Readers' Award

1 Toast By Nigel Slater

2 The River Cottage Meat Book By Hugh Fearnleywhittingstall

3 The Moro Cookbook By Sam And Sam Clark

1 Writing doesn't come easily to me. Whenever I get writer's block I get out one of Nigel's recipe books and just immerse myself in it. He has a unique way of creating a mood around food, he writes about tastes so well. I don't know if he finds writing easy, I've never asked him, but he sure is a pleasure to read. I loved Toast. I read it on the train from Cornwall to London and I couldn't put it down. I thought it was brilliant how he remembered what it was like to be an eight year old and how he recounted all these very painful things in his childhood through food: there was such unhappiness in there - the childish misapprehension that his mother was pregnant but actually she was dying, the arrival of his new stepmother - and yet the book was also very funny and very coarse in places too. It would make a brilliant film along the lines of High Fidelity.

I really envy his recall of detail. He was spot on with how hotel toast used to be, all soft and chewy, it brought back so many foods I'd forgotten about. I don't share his enthusiam for those horrible stripey marshmallows, but I do share his love of sauces. My parents were quite interested in food - they read Elizabeth David - so I think we ate a little more imaginatively than Nigel did. However, we weren't allowed sauces at home so naturally at school I gorged on them - tomato ketchup, brown sauce and my particular favourite, Daddies. I also still have a passion for bananas in custard.

His recall of food in the 60s and 70s is spot on. When we fi rst moved into the Seafood restaurant in Padstow in the early 70s the freezers were full off boilin- the-bag duck in orange sauce, which is what the punters were being served when it was a nightclub.