British Books

The title is a quote from Shaun of the Dead — meaning something that can’t be bettered, that is as good as it gets — and it is not a celebrity memoir. It is a cookbook. But Delia it is not.

“I thought, ‘What if Hunter S Thompson wrote a cookbook?’ and went from there,” Frost says, which isn’t a bad way to describe it, but doesn’t fully capture how sweet and funny and weird it is, as well as genuinely insightful about cooking.

Frost has been cooking for friends since he and Pegg were flatmates. When I tell him that I’ve heard from multiple sources what a brilliant cook he is, he dismisses the compliment and says cooking is just another symptom of his people-pleasing tendencies and his ADHD (the slicing and dicing soothes him) and, really, it’s just a way for him to hide in the kitchen when people come over. “I feel that maybe cooking is an apology sometimes: ‘Sorry I’m like this,’ ” he writes in the book.

Maybe it is all of that, but I also feel he is possibly pathologising one of the few healthy hobbies he has had for the past 20 years. The recipes are all hearty but healthy and made for sharing: fish pie, Sunday roast, curries — the opposite of furtively bingeing on chocolate bars in a loo. It is also, clearly, a way to give his children the kind of nourishment that perhaps he and his siblings didn’t always have. The food is almost by the bye because this is a cookbook that is really about the writing, and the writing is very funny. Yes, he references what he has been through recently, and yes, he writes about his neuroses. But there are also pages of what he calls his “flights of fancy” that can take you from a ragu recipe straight into the romantic life story of a fictional Italian nonna before, without so much as a pause, hurling you into how to make gnocchi.

“I just feel that the book can be weird. I’m allowed to be weird,” he says. In a section on whether it’s worth making your own pastry or not, Frost writes: “If I like my guests enough, maybe I’ll go that extra mile, but usually I want them in and out so me and my lunacy can settle in for the night editing photos of dead mice I find and sitting them in a selection of tiny chairs I own. (When you put a beautiful dead mouse in a tiny reproduction of the classic Karuselli chair, they end up looking like 1960s Bond villains.) Turn your oven up to 180C ”

Frost has always been good at finding the humour in his anxiety and anger, so much so that some friends didn’t realise how bad they were. In his recipe for children’s porridge he segues to an anecdote about when he and Joe Cornish — who directed Frost in the sci-fi comedy Attack the Block — went to Japan on a press trip for the film. When he found out his bedroom was on the 50th floor of the hotel he thought his “heart would burst” and immediately checked out, petrified.

Cornish, when I speak to him, says what he remembers about working with Frost is “how he’s so confident and funny, but also so bullish and vulnerable”. “He was the big star on Attack the Block because all the kids in it were first-timers. Nick had that experience when he was on Spaced, because he’s not a trained actor and was inveigled into Spaced by Simon. So he was really sweet with the kids, teaching them tricks to memorise their lines.”