dance on the breeze. There are hints of cinnamon and curry, camphor and orange, mint and something I can't quite put my finger on. My hands smell of Greek hillsides and Provençal fields, an Elizabethan knot garden and a Parisian apothecary, but they also smell of long lunches in the garden. As I head in to make supper it dawns on me that spring has finally slipped into summer.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Some humans fare better in shade too. We do not crave the bright lights and the attention it brings but prefer to work quietly, a life lived, if not exactly in the shadows, in a certain cool, dappled light. Always one to dwell more contentedly in woodland than on a sun-drenched beach, I find the half-light with its shadows and needles of bright sunlight a fine place in which to spend my days.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“I like choosing the right plate for the right food. A striped Cornishware plate for scones and clotted cream; a moss-green, rectangular platter for sushi; oysters from a round aluminium tray. There is no science behind this, it is purely a question of aesthetics, in the way that battered fish and chips ‘tastes better’ eaten out of paper or a Chinese takeaway does when eaten with chopsticks out of white waxed boxes than either does when tipped out onto a plate. It is why drinking a single espresso from a mug feels ‘just wrong’.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The appearance of the full moon comes with a cast that includes ghosts and werewolves, vampires and fairies, lunatics and late-night revellers, but also this extraordinary light. An incandescence that picks out the white petals of certain garden flowers-- nicotiana, the spikes of actaea and echinops, allium snow globes and the dancing white fairies that are aquilegia. The best of these is probably the appropriately named sea holly, Miss Willmott's Ghost, with its ruff of grey spikes that appear to glow silver in moonlight. The name was given not for this delightful feature, but for the late gardener's habit of secretly distributing its seeds wherever she went.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Vivid greens and bright crimsons fill my fridge; the larder has jars and bottles with every shade of pink and violet, orange and magenta. The more colorful and vibrant the food I eat, the happier I am. I have just made a salad of milky-white burrata, purple basil and peaches the colors of a sunset. Breakfast involved melon, wine-red raspberries and nuggets of crimson pomegranate. Eat the rainbow, they say, and I do.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The first time I smelled the soft, powdery rocks of Somalian frankincense James brought back from traveling; the whiff of a broken dahlia stem or inhaled green osmanthus-flower tea was like stepping through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. Likewise crocuses, charcoal and umeshu, the citrine-hued Japanese plum wine.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Ginger cake is perhaps the most magical cake of all. I bless the way you don't have to cream the sugar and butter together and gently beat in the eggs or sieve in the flour. I like the fact that you just put the syrup and black treacle, sugar and butter in a pan and melt them. That you then stir in the eggs, flour and spice, pour the runny batter into a cake tin and bake it. Literally magic.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“There isn’t a crumb I don’t like. The shattered crust of a baguette; the rounded pink and yellow remains of a slice of birthday sponge; the last currant from an Eccles cake or flake of puff pastry from a sausage roll. There are the spongy, butter-coated crumbs from a crumpet; a lost nib of candied peel from a hot cross bun or the sugary rubble that lies at the bottom of a dish of apple crumble. The truth is that all crumbs are good.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“A second-hand bookshop draws me in a as a moth to a candle. Each shop is a small shrine to the power of beauty and words. Tightly packed shelves of old hardback novels; heavy tomes on art and design; teetering piles of poetry. There are copies of the Children's Encyclopedia used as a doorstop and wooden crates of paperbacks going for a song. Some are rare, with a price to match, others a fraction of their original cost. A book for everyone, I guess.
Yes, it's the thought of words put together with such care, the pages whose surface has been worn by years of handling; the tired bindings and torn-edged covers where a book has been in less kind hands than it should. (A chance to give a damaged book a kinder home.) But even more, it is the smell that makes me want to enter every second-hand bookshop I pass. A smell that is dusty, a cross between an old leather saddle and a country church.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“There is soft ground underfoot, spongy and damp, the river is fast-flowing and I am careful to steer clear of the slippery bank. Lichen is everywhere; even the youngest trees are encrusted with it. Here it is as abundant as I have ever seen it, coating almost every trunk and twig with a soft green crust.
We had smoked salmon for breakfast, with sticky bread like wet peat and cloudberry, juice the color of apricots. A meal so simple and perfect, a breakfast steeped in the spirit of the place. Here in the woods I hear gushing water and birdsong, but little else. Just the crackle of twigs, the occasional drip, drip of raindrops from the trees.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Some plants grow better in the shade. The woodlanders: cream spires of aconitum and aruncus, delicate ferns and the tall windflowers better known as Japanese anemones amongst them. As you might expect, the fairy flowers of thalictrum and epimedium thrive when grown in dappled light and will dance in the gentlest of breezes. The perfect hiding place for those who inhabit the 'otherworld.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The roses are fading. Turmeric petals soften to the color of old dusters, magenta becomes palest violet, edges that were dark and sumptuous turn to the color of a tea stain. What was once as white as snow is now buttermilk. Their texture changes too: petals soft and strong enough to support a portly bumblebee dry to walnut-colored fragments frail and aging till they shatter.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“It is when I get to wallow in the salacious delights of the crinkle-petalled Black Parrot and Orange Emperor, the brilliant tangerine Cairo that stands head and shoulders above the crowd, or fantasies about the soft ochres of Brown Sugar. The single-flowered, pale pastels are tempting, too, if only for their gentleness, their shy colors reminiscent of buttercream on cupcakes.
The Rembrandts are the tulips of my dreams, great goblets the color of hot-air balloons; deep plum and crimson with flashes of yellow; tight green and white petals as crisp as ice on a pond and those that look like crushed berries being stirred through whipped cream.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The soft pastels and red-wine colors of this garden change in the piercing sun. The deep reds fade to violet and walnut-brown; the pinks, soft oranges and creams crisp like old newspaper. I don't mind, in fact I rather like the faded colors in the glorious heat of late July. I haven't turned the oven on in a week or more. Today burrata, yesterday panzanella and before that rough-and-tumble dinners assembled from the deli. Lunches have been laid out in assorted bowls outside: preserved artichokes in oil, deli-made couscous salads, marinated octopus and tinned sardines. There are lumps of feta scattered with dill and bloomy goat's milk cheeses with rose-petal za'atar.
Pudding is offered in jam jars. Makeshift trifles of sponge, lemon curd and apricots. Messes of meringue, loganberries and cream. Another of passion-fruit posset and halved cherries. In the top of each jar a flower: rose petals on the loganberries, a viola with the apricots, marigold petals scattered over the dark-red cherries. Little pots of treasure in which to go digging with your teaspoon.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“As soon as I moved into the house, I planted a Discovery apple tree at the foot of the garden, by the yew hedge. A gift to the Norse gods for eternal youth, but in truth a nod to the apple tree of my childhood, whose canopy shaded the patch of phlox growing underneath, whose long stems and flowers the colors of sugared almonds hid a treasure trove of fallen fruit.
Discovery is a scented apple, with bright, acid flesh that does not keep well. The small, slightly flattened fruit are best eaten straight from the tree. The flesh is white as frost, flashed lightly with strawberry pink. A child's apple.
It is aptly named. Brought up as I was in a world of Dairylea, Ritz Crackers and Wonderloaf, the flavor and scent of these pale fruits were my first hint that there was something more interesting out there to eat.
My tree, twenty years old now, awaits the lacework of soft-green lichen that covered the branches of my parents' and, infuriatingly, phlox has so far refused to grow beneath its boughs. It is the earliest apple, ripening in August. A fruit I think of not only as the herald of the apple season, with its Michaelmas Reds and Blenheim Oranges, its Cornish Honeypins and Ribston Pippins, but as the beginning of everything.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The roses were originally picked as much for their perfume as much for their color and form. (Unlike my first roses, which were bought purely because I was enchanted by their romantic names.) Of the basic musk, myrrh, tea, fruit and old-rose fragrances I am drawn to the latter two. Fruity is a broad bush on a night like tonight. Lady Emma Hamilton, reliable though now retired by the growers, is at her most giving: apricots and white peaches spring to mind. Gertrude Jekyll is one of the most intense of the old-rose scented varieties. She calls me over every time I set foot on the terrace.
Unlike the more generous jasmine, even the most scented rose requires us to bend a little, pushing the tip of our nose into the cluster of petals. Not so Gertrude tonight, mingling as she does with the white jasmine, hovering cloud-like over the hot stones of the terrace. I have a plan to bring the Queen of Denmark into the garden too, another old-rose scent, and I long for a decent musk rose such as Buff Beauty, exuding its faint note of cloves on a warm evening.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Some plants give out their strongest scents during daylight, attracting bees and butterflies; like phlox and many lilies, jasmine keeps its headiest moments for the night, to attract moths, which are the plant's most efficient pollinator.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Once established, jasmine grows well in this garden, and there are three, no, four varieties now. A soft yellow, like clotted cream, that hangs loosely from the window boxes, shifting in the breeze. A pink variety, Jasminum stephanense, clambers up the brittle, naked stems of a much older plant, using its relative as a trellis. White stars of Jasminum grandiflorum cover the tendrils that have woven a canopy over the courtyard, a fragrant white parasol whose petals fall like snowflakes each autumn.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Their petals are as delicate as antique lace but I grow them for their leaves, which are scented-- lemon, camphor and rose.
There is Edna Popperwell's Ashby, whose leaves smell not of the advertised rose but (to this nose at least) of frankincense. Attar of Roses has furry leaves which remind me of Turkish delight, Orsett smells of balsam whilst Prince of Orange and Queen of the Lemons speak for themselves, the latter of sherbet lemons rather than the fruit. At the top of the garden is a wayward, rambling Copthorne, whose clusters of marshmallow-pink flowers are entangled amongst the bars of the old iron gate. Others are here not for their scent but for the delicate flowers. The diminutive Shannon sends her frilly parsley leaves and straggle of wandering stems over the table. She has no scent at all, but flowers that resemble salmon-pink stars, which twinkle against the watery-grey zinc of the garden table.
The leaves are nothing to look at but show their magic once you rub them between finger and thumb. I use them for a spritz of inspiration as I write, but I occasionally take them into the kitchen too. If you layer their leaves amongst caster sugar in a jam jar they will infuse the crystals with the essence of lemon, orange or rose. Pick the right leaves and you have delicate, scented sugar with which to crown a summer sponge cake or to infuse in a jug of cream for raspberries.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The roses are very much the heart notes of the space, spilling from the formal green architecture in shades of apricot, white, buff and deep, arterial crimson. They bring a classical beauty and a certain untidiness, something this garden needs if it isn't to look uptight, and layers of fragrance and softness to a design made up of crisp greens.
The top notes, fleeting, like butterflies, are grown in terracotta pots that change with the seasons. Narcissi, tulips, foxgloves and dahlias. The most fragrant of the top notes are the tubs of rust and maroon wallflowers whose sweet scent wafts on the breeze from February to April. They watch over the garden's annual transformation from brown to piercing acid-green.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The tree's demise has also opened up the green space beneath, allowing spring primroses and apricot-colored epimediums to thrive.
And another joy... the small Japanese cherry tree that had struggled in the shade of the chestnut has now found its feet. In a heartbeat it has put on girth and height, a sudden spurt of growth as if in a hurry to fill the vacant space and cover our nakedness. For three weeks in May the blossom flutters in the breeze like a million white butterflies, then covers the underlying hawthorn and spiraea bushes with tiny petals. A silver lining of the very best sort.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“At night the space is filled with the scent of daphne, philadelphus and Choisya ternata. Protected by walls and hedges, the leaves still rustle in the breeze, whispering to one another or, perhaps, to me. I fancy this part is occupied by relatives of the kami, the sacred spirits of the Japanese forest, which can take the form of trees, of which the Cornus Gloria Birkett is now the most splendid, its pale bracts like a shimmer of creamy-white butterflies come to rest.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“There is nothing softer on which to walk. Your footsteps are silent, as if treading on velvet; each step becomes slower and more cautious. To set foot on a moss path, even the short one at the top of my garden, slows your pace, every movement now more thoughtful.
The luminosity of moss is extraordinary. It holds water, a dampness reminiscent of cloisters and cathedral walls. I imagine that is how the walls of a monastery might smell.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Amongst the ochre leaves are roses: deep-crimson Gabriel Oak, apricot-blushed Lady Emma Hamilton and the final breath of the haunting white Direktör Benschop, which clambers through the yew hedges. There are Japanese anemones-- windflowers-- and at the far end of the garden, at the foot of the crab apple tree, a cluster of pale-pink autumn cyclamen.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Kyoto; I stop at a tiny restaurant I want to eat at but it is closed. Outside the locked door is a narrow table with a tin bath filled with flowering lily of the valley and a basin of wild strawberries, ripe and begging to be eaten.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“My childhood was full of hedges, the tight corset of green privet that ran the entire boundary of the house, orchard and garden; those I passed on the long walk to school, hedges of hawthorn and holly, sloe, blackberry and wild rose. In spring they were a tangle of white froth and carried primroses and cowslips at their base, violets and the odd bluebell that had strayed from the woods. In winter they would be peppered with scarlet, black and rust berries, grey clouds of old man's beard and dew-speckled spiders' webs that hung like diamond necklaces in the early-morning light.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“The tulips are usually in flower in March, a carnival of orange, saffron, rust and purple-black. Once they have gone over, as we gardeners say, their petals brown and frail like antique satin, the bulbs will be lifted and replaced with fully grown foxgloves, whose faded notes of lilac, pink and speckled cream will stand tall till it is time for the dahlias to go in.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Late February has brought crocuses to cheer us in the melancholy of winter. The petals-- white, lilac, mauve and gold-- are perfect against a grey-white sky. We planted a thousand small, hairy corms and a couple of hundred have come up. Plucky little flowers, they must fight against the rain, mice, squirrels and sparrows, all of which seem hell-bent on their destruction.
Most welcome are the luminous white Jeanne d'Arc, which have swan-like petals with a tuft of egg-yolk-orange stamens. Others include Orange Monarch, a deep saffron and mauve, and a few Pickwick, the palest lilac with a delicate feathering of mauve. Common varieties, but none the worse for it.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“But there, climbing up the whitewashed brick walls of the garage, is the rose of my dreams, a rose so utterly charming, so delicate and fleeting that I can forgive him his screeching reds and wishy-washy purples. It is rarely without a flower, its petals open wide, in shades of cream, faded fawn and soft pink, and here and there a crimson petal or two. Each summer it is as if a hundred butterflies have come to rest on the wall, baking in the late-afternoon sun. (This rose, chinensis Mutabilis, is to this day my favorite.)”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Petals the color of butter, primroses and farmhouse Caerphilly. Deep egg yolk and elephant's tusk. Others of piercing marigold, honey and Dutch orange. Trumpets of turmeric, saffron and Sienese alleyways. The narcissi I am planting have petals, coronas and stamens in all the colors of spring. The colors of a child's hand-made Easter card.
The single narcissi are those I cherish most, as much for their scent as their simple, uncluttered form. Many are placed singly in small, chipped terracotta pots. They will sit snugly between larger terracotta pans of Thalia, miniature scented daffodils the color of buttermilk, and Jetfire with its orange trumpet. There will be a deep pot of Paperwhites and the scrunched creamy-orange Erlicheer. I'm digging in Avalanche with its tangerine fairy cups and Chinese Sacred Lily, which I fear I have acquired for its name alone. My plan is for a zinc table of spring yellows in all the colors of milk on its journey to cheese.
Narcissi, their petals and their scent, carry the spirit of Easter. Planting them on a warm afternoon in November is something of an act of hope. The belief that spring will come once again, and that I will be around to enjoy it. If not, then perhaps someone else will.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts