Toast by Nigel Slater (Fourth Estate, £16.99)

THE Observer's celebrated food columnist had a pretty miserable upbringing, especially his early teenage years in Worcestershire.

Moving to a house on top of Ankerdine Hill at Knightwick, and a pupil at The Chantry, Martley, he wasn't allowed to take friends to the home he and his father shared with their obsessive cleaner "auntie Joan".

For entertainment he wandered the local woodlands, spied on courting couples at night when he took the dog for a walk and then found his raison d'etre in the kitchens of the Talbot Hotel at the bottom of the road.

When his father told him he was going to marry auntie Joan "because she is like mummy", Slater's misery was complete.

He writes: "I want to tell him that there is no one on earth less like mummy"... but of course he doesn't and the nuptials went ahead with a reception at The Hundred House, Great Whitley (sic).

I oh-so desperately want to believe that every single word Slater has written in Toast is true, because it is all highly entertaining stuff and anyway, I've already begun recounting the anecdotes.

The book is a slice of his life between the ages of nine and 18.

Growing up in the posher part of Wolverhampton with a mum who considered Butterscotch Angel Delight as the ultimate pudding, a terrifying dad who was likely "to go crack at any time" and deaf aunt Fanny, it is a richly comic background that is not without its tragedies.

There is pervy uncle Reg, Josh the decidedly suspect gardener, and mum's asthma which you just know is going to bring about her inevitable demise.

In his rigidly formal 50s and 60s upbringing, Slater's interest in food developed from watching his mother and her limited culinary expertise in a kitchen stocked with see-through Pyrex.

Each story is named after an item of food: Tinned Beans and Sausage, Blackcurrant Pie, Tapioca...

For the funniest read Spaghetti Bolognese, Walnut Whip 1 and Walnut Whip 2; for the most poignant: Smoked Haddock and Tinned Raspberries.

After his mother's death, just before Slater's 10th birthday, he writes ominously: "Dad brought Mrs Potter to the house today. She smiled at me and said we both looked as if we needed fattening up."

He hints that it was her over-indulgence that brought about his father's death (he was buried in Suckley churchyard), but by then Slater was in a foodie heaven of his own.

Formal cookery classes at school led to the part-time job at The Talbot, catering college and it's not too difficult to decipher the identity of the "grand hotel" just outside Worcester, where Slater was first properly employed.

Where, he claims, empty bottles of Malvern Water were filled from the cold tap, white bread was used to fill up the trifle and "sex was as much on tap as Watneys Red Barrel".

And a certain men's boutique in Worcester has a mention too for its "exotic" owner and rumoured two-way mirror in the changing rooms.

The sexual ambivalence that has surrounded Slater through his years in the public eye remains in tact. Though his father, fearing his son would grow up to be a "nancy boy", always tried to force feed him eggs and Brazil nut toffee.

Why Toast? Burned though it always was, it's an enduring memory of mornings with his mother.

And as Slater says: "It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you."

David Chapman