She’s the thinking man’s sex symbol – an Oxford graduate who’s written four books, performs culinary miracles and looks fetching in the process – provocatively sucking whipped cream off a finger, her curves wrapped in Scottish cashmere.
She’s the modern woman’s domestic goddess – balancing home life with work, making kitchen chores look easy, and taking unabashed pleasure in high-calorie comfort foods that would make a Size Zero run screaming in the opposite direction.
She’s Nigella Lawson, 46, one of Britain’s most influential food writers turned television cooks, whose best-selling cookbooks have spawned three TV series. The latest is Nigella Feasts, which will premiere on Discovery Travel & Living Channel on Wednesday, Dec. 20, at 8 p.m.
Lawson studied Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford University before becoming a journalist, rising to deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times. She critiqued restaurants for The Spectator, became a freelance writer for publications like Gourmet and Bon Appetit, and even wrote a food column for Vogue.
"When I used to go into the (Vogue office) building, they used to look at me and think, ‘That’s what I would look like if I ate,’" laughs Nigella.
Not a fashionista at heart, Lawson is most comfortable in her now-famous twinsets and cardigans by Brora and dresses by Ghost. When she travels, she would rather pack one black dress and five cardis in different colors, "so it’s a very easy way of looking like you’re wearing something different without having to buy five dresses."
She wrote her first book in 1998, How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food, which met with critical acclaim thanks to her vivid yet folksy writing style. How to Eat introduced Nigella’s relaxed attitude to food and eating, and it clicked with women everywhere who didn’t feel they measured up to the "domestic goddess" ideal foisted upon them. The book was also the basis for her first series, Nigella Bites.
In 2000, she resurrected the commonly misunderstood art of baking with another best-seller titled How to be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking, which won her Author of the Year at the British Book Awards.
"It was kind of an ironic title," claims Nigella. "Everyone seems to think it’s hard to make a cake – and no need to disillusion them – but it doesn’t take more than 25 minutes to make and bake a tray of muffins or a sponge layer cake, and the returns are high."
Her next series and book was Forever Summer, both geared at prolonging the feeling of warm, lazy summer days throughout the dark nights of winter.
In 2003, Lawson married the infamous art lover and collector Charles Saatchi, and a year later published Feast, on which her third and latest series, Nigella Feasts, is based. The new series will have themed episodes like "Let Them Eat Chocolate," with five recipes designed to sate even the most diehard chocoholic; "Solitary Eating," a lesson on how to treat yourself right with roast lamb for one; and "Kiddie Feasts," where Nigella gets picky eaters to succumb to Ritzy Chicken Nuggets and Slime Soup. (Lawson has had ample practice with her two children, Cosima and Bruno, the offspring of her first marriage to the late broadcast journalist John Diamond.)
Part of her homespun appeal is that Lawson is not a trained chef and has never had any pretensions about being one. She shoots all her shows in her London house – in her actual home kitchen. The only difference in Feasts is that now Nigella’s sister lives in the house, and the kitchen was given a fresh coat of paint.
"I’m not a domestic goddess anywhere," she admits. I’m very messy, I’m not very good at housekeeping. But yes, I do cook a lot at home. Cooking is what I do."
A rabid cookbook collector, Nigella describes a room in her house "that must be three walls of 14-foot-by-12-foot high" filled with tomes on gastronomy, "and I’ve still got piles on the floor."
Heedless of her overflowing library, Nigella asked me for some good Filipino recipes online. When I couldn’t come up with any off the top of my head, she asked for a Filipino cookbook, which I’ve since mailed and she has since received and loved, with many sincere thanks.
Who knows, Nigella might do an episode on Asian flavors in the future, and include our very own adobo or sinigang. In the meantime, stay tuned to Nigella Feasts, and read the excerpts below of the phone interview I did with her:
How is your new show Nigella Feasts different from your first one, Nigella Bites?
NIGELLA LAWSON: To be honest, it’s not terribly different, because it’s me. I don’t have an act, I don’t have a script, I don’t have an agenda – it’s just me in my kitchen. I suppose it’s almost like a development or an intensification. I’ve just taken things a bit further.
I believe that you don’t need to be a chef to cook. That if you love food, your life will be better and these are the recipes that I’ve got that I think will make your life simpler and you’ll like cooking and you’ll do it again.
In your opinion, what makes a meal a feast?
It’s really about deciding to make the most of everything. So even if, in the end, you’ve just got a bowl of soup and bread to eat with it, if you make that soup lovingly and present it with love and sit down and really determine to enjoy it and help other people enjoy it, it’s a feast. I think it’s a lot about attitude and also about deciding to maximize what you’ve got, rather than think, "Oh, do you know what, I think I’ll just do lots and lots of little things, because I can’t get that the way I want."
So I think it really doesn’t have to be an expensive meal and it doesn’t have to be a fancy meal. It just has to be that everything has to be as good as you can get it. But I think it’s so much about enjoyment, so that a great meal that’s cooked and served in a mood of stress is less of a feast than something that you really relish. I think allowing yourself to enjoy the eating is very important.
If you wanted to cook to impress a man, what would you prepare?
I don’t think I’ve ever tried to impress someone, but I do think men like quite simple foods, generally. I would always cook something like roast chicken. That’s what men… as far as I can see, they like food that is much more akin to the food they ate in childhood than women do often, I think.
In this age of Size Zeros and eating disorders, what is the right attitude to have towards food?
I think it’s incredibly difficult for women to have the right attitude towards food, because most women are trying to be so much leaner than nature intended them to be, so it’s a constant struggle. So I think it must make them feel obsessed with food, but obsessed in a way that is a negative thing, rather than a positive thing, because I’m certainly obsessed with food, but it’s not like a constant fear.
When I first started reviewing restaurants years ago, before I really did anything with food, I remember a girlfriend of mine saying to me about working with food, "So, is it going to be safe?" As if I was working with nuclear waste, because she thought that somehow, I would eat non-stop and it would be dangerous. Whereas it’s certainly true that when I used to work occasionally for Vogue, when I used to go into the building, which was not very often, they used to look at me and think, "How terrible."
But I think you have to have a bit of reason. No one wants to eat so much that they are huge and obese. But how can you go through your life if you think, "No, I can’t eat that, I can’t do that, because I won’t fit into my jeans"? I couldn’t be like that. But you probably have to make a decision. I always quite liked it when Elizabeth Hurley said, "You have to make a decision: Is it going to be the jeans or the cookie jar?"
And that’s probably right. And I would rather eat than wear fashionable clothes, but nevertheless within reason.
I do have a slight problem with portion control, which is that I don’t know how to apply it and one day I’ll learn, but I don’t have it yet. But I certainly don’t eat in between meals in excess, just sometimes. They say, "Everything in moderation, even moderation."
I think you have my ideal figure.
I’ve got far too much of it. I always say to the cameraman, "You’re only allowed to have my bottom on there if you’re out of focus." It is really extraordinary how teeny-tiny most people who are on television are.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried Filipino food. People say it tastes good, but it always looks brown, oily, and unappetizing. How can we present our cuisine in a more palatable way to foreigners?
I feel slightly that it’s very, very difficult to remind people that food isn’t about glamour photography. Everything can’t look picture-perfect. When I was cooking something on the program, I did say at one stage, "Look, I know this is brown. I know it doesn’t look great, but it’s not food for a photo opportunity, it’s food to eat."
I’m a great believer that if you put a bit of parsley on top of meat or those brown things or coriander or something, it does make it come to life, you know a bit of green on it. Sometimes I cook things that are brown, brown, brown, but they taste delicious.
Do you have any idols or mentors in the industry?
I don’t, really. Not out of, I suppose, anything other than, I think if you try to measure yourself against someone else, you’re not being true to yourself. Certainly there are certain people… there’s a writer I often mention, called Anna del Conte. I read one of her books called Entertaining All’Italiana when I was quite young before I did this. I found it a very helpful book, because she explained the historical origin of the dishes, where it came from in Italy and how it would be cooked. She also, I suppose, made me feel better acquainted with the actual recipe.
She also gave very good practical information like, "If you’re cooking this, you could do this two days ahead," which when I was young I found very, very helpful. And she also did menus, which when you’re young, you’ll try. So I think a lot of people find the balancing of different dishes harder than just the cooking. I found that very helpful and I’ve always borne that in mind.
I’d have to say that I think Jamie Oliver has done an awful lot to encourage young people to cook, which can only be good.
On camera you’re often caught licking ladles or your fingers. What would you say to people who describe your show as "gastroporn"?
I never quite understand it, because I feel that, yes, food is very sensual and I think people respond to that. In a way, maybe just seeing someone who takes pleasure in food gives others that impression. It embarrasses me that people think I’m doing it to be provocative, because I’m not. The difficulty is that I’m quite self-conscious. I love food. So when you cook, really, you have to taste all the time. I find it very odd when I see people cook and not tasting. How do you know whether you need to season differently or whether it’s ready?
What’s the best way to get picky children to eat?
My feeling about children, at least in the West, is that I don’t think one should worry about whether you’re putting butter or something in their diet. What you should worry about is whether they’re eating real food or not real food. And I certainly think that if you eat food that is freshly made out of real ingredients, that is the best way to go. So, for example, I don’t think you should put them on a diet, but I worry about children eating so much processed food. That is the problem. And I think if you can involve children a bit in the kitchen – and I know it makes your life harder a bit, because they make such a mess – but I really think it makes a difference.
How can a woman who has never been taught to cook by her mom become a domestic goddess?
I’m no domestic goddess, but the thing is that it’s not some arcane knowledge that you need to have been taught by your mother or grandmother. I think you just need to cook and I’ve always thought that if you cook for yourself a bit, you learn how to cook better. It doesn’t really matter if something goes wrong, because you’ve got no one judging it except you. Therefore, because you’re relaxed and not fearful of judgment, things don’t go wrong, or if they do, you think, "Would I like this more if I did it like that or like this?" I think that helps.
The recipes for Feasts are simpler, with a certain emphasis, always, on why cooking a certain thing is a way to add something in terms of pleasure and joy into your life. All I hope to do is maybe show that you don’t have to have any particular skill to be in the kitchen. You just go in there. Really fabulous food doesn’t have to be impossible. You don’t need to have any training and you don’t need to have any expertise; you just have got to learn to trust yourself.