Real Cooking Nigel Slater

Real Cooking Nigel Slater

Published by Michael Joseph, 1997 (Hardback)

Designed by uncredited

Photographs by Georgia Glynn Smith

Real Cooking is Nigel Slater’s fifth book, it is aimed at the home cook with simple, clear recipes and enlightening commentaries by the author. The book is based on a simple grid with some elements (the chapter openings for example, breaking out of the grid) Photographs are the dominant element and represent a shift to the visual from his previous book, Real Good Foodwhich is predominantly text-based. There are three photographs of the author and details of his hands making food; at this stage, although the author had achieved fame as the Good Food Awards Media Personality of the Year, he was primarily known as a journalist, known better for his words than his face.

Typographically, the book is more sophisticated and consistent than Real Good Food: Baskerville is used throughout in different sizes with a condensed light grotesque for recipe titles, ingredients and running feet. As with Real Good Food Baskerville has perhaps been chosen because if its schoolbook authority and the warmth that it projects, particularly at larger point sizes. The grid is broken up with the positioning of photographs which, although are lined up to the grid, are placed in an almost intuitive manner creating an informal, playful atmosphere that reflects Nigel Slater’s ideas about cooking and eating.

As with Real Good Food and other commercial books, the cover has a different identity from the interior. Covers are often updated with the content remaining the same: this is fairly common with novels, particularly when a novel is turned into a film, the cover is changed to show a scene from the film. In Nigel Slater’s case, it appears that there have been three different covers for Real Cooking: the second, published in 1999, shows Nigel Slater eating goat’s cheese on sour dough toast while the most recent, published in 2006, shows a sketchy illustration of kitchen equipment and ingredients hanging from a rack. This is the opposite of what Jost Hochuli calls ‘total design’, a unified plan that treats jacket and the interior as one to create an overall impression. I will do some further research to see if the interior of the new editions has been updated as well as the covers.

Front Cover

The cover shows a photograph, by Georgia Glynn Smith, of a close-up of baked apples. The photograph is shown at full bleed with an extra bold sans-serif type printed over the top. The author’s name in title case takes up the width of the book and is reversed out of the photograph; the title of the book, in titlecase and in bold italic sans-serif, is placed at much smaller size and is printed over the top of the photograph in a blue-grey. There are no other elements on the front cover.

The photograph shows the baked apples very close up and with a shallow depth of field - the parts of the photograph that are in focus are the shine on the skin of the apple and the golden flesh within; the edge of the baking dish - with burnt-on bits - is just visible. As with Slater’s Real Good Food, the photograph reinforces the idea of ‘real food’ by presenting food that is the opposite of complicated food, positioning the book in the domestic sphere.

The dominant element on the cover is the photograph of the baked apple and the author’s name; the title of the book is third in the hierarchy of cover elements. The dominant colours are warm yellows, oranges and browns with a smattering of rich blacks.

Inside Pages

The book is 19 cm by 24.5 cm and is printed in full colour on white coated paper. The book is divided into chapters, each dealing with different kinds of food: fish, meat, vegetables etc. The book is set in Baskerville. Each chapter has an opening section that uses Baskerville at a larger point size than in the rest of the book, justified in a single column with a chapter heading in larger Baskerville printed in grey. Following the opening section are the commentary and recipes - these are set in Baskerville but use a different layout and margins: a two column grid with a wide central column for the method and commentary and a narrower column on the outside for ingredients which are set in a light condensed sans-serif. Titles and running feet are set in the same light condensed grotesque with page numbers at the foot, aligned to the outside of the wider column, set in Baskerville.

Full colour photographs, concentrating - with extreme close-ups - on the food with little or no background are used throughout the book. The photographs were taken by Georgia Glynn Smith, according to Nigel Slater: “they are totally natural - not set up or contrived in the typical way of food photographs - Georgia simply followed me around my home kitchen taking her photographs while I cooked.” Some images are presented as full page, full bleed, others are fitted at a smaller size within the grid of the page. Chapter openings use full page black and white photographs at full bleed, taken in a similar manner, with large headings reversed out in white. Occasional black and white photographs at full page, full bleed, punctuate the book.

The photographs are the dominant element in the book. Not every recipe in the book has a corresponding photograph while some recipes are presented with several images. The dominant colours in the photographs are golden ochres, oranges, browns, reds and rich blacks with occasional sprinklings of green. Despite Slater’s claims for ‘naturalness’ the photographs look almost hyperreal with saturated colours and an almost Photoshopped shine on some of the ingredients, the close-ups - and sometimes unusual camera angles - adding to this unreal effect. Often there are pairings of photographs of before and after - cooked and uncooked ingredients - adding to the effect that this is food that can be cooked at home, by anyone.