When I used to eat for a living my favourite food was toast.
I would come home from one of those bastions of Michelin-starred all-male dining like Orrery or Lindsay house, having eaten everything from the canapes to the petit fours, and at 1:00am find myself sitting alone in the kitchen while the rest of the house slept, eating Mother's Pride.
Of course, it had nothing to do with hunger and a lot to do with alcohol. But though the meal I had was often, though not always, delicious (I reviewed an awful lot of stinkers who have since gone in to the great waste disposal of life), the food was all so rarefied and pretty - not to mention pretty small portioned. It was all little tastes of this and morsels of that; the teeny, tiny amuse bouche, invariably in a shot glass filled with a foam or cappuccino, or sometimes even spume (never have people paid so much money for so much whipped air), followed by the main course with vegetables as a garnish, pre-dessert and proper dessert and then the extra courses that the chef would sometimes send out in between. It was an embarrassment of rich food but still, at the end of the evening, all I really wanted was a reassuringly un-complex carbohydrate - sliced bread with Lurpak, salty and sweet, the butter melting into puddles and dripping on to the plate - familiar and honest and real.
Sometimes I think that quality publishing isn't so different from dining out in fine restaurants. It's easy to get spoiled by a diet fat on words and heavy on plot where every day is another long, long Tasting Menu with a matched wine for each course until you're drunk on books and can't tell any more what you're reading. It's hardly surprising that publishers and agents say they give up if a manuscript doesn't interest them after only a few pages. Everybody wants something that wakes them out of the drunken stupor.
And I guess we all have our own version of toast..
One of the Indians in the office was saying that she didn't think that there were many women who didn't secretly enjoy a Marian Keyes on the beach, but that doesn't tick the toast box for me. Nor does Jane genius but dreary Austin (I know, I know, but I'm not made like other women), For comfort reading I want crime - somebody on a slab after a grizzly murder, a mystery, some tension, or a stalker with a telephoto lens. When I was younger I admit, albeit reluctantly, that before being married to an academic shamed me out of them, I was a fan of the 80s bonkbuster. A long-ago sad weekend in Paris was only bearable because of a tattered paperback I found in the hotel by Jilly Cooper, whose books I had previously disdained - but sometimes you cling to stereotypes and girls called Fanella like a lifeline, or a pair of reigns and a riding crop in this case.
When not gorging on airport murders, what I usually want from a book is a parallel life that sucks me in and lets me be someone else for a while; not the woman stuck in a traffic jam on Ladbroke Grove but a teenage hooker in Vegas, an anthropologist in Thailand, a Ukrainian immigrant in Canada in the 1950s, or a murderous taxi driver. It's a chance to act without learning lines. A way to travel without leaving your head. A vicarious experience in a room where all the doors may be locked.
White Tiger was the first book I read when I started working here and that's certainly not toast. There's nothing cosy about Aravind's story. It grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the last page. We've recently bought another two, very different, but equally arresting books: the first, Cooking Dirty about the restaurant business, is gritty, laconic and Raymond-Carving knife-sharp, while the second , a novel called Thief has completely split our mostly female office - Indians and Chiefs alike. It's a very explicit and coolly self-possessed story of a woman which touches on some pretty taboo subjects and who some of us identified with, fairly uncomfortably, while others recoiled and wouldn't as much as sit down on her vacated bar stool. I was firmly in the first category and loved it. It's not unctuous sauces and creamy mash with truffle oil - it's wasabi and a vodka martini at Duke's Hotel Bar followed by the Heimlich Manoeuvre - something that stops you getting jaded and longing for a slice of toast....
Though have two of those martinis and all bets are off, and after three you can't focus your eyes anyway.
