Nigella Lawson is already in the bakery we had agreed to meet in on Connaught Street in London, photographing a tray of cinnamon buns. “Always working,” she smiles, as I approach her, and observantly adds, “We are matching very well.” Lawson and I are wearing the same colours — squid ink black and soft cream.
It is spring in London, but the day is rainy and grey. It is a good day to be indoors in a space warm and intimate like only a home kitchen can be. There is a sweet vanilla scent in the air. We order coffee — flat white with oat milk — and find a table that holds the promise of no voyeurism.
In 1998, Lawson wrote her first cookbook, How To Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food , a 500-page, no-photograph tome with over 350 recipes. About 3,00,000 copies and 20 years later, How to Eat remains a culinary classic and Lawson’s voice, as fresh as ever. How long did it take to write that first book, I ask. “It didn’t take a long time to write the book. Six weeks, I suppose, not counting the procrastination. It took a long time not to write it. One of the things you realise as a columnist is that you spend more time not writing your column than writing it,” Lawson says, laughing.
Back in the day, Lawson was a successful journalist and columnist who went on to become the Deputy Literary Editor of The Sunday Times at the age of 26.
So why food and not fiction? “I always wanted to write that great big novel. I realise now though that I don’t have it in me. Fiction is always reduced to saying something absolute. In a funny way, you are so exposed when you write fiction. It is so much easier to write about food. I suppose I always cooked and I found my voice with How to Eat . I loved writing about food so much that I went on to write 10 more books after that,” she says.
Cooking with mum
Lawson cooked from a very young age along with her sister Thomasina who was only 16 months younger than her. She remembers Thomasina and her in the kitchen as little girls, chairs by the stove, helping their mother cook everything from béchamel sauce to mayonnaise. “Not because my mother was remotely concerned about entertainment for little children. It was about getting things done,” she says.
She lost both her mother and sister to cancer in quick succession, and one of the reasons she wrote How to Eat was to continue to feel their presence in her kitchen and memorialise them through their food.
Cancer also claimed her first husband, the award-winning broadcaster and journalist John Diamond, shortly after How to Eat was published. Lawson recalls how it was Diamond’s idea for her to write the book and she credits him for the timeless title as well.
It is getting damper outside and we both agree more coffee is a good idea. The conversation now veers towards women and cooking. “One of the reasons I started writing about food is because women my age were frightened of cooking, of being shackled to the kitchen. Am not remotely suggesting that women should cook or that a woman’s place is in the kitchen. I don’t think cooking is a woman’s moral duty, yet, to disparage an activity because it has traditionally been in the female arena is in itself anti-feminist,” she says.
She has great disdain for the idea that male chefs are more often than not seen as brilliant elevators of cuisine while home cooking is taken for granted and women often seen as these warm fuzzy connecting creatures.
“Cooking is pleasurable and makes the everyday better. I love to eat but to be engaged with food only at the point of consumption is such a loss. The ability to cook and keep oneself alive, to me, is a symbol of independence. And this fact is not dependent on one’s gender.”
We are now talking about her television series that has made her a household name around the world. Did she resist the crossover from words to pixels? “When I was a young woman, I felt it was very important yet very difficult for women to exist in their words and in their thoughts. I did not want to have a public physical existence in any way. When I was a journalist, I did print and radio. I did not do television because I thought it was unhelpful. After How to Eat , a lot of people asked me to do television and I kept saying ‘No’ for a very long time. I finally agreed when I could do it on my terms — at home and unscripted. I have worked with the same crew ever since. They are like my small family.”
Television then went on to add a rather unintended aura to Lawson. People began to ‘see’ her a particular way. “What I find quite odd is what people see in me I actually don’t see in myself. I am an intense and intimate person. What I am not is coquettish. Enough people say I am this flirtatious, saucy person on screen. I can’t remember who but somebody once told me, ‘What other people think of you is none of your business.’ All I can say is that intimacy and intenseness can be misunderstood,” she says.
Whether it is through her books or her television shows, what Lawson values the most is the ‘connection’ she feels with a reader, viewer or fellow-cook. “In the modern world, you get a sense of it when a reader cooks one of my recipes, posts a picture on Instagram and tags me. But it is their food now and I feel very moved by that. Food is all about connection. Without that, things will feel terribly meaningless especially in a world governed by screens and distance.” And from a reader’s perspective, Lawson has made home cooking unapologetic — desirable even — and all about flavour and not virtuoso technique.
Later that week, I hear Lawson talk at the British Library about how she creates the ‘voice’ of the recipes in her books. “A recipe is not quite like any other literary form. I have to convey the dish I am cooking to my reader with words, words that can not only spark her imagination and appetite but also help construct the meal in her own kitchen. The challenge that interests me about cookery writing is to evoke something so firmly in the realm of the senses with language, which is so very abstract in itself.” And Lawson is no stranger to that abstract world having studied Medieval and Modern Languages at Oxford.
Her style is often described as chatty and her cookbooks are intimate and honest — something like a diary. “I love the taste of a well-constructed sentence. I think I experience words as tastes. Isn’t it that thing called ‘synaesthesia’, when you experience one feeling or sensation through another.” Her recipes are never reduced to a formula, and she firmly believes a recipe is a suggestion, a thought, and a reminder of possibilities. “As in life, in cooking too, you understand much more by metaphor than by formula.”
Eleven cookbooks and hundreds of recipe suggestions later, how does one still get new ideas, I ask. “Sometimes, it is travelling. Sometimes, it is eating out and thinking, ‘Hey, those two flavours went well together. Maybe I can put it together in a less complicated way.’ And when I borrow an idea from somebody else, I always credit them.”
Writerly details aside, Lawson’s books are so popular — over 10 million copies sold world over — because her recipes work. “When you cook all the time, your intelligence is in your hands. Much like my mother, I never measure anything when I cook. However, to document a recipe, if I stop to measure, let’s say, how much wine I put in the stew, all my sense of where I am in the recipe is lost. For me, that is the hardest part. I test all my recipes at least three times to make them fail-proof. Sometimes more. It is quite an intense process,” she says.
Lawson seems to follow me everywhere the rest of my time in London. I see her books in every bookshop I visit. And at the British Library, the lady next to me says, “Nigella is so well loved in this country. Culinary royalty, if you will!”
The writer is author of the cookbook, Five Morsels of Love .
