The Kitchen Diaries Nigel Slater
Published by Fourth Estate, 2005 (Hardback)
Designed by Sam Blok
Photographs by Jonathan Lovekin
The Kitchen Diaries is Nigel Slater’s eighth book, written as a diary, it is aimed at the home cook with seasonal and simple recipes with commentaries by the author. The book is based on a simple grid with seemingly simple typography - using one typeface, Baskerville, only - and layout. It is printed on uncoated paper which feels good to the touch, this tactile quality is heightened by the cover details. Photographs and text are in balance - each has equal hierarchical importance.
Compared to Real Good Food and Real Cooking, The Kitchen Diaries is unique in that the cover and the interior share a common design identity, the book was designed as a whole rather than an inside section with separate cover. The paperback version, published in 2007, has an updated cover but it still shares an identity with the hardback edition and the inside of the book: Baskerville is used with the author’s name being the dominant element and the title of the book coming second. The text is printed over a photograph - that does not appear in the book - of a table set for lunch that was obviously from the same session as the Christmas Day photograph. This has a remarkably different feel to the original hardback edition - the dominant colours being whites, greys, blacks and muted browns.
Front Cover
The book has a lavishly produced and complex cover: it is a hardback, covered in black book cloth with a half-image wrap covering over just over two thirds of the front and back. The exposed cloth at the spine and at the margin is blocked in sliver foil with Nigel Slater’s name arranged vertically with the title of the book in much smaller text at the foot. The author’s name is clearly the dominant element. The image wrap shows a photograph, by Jonathan Lovekin, of a close-up of rustic-looking apples, slightly irregular in shape and size. The photograph is shown at full bleed on three sides and is finished with a matt laminate, creating a contrast of textures with the book cloth. Other elements include head and tailbands and a ribbon book marker in a colour that matches the pale green colour used on the back cover.
The photograph shows the apples in close up complete with fresh-looking apple tree leaves suggesting that these apples have been freshly picked - this is somewhat contradicted by the darkness of the image suggesting not the gold of autumn but the half-light of winter. The dominant colours are dark reds, rich greens and shadowy blacks. The book stands in contrast to Real Good Food and Real Cooking where the dominant colours are warm oranges, browns and yellows.
Inside Pages
The book is 17 cm by 24 cm and is printed in full colour on cream uncoated paper which is identified in the colophon as "Munken Pure 130gsm." The book is divided into sections, each dealing with a month of the year and the seasonal foods of that time. ‘A Note on the Type’ tells us that “This book is set in Berthold Baskerville 10.5/12.5. The typeface was originally designed by John Baskerville (1706-1775) in the 1750s.” This note and the note that follows about the paper stock suggests that the book is aimed, not only at cooks, but at visually aware readers interested in the minutiae of design. Each section opens with a double page spread with a full bleed photograph on the left and a list of recipes on the right set in bold Baskerville with the name of the month set in larger bold Baskerville arranged vertically. These pages are perhaps the least satisfying in the book: the photographs of flowers and plants, presumably taken in Slater’s garden, are too obvious signifiers of the seasons and the typography, compared to the rest of the book is unresolved with the list of recipes with no page references serving no real purpose.
The rest of the book is much more resolved and is based on a simple symmetrical layout of two columns: a wide column for diary entries and recipes and a narrower column on the outside for dates and edited highlights from the diary. The text is set in Baskerville in one size with bold Baskerville used in the outside column and for the titles of the recipes. Photographs are placed throughout at a consistent size within the margins of the page. This is a design that is simple but refined and, for the reader, easy to navigate (aside from the list of recipes in the opening sections).
The photographs were taken by Jonathan Lovekin and, in common with Slater’s other books are taken in a similar style: close-up, little or no backgrounds, saturated colours and with rough and burnt edges on the food; a photograph of roasted butternut squash could have been taken form the same session as the photograph of squash on the cover of Real Cooking published ten years before. Interestingly, the entry for Christmas Day shows a photograph of a room with a table set for six people - an interior detail that does not often appear in Slater’s books.
In this book the photographs and the text share equal billing: this is a book for reading as well as for looking at. The recipes are very simply laid out and although, arguably, they are difficult to consult whilst cooking, Slater’s recipes are generally simple enough to understand after a single reading. If you are at all familiar with Slater’s recipes then it is easy to see that there is an element of recycling going on - the roasted butternut squash is a good example - I would argue that the tone of this book is informal and conversational, reflected in the simplicity of the design. Imposing a complicated recipe hierarchy and structure in this book would not work: his recipes are passed on like a conversation with a friend.