"The grace of understatement"

Soon, we will begin our one book club.  The book I have chosen is: Nigel Slater - a year of good eating.   I always suggest one reads the introduction to every book they purchase.  You can learn a lot about the writer, and this often encourages you to take the book into your kitchen even more than you might have expected from your first flirtation.

From this book, I have chosen these paragraphs from Nigel's introduction to share with you. 

"With this book comes something of a plea for both good food and a love of cooking to be just part and parcel of our everyday lives.  Thoughtful, considered, always delicious, but something to be quietly enjoyed rather than put on a pedestal. (The very notion of someone being a 'foodie' makes me shudder).

I worry that the competitive element currently prevalent in food and cooking is scaring people, particularly new cooks, away from getting stuck in.  There is, I believe, too much pressure on us to 'perform', to reach for perfection, instead of simply treating the art of making something to eat as the lifelong joy it should be.

I like to think I have an attitude to cooking and eating built on foundations of good taste and pleasure rather than of veneration and worship.  Yes, I like eating the good stuff and I cook from scratch pretty much every day of my life, but I can't help thinking good food should be something we take in our stride, a life-enriching punctuation to our day, rather than something to be fetishised.  And if I read once more that someone is a 'passionate cook' I think I'll eat my other gloves."