Although Nigel Slater has written well over a dozen cookbooks, this is not one. Which is fine. And while he calls A Thousand Feasts “a memoir of sorts,” it is more like a kaleidoscope of glimpses into pleasures discovered and taken around the world.  Which is much more than fine.

Slater makes no effort to be linear and, to be fair, a linear account would obscure the transient nature of the joys he celebrates. It doesn’t matter what temporal relationship a camping trip in Ireland has to a Nowruz celebration in Iran. The necessary time to properly whip butter and sugar for a cake, the patina on daily use tableware, the snow falling on the back garden; none of these need to be about each other.

The loosely thematic chapters with titles like “With spoon in hand,” and “Through the garden gate,” might help you find a piece you especially want to reread, but our suggestion is to open at random rather than tearing through the book from cover to cover.  

Think of A Thousand Feasts as a seasoning rather than a main course and let it sit where you can find it when you need to remember that small pleasures are worthy ones.

Hardcover.