Nick Frost’s new book starts with a recipe for beef stroganoff in his mum’s handwriting that he discovered long after she died. That recollection competes with a memory of his dad’s Sunday lunch, his special way with gravy (involving a can of McEwan’s Export). Also in there is his Welsh auntie’s take on cawl soup, which he now makes for his own three kids; and his trademark “pies in a bowl”, which was a staple of the time he shared a flat with his eternal friend and collaborator Simon Pegg. Though cooking has always been something like therapy for Frost, it was only when a publisher asked him to write a cookbook that he realised that the story of his life was there in the – 300 or so – dishes he could make. Frost’s childhood had been derailed by his father’s bankruptcy and his mother’s alcoholism; the recipes are the good part of his memories of them.
The actor, now 51, has covered some of that territory before in his 2015 memoir, Truths, Half Truths and Little White Lies, which told of his chaotic life before he made the films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz with Pegg, before they became first cultishly and then Hollywood famous. That book closed with him getting his break on TV in the sitcom Spaced and – characteristically at the time – blowing the nine grand he made on drink and drugs. This one, which takes in fatherhood, his first marriage and his current long-term relationship, provides something of a more reliable happy ending.
Frost moves easily between fantastic comedy and blunt reality. “When I’m writing I’m always trying to be honest,” he says. “A lot of people after reading the first book approached me to say: ‘Hey, I really appreciate you talking about, you know, mothers and addiction and grief.’ I felt very exposed – but there was that vibe of wanting my kids to know about how we got to where we are. This book was a similar thing. Plus you can learn how to make a good omelette.”
He is telling me about this history in the restaurant attached to Petersham Nurseries in south-west London, another kind of family affair, run with love by the Boglione clan since 2002. Frost has lived in nearby Richmond for a decade or more and this is a go-to place for special occasions. When we meet, he has just come back from Finland where he has been filming for six weeks. Sitting at a corner table in the crowded glasshouse, he is enjoying, he says, being back among lots of people, and with a menu in front of him. The food was all right in Finland, he suggests, but it was a bit solitary. “There were a lot of places where you drive for 20 minutes through the deepest forest you can ever imagine. And then you get to an amazing house next to a lake. And all it sells are homemade cinnamon buns and coffee. And then you drive back.”
That film was the last in a run of six that he has made since lockdown, none of which have yet been released. The cookbook began as a way of filling time in those schedules. It was, accidentally, Frost notes, food that got him going in the entertainment business. He left school at 16 without qualifications to try to support his mum and dad, and ended up at 21 working in a branch of the Mexican chain restaurant Chiquito’s on London’s North Circular. He was there for seven years, first as a waiter and then as a line cook. It was through the restaurant that he was introduced to Simon Pegg, whose girlfriend at the time also worked there. Pegg and Frost subsequently shared flats with each other (and also a bed for a while in a Morecambe and Wise kind of way), before successfully translating their men-behaving-hopelessly relationship first into Spaced and then into surreal film comedies, beginning with the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. The question Frost is always asked is what comes next for them.
“We talk a lot,” he says. “We are going to be together at the London film festival, and before that in Liverpool for a comic convention. We’re like: ‘Two days together! It’s gonna be amazing!’ I think one of the great things about the films we’ve made is that you got to see us age a bit as people. The characters have gotten older and more complicated. So even if it’s another 10 years, there will be that …”
The “complications” have included real-life struggles with drink and drugs. One step in that process for Frost was a diagnosis that identified a full English of neurodivergence: “ADHD, OCD, PTSD, dyslexia, anxiety disorders and a healthy slug of hypervigilance.”
“I was 47,” he says of that discovery. “And when I started looking into it, it explained so much of my behaviour. I tried to be medicated for the first couple of years. But knowing that I had essentially a bottle of methamphetamine in my house was difficult for the addict in me. I’d be thinking, what would happen if I took 10 of these in one go? And then, you know, I’d also had 47 years of figuring out how to cope with it myself, and mostly done OK, so I went back to that.”
He has, he says, reached the point where he can usually laugh at his neuroses, even if he can’t conquer them. “I was staying in this hotel in Finland,” he says, by way of example. “The first day you go down for breakfast. Your ADHD says, ‘OK. This is good.’ There is a juice machine. Then coffee. And I can queue up to get little pancakes; three of those with strawberry jam. Two weeks in, I went down for breakfast and they had fucking changed it all! Instead of pancakes it was carrot cake – which is clearly something for teatime. I stood for 10 minutes in the middle of the room just staring. And even when I got something on my plate I was thinking round and round and round: ‘Why would they do that?’ That seems weird saying it now. But to an ADHD brain it does not seem weird at all.”
Frost had always been aware of compulsive tendencies, needing to eat the same lunch every day and so on, but it steadily got worse in his 40s “I think there was a loneliness in me,” he says. “I’d lost all my family. And you get to a point in your life where your friends get married and have children, and you’re left again. There’s part of me then that just wants to dig in and build a wall. And it just becomes a bigger and a bigger thing until you become an awfully sad, mentally ill human being.”
One of his ways out of that was into the kitchen. His book details his insomniac nights of focaccia making and cathartic chopping habits. “It’s never really frowned upon that you spent four hours in the kitchen on your own,” he says. “Because you produced this lovely thing at the end of it. We have a nice big table and when I’m not working there are always people around and I cook for everyone every day.”
In his efforts to get a handle on the destructive elements of his personality, the toughest battle has been with binge eating. In the past year, he says, he’s managed to lose about 100lb of weight, just by cutting out, day by day, those habits that would see him “secretly go and eat the top tier of a wedding cake or something”.
He knows when it started. “As a 51-year-old man I can certainly see myself as an eight-year-old – in the middle of my parents going mental at one another or both asleep drunk on the couch – opening the fridge, loving that secrecy, that James Bondness. I kept doing that. I’m never not going to eat a cinnamon bun. But I have stopped that secret eating.”
We’ve cleared our plates by now and it’s time for him to collect his youngest son from nursery. One of the themes of his book, I suggest, is his inability to take any pleasure in his success, partly for fear it is all going to explode. Is he getting any better at that?
“It’s funny,” he says. “If you walked into my house, you’d have no idea what I did for a living. There’s no mementos. But I have just recently started to let myself think: ‘You’ve written two books, you’ve got three great children, you’ve made some films.’” And, as he says, “no one taught me to do any of that” – it’s a recipe he made up himself.
A Slice of Fried Gold by Nick Frost (Bonnier Books Ltd, £22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
