Take one cake… Nigel Slater’s recipe for a festive fragrance

Some people judge others by their shoes. Some, by their eyes. For Nigel Slater, it’s all about scent. “I always remember what people smell like – if they’ve got a particular fragrance on, or they haven’t. It tends to stay with me,” says the food writer. 

We’re sitting in the tranquil drawing room of his late-Georgian house in north London. If the atmosphere is rarefied, the smell of freshly baked chocolate and spiced ginger cake puts me at ease. Slater carefully pours out lemon-infused Sencha green tea into two Japanese ceramic cups on a weathered leather tray. “I tend to sniff everything,” he continues. “When I’m in clothes shops, I sniff and if something doesn’t smell right, I won’t buy it.”

It’s a suitably olfactory juncture at which to discuss A Feast, his collaboration with Perfumer H, the boutique perfumery founded in 2015 by Lyn Harris. Comprising the loose-leaf tea we are drinking (created with Mayfair’s Postcard Teas), incense rolled by hand in Kyoto, soap made in Lancashire and a scented candle in a stormy-blue handblown glass jar, the collection is Slater’s first venture into products. “I’m the least commercial person in the world,” he says with a slight shudder. You won’t catch him shilling frying pans or lamb-and-mint-sauce-flavoured crisps. “Nigella got it right, but most people don’t.” He made an exception for Harris, a “kindred spirit”, because he loved her perfumes. “What Lyn does is an intimate part of my life. It’s on your skin, your clothes, it’s everywhere.”

Slater met Harris when she walked into Postcard Teas, their shared haunt, one afternoon in 2014. He had worn her fragrances – Figue Amère from her first venture, Miller Harris, and later Perfumer H’s Moss, Angelica, Frankincense and Ink – for years. “[Mass-market perfume] is about selling you a dream, that you’re going to live a different life because you’ve bought this bottle. With Lyn, there’s more integrity – to the ingredients, to the way it’s made.” He was mortified to be holding a bag from Santa Maria Novella. “She said, ‘We love Santa Maria Novella.’ I liked her immediately,” he recalls.

What Lyn does is an intimate part of my life

The pair quickly became friends. “We have a really special relationship,” says Harris, when we meet at Perfumer H’s Clifford Street shop. Slater visits regularly. “I’ve let him into my world a lot over the years,” she continues. “He’s smelt raw materials, I’ll give him something and he’ll say, ‘God, I’ll try that.’ I know how my materials should work, I’m explorative, I have a different way of looking at my palate. He’s like that as a cook. He’s quite poetic – and I’m quite poetic.”  

Readers of Toast, Slater’s surprisingly touching memoir about his repressed 1960s boyhood, will know that scent plays an outsize role in Slater’s trajectory to star cook. “Smell was like a key turning in a lock,” he says. His first culinary memory is an olfactory one: the syrupy aroma of his mother’s oat flapjacks as he arrived home from school one snowy winter’s day. “If I had to name my half-dozen favourite smells, those flapjacks baking would be at the absolute top,” he says.

While his classmates were reading football comics, teenaged Slater was reading Vogue. That’s how he came across an advertisement for Dior’s Eau Sauvage, saving up his pocket money to buy a rippled-glass bottle. Today, he uses scent to reset. Every afternoon, when he has finished writing his Observer column (31 years and counting) or completed a chapter of a book (he has written 18), he either steps into his jasmine- and rose-scented garden (“It’s like walking straight into a perfume shop!”) or lights incense.

The latter is one of many “empty-headed moments to cherish”, along with ironing pillowcases and, uh, dusting his Edmund de Waal ceramic installation – that comprises what he calls “a feast”, detailed in his latest book, A Thousand Feasts. “It is a very special moment when you’re alone, you light some incense, and you sit very quietly with it, and just watch the smoke. For me, it’s quite replenishing and refreshing.” The only thing threatening his peace are his hyperactive smoke detectors. His system is directly linked to the fire brigade, who’ve turned up six times – all false alarms. 

The rich odour of Slater’s house, with its York stone floors, John Pawson steel kitchen and horsehair blinds, directly inspired Harris. She visited on a filthy January day for tea, then went home and immediately wrote the formula for A Feast. “I wanted to capture this wonderful ginger cake he’d developed with orange and cinnamon. But then I brought in his home atmosphere: the wood, the books,” she recalls. “He’s very ordered and meticulous. Everything has to be quite so: his desk, his ink, his pen. I tried to incorporate that [to create a] nostalgic smell.” 

The resulting candle is a smoky, sensual mix of Slater’s favourite notes: a birch tar base with hints of cedar and sandalwood, as well as cloves, neroli, cinnamon, cardamom and juniper wood. He also commissioned potter Florian Gadsby to create a limited number of rectangular soap dishes with a custom lichen-coloured glaze, to be sold with the soap. The custom labels are navy blue – his favourite colour.  

As a parting gift, Harris reformulated Slater’s beloved Ink. The limited-edition “Ink Rewritten” eau de parfum has a new note of juniper wood, which has in turn inspired his cooking: Slater’s added juniper to the cake he’s made for me. “I wasn’t sure about it, because normally you wouldn’t put juniper in sweet things. But I wanted to.” It lends a melancholic depth to a festive bake that feels right for Christmas, one of his favourite times of the year, when he will spend a whole day decorating his tree with vintage glass baubles collected from markets in Vienna, Antwerp and Stockholm.

Is this the start of a bigger collaboration? “Since Toast, the play, I haven’t done anything that has excited me so much as this,” says Slater. He takes a bottle of Ink Rewritten out of his pocket. “I carry it around,” he smiles. “I want to know what’s going on in the world, but it’s all quite depressing now. Where things are going, God only knows. You need to hold onto good things.”