The food writer and broadcaster looks back on the best (and worst) meals of her life, from picky child to domestic goddess
‘I had quite the wrong start for a future food-obsessive.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks
Nigella Lawson
Saturday 3 October 2015
I think of myself, in part, as the sum of all the meals I’ve eaten, as much as I feel I’m the sum of all the books I’ve read. (I’m not alone in this: it’s why Nigel Slater’s Toast, or Samantha Ellis’s How To Be A Heroine, resonate so with readers.) Having just published my 10th book, I see the mark the food I’ve eaten throughout my life has made on it, and at the same time how it is shaped by the foods I’ve more recently taken to. I don’t suppose it could honestly be otherwise.
All recipes, whether one is writing or cooking them, tell the story of one’s eating evolution. This is mine.
The sixties: a different universe
I had quite the wrong start for a future food-obsessive: I absolutely loathed eating as a child. Or perhaps more accurately, it was mealtimes I hated. And there weren’t, then, occasions for eating outside mealtimes – or at least not in my home. My earliest memories of food are of sitting at the table, being told I had to eat everything on my plate. And the plate I always see in front of me is stew. Stew getting colder, the fat congealing as I sat there, staring it out; the stew always won.
There was no intimation that there was meant to be pleasure in food. It was there, and it had to be eaten. I was made to sit until I’d eaten, and if after hours (it was probably never hours, but it felt like that then) I had failed to clean my plate, the same plate, with its cold, unloved remains, was put in front of me at the next meal. I am not singling out my parents for strange and unusual punishment: this was just how children were routinely brought up in the olden days.
FacebookTwitterPinterest In 1965 with her father Nigel, mother Vanessa and younger sister Thomasina. Photograph: Rex Features
It was a curiously divergent upbringing, foodwise. There were the meals we ate without my parents, lunch and tea in the week, and those we ate with my parents: at the weekend, and supper once we’d reached the age of eight. This was a different universe, and one my older self would have fitted into so much better than the child I was. Here the talk was all food: eating was not duty but pleasure, at least for the others. My family would sit around the large, pale blue Formica table in the kitchen eating and talking about what they’d eaten previously and what they were going to eat next. This was otherwise still an age when it was considered vulgar to talk about food: even to comment favourably on it was just not done. I’d go to friends’ houses for tea (this was before the age of the sleepover) and meals were eaten in silence. My family (except for me, anxiously quiet) talked noisily about it all and, moreover, with their mouths full.
Nigella Lawson: I eat, therefore I am – in pictures
My mother had quite a different take on table manners. She considered it a slight to the cook (ie, her) not to start to eat once your food was in front of you: no waiting for everyone to begin before you started. And conversation should never be interrupted by the tiresome asking for peas or potatoes: “Don’t ask, stretch!” she would hiss.
Her food was different, too, from the food at my friends’ houses. She and my aunts had had an Italian au pair when they were growing up, and though spag bol had begun to make a showing in the traditional English culinary canon, she cooked spaghetti aglio e olio, even if the olive oil came from Timothy Whites, the high-street chemist. France was still the leading influence: we ate garlicky lamb cutlets (which wore frilly white cuffs if company were present) with herbes de provence, bowls of ratatouille, and there were always sauces: béarnaise, hollandaise, béchamel (only ever called white sauce).
But chiefly what I remember eating was chicken: roast chicken with butter smeared under its skin, a lemon half squeezed and then chucked into its cavity, or – the central food of my childhood – cooked with wine and water and vegetables on the hob, with rice on the side. With this, my mother would make her own version of hollandaise, adding saffron strands to the yolks, and a ladleful of the chicken broth with the butter. I still cook cabbage her way, too: not boiled, but tossed with butter (and a drop of oil to stop the butter burning) and caraway seeds, and when it had begun to wilt, only a little water added, and a lid clamped on so it steamed in the scant liquid.
Otherwise, vegetables always seemed to come with a sauce: if the broad beans weren’t draped in parsley sauce, they came, idiosyncratically, with a sweet-and-sour sauce in a jug to be poured over them at the table, something I’ve never encountered since. Leeks were always in a white sauce, some of their cooking water added with the milk, although towards the end of the 60s they started appearing, halved lengthwise, in a vinaigrette. And, at all times, black pepper was verboten: only white peppercorns were allowed in the grinder, something I’ve since read was also an edict of the food writer Bee Wilson’s mother; it must have been the age.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘We ate with our parents at the weekend, and supper once we reached the age of eight.’ Photograph: Getty Images
Different rules held sway at my grandparents’ homes. At my paternal grandparents’, you could tell what day it was by what they served. I wish I could remember the exact timetable now, but that memory is swamped by the exciting fact that they had puddings and cakes and sweets – child-seducing delicacies that never found their way onto my mother’s table. A special drawer below the drinks cabinet (hovering below the Tio Pepe, which my grandmother would never drink, not that any of my family were serious drinkers, without telling us that the doctor had informed her that it had no calories) held tins of what used to be called car sweets, boiled cubes dusted with glucose, and stale Penguin bars.
My maternal grandmother’s cooking was held slightly in scorn by my mother, who herself cooked instinctively and well. For my granny cooked from recipes, torn out of magazines and full of whim and fancy. She went through a period of cooking nasi goreng, referred to by my parents as Nazi Goering; chicken salad had fruit in it and grapefruits were grilled and served as a starter.
But if I was taught how to cook by my mother – from about six, I would be put on a wonky wooden chair by the New World gas range, stirring butter into bain-maries of egg yolks to make hollandaise – I loved cooking with my grandmother. What’s more, I loved eating what I cooked with her. On Fridays, we’d go to the butcher, buy some brains and go back to make some brown butter and capers to cook them in. She indulged my love of spinach: sometimes, for a special treat, I’d be allowed a big buttery bowl of it, just by itself, maybe with a mug of hot chocolate on the side, for lunch. So if I began the 60s (I was born at the very beginning of 1960) as a grudging eater, I ended it an idiosyncratic one.
I’ve chosen a recipe for jam tarts to sum up that decade for me, not because they featured greatly in it, but because, to my dismay, they didn’t. They were rare treats for birthday parties (no doubt bought rather than made) and, as a child, they had some magic literary allure about as near to eating nirvana as I thought it was possible to get.
Jam tarts
An old-fashioned nursery delicacy, which in truth I can’t remember ever having at home when I was a child, but which I am drawn to for the same sentimental reasons my own children are: jam tarts evoke not the real but the super-real, the world of picture books and nursery rhymes.
Since children like little things, we make these in mini tartlet tins. The pastry rolls out easily – the acid of the yoghurt or buttermilk makes it tenderly cohesive – so let children practise. And use cheap jam, the sort without one iota of fruit in it: it saves having to sieve it before spooning it into the pastry cases. Makes 24 small tarts.
120g flour (preferably Italian 00)
60g cold butter, cut into 1cm dice
5 tbsp buttermilk (or 3 tbsp yoghurt diluted with 2 tbsp iced water and a pinch of salt)
7 tsp strawberry jam
1½ tsp water
Put the flour in a bowl with the butter and put in the freezer for 10 minutes. Empty the bowl into a food processor and mix until crumbly; add the buttermilk, and process again. If it’s not beginning to form a dough, add some iced water teaspoon by teaspoon, with the machine running. When the dough is just starting to come together, remove, form into a fat disc, wrap in clingfilm and leave in the fridge for 20 minutes.
Heat the oven to 210C/gas mark 7. Roll out the pastry and, with a 6cm crinkly cutter, stamp out 24 little circles. (Obviously, for full-sized tarts you will need a bigger cutter and will end up with fewer.) Press the pastry circles into place in the tartlet tins (if you’ve got only one such tin, divide the dough in two and make up one batch after another) and put back in the fridge while you heat the jam and water in a saucepan until it’s a syrup liquid. Put a spoonful of jam on the base of each tartlet case and bake for about 15 minutes. (From How To Eat, 1998.)
The seventies: my avocado years
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘I began a love affair with avocadoes at my Great-Aunt Myra’s house; she was a great one for the New.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks
I think of the 70s as the egg mayonnaise decade. It’s true that my sister and I had been whipped into service making mayonnaise before I had entered double figures, one of us drip-dripping the oil on to the yolks (the eggs left in their shells in a bowl of warm water for 10 minutes first), the other whisking furiously, but never fast or furiously enough for my mother. The 70s seemed dominated by them; the stove was never without a noisy pan of water with eggs jumpily boiling in it, even while the last batch of hard-boiled eggs were in the fridge, waiting to be coated in thick mayonnaise and criss-crossed with anchovies.
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My parents had started holidaying in Greece, and my mother returned with a passion for taramasalata. Her blender, with its plastic, bronze-grey goblet and olive-green plastic lid, would judder with bread, garlic, smoked cod’s roe, lemon and oil. Eternal supplies would be stashed in the fridge, often alongside that other coral delicacy – though this from eastern Europe – liptauer, a mixture of curd and cream cheeses with capers, mustard, caraway and paprika that you never come across now, but then seemed to be in every deli, themselves quite a novelty. My mother also became quite a moussaka maker: while other people brought back holiday snaps, she returned with recipes, even if she didn’t, in fact, ever cook from one. Her notion of how to cook something came from eating it, and we travelled vicariously at the kitchen table.
We were taken to France to eat, though all I remember of early trips was the joy of snails in garlic butter, and the frisson of surgical delight that came from clamping the shell as you ate. My mother made them back at home, too, complete with dimpled metal snail holders, clamping devices and winkling tools. That was just for a treat, for us. When people came for dinner, they’d get coquilles St Jacques, and my mother would keep the cleaned-out shells for visiting smokers to use as ashtrays.
It was in the 70s that I began a lifelong love affair with avocados, though this certainly wasn’t at home; my mother considered them an overpriced novelty. It was at my Great-Aunt Myra’s house and Myra – as she insisted on being called – gave them a very good showing; she was a great one for the New. Calves’ liver with long slices of sauteed avocado was perhaps not her finest moment, but her avocado, pea and mint salad is something I still make today. Ostentatiously unstuffy and proud befriender of the young, she’d been at art school with thepainter John Minton in the 40s, and loved telling us all about her wild affairs.
Although Myra still painted, domesticity had largely claimed her, and much of her creativity went into her cooking. Days would be spent creating dishes to go into her cavernous chest freezer (the first I’d ever seen) and any guest would face an onslaught of food, each dish with its own styling. Chilli con carne came in individual wooden bowls, a baked potato with chive-flecked sour cream on a dark brown pottery plate and a hessian weave napkin to the side; gravad lax was served on green pottery, decorated with fresh dill, along with a warm potato salad and a Scandi-patterned napkin in a pewter ring; boeuf bourguignon came in a miniature orange casserole, with glazed carrots, dotted with parsley (curly, of course) and slick with butter in a bold-to-the-point-of-pyschedelic nasturtium-patterned Midwinter Pottery dish, and an obliquely sliced baguette in a basket. In Myra’s defence, her painting was rather more free-flowing.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Nigella Lawson in the 70s. Photograph: Courtesy of Nigella Lawson
Myra had (olive-green) shelves filled with the Time Life Foods Of The Worldseries; each volume came in two parts, with the recipes in a hardback and the photographs in a spiral-bound, large-format edition. Or it might have been the other way around. Either way, this was my official introduction to the cookery book and, since she wouldn’t allow anyone in the kitchen as she cooked or arranged her table, I’d spend hours reading them. I’ve been a compulsive collector of cookbooks ever since.
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At the end of the decade, I went to Italy for my gap year to learn how to speak Italian. By great fortune, I learned how to cook Italian, too. I worked as a chambermaid in a small, family-run pensione, and it so happened that there was a nonna from central casting on the premises.
While I was banned from going into the private sanctuary of the kitchen, she got lonely there in the day by herself (her son and daughter-in-law made frequent visits to the family farm in Arezzo), and I was ushered in to chat and watch her stir sauces, make broth, braise beans and pot-roasts (rosbif all’Inglese turned out to be cooked in a pan on the stove with rosemary and red wine); she made the best mashed potato I’ve ever tasted, with more butter than non-Italians ever credit the Italians with actually using.
Pea, mint and avocado salad
This is one of my Great-Aunt Myra’s recipes. Of course, you can use frozen peas, though in summer that feels odd somehow, like having a lightbulb on in brightest daylight. Alternatively – and this is probably the genuine compromise position – pod and cook the peas in advance and leave them steeped in the dressing. Nothing beats freshly podded, just-cooked new season’s peas, but we must be prepared to bend a little for our sanity’s sake. Serves eight as a side.
9 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1½ tbsp good white-wine vinegar
1 fat pinch caster sugar
1 bunch mint, picked
1.5kg peas in pod (about 500g podded weight)
Assorted salad leaves
2 chicory heads
3 ripe avocados
First make the dressing: put the oil and vinegar and a pinch of sugar in a large bowl, then add a decent handful of finely chopped mint and stir to amalgamate. Cook the podded peas for a short time in salted boiling water, just so they’re ready, but not soft: taste after two minutes and keep tasting. Pour the peas into a colander and then tip straight away into the bowl of dressing and leave to steep for an hour or up to a day.
Just before serving, stir in about a packetful of mixed salad leaves, the chicory, which has been separated into its leaves, and the avocado, cut into bite-sized chunky slices. You may need to drizzle in a bit more oil after tossing.
Serve on a big plate sprinkled with more chopped mint. (From How To Eat, 1998.)
The eighties: the Queen of Onion Soup
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘In the 80s, I started restaurant reviewing. This was a time of raspberry vinegar, kiwi with everything and pureed vegetables – food for very indulged babies.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks
I entered the 80s as a student and, after a year of living in college, with a dining hall that posted up menus boasting chicken marengo and chicken à la king, neither of which bore any similarity to the original creations but were, despite the shiny new decade, more in the fashion of postwar slops, I moved out and got my first (shared) kitchen.
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I already cooked, but here I could be in charge of what I was cooking. I became the Queen of Onion Soup, ransacking my housemates’ rooms for alcohol to add to it, finding a miniature bottle of chartreuse here, a drop of vinegary red there. I’d buy breast of lamb for 25p at the butcher’s in the market and braise it for long hours with whole spices. I’d get mince to make vats of meat sauce, assiduously stirred risotto (the two are conflated slightly in the recipe here), made pasta with lentils, pasta with chickpeas, pasta with beans. From Delia, I made kidneys stroganoff; from The Hungry Monk cookbook, I made banoffee pie. Outside the kitchen, I discovered brandy alexanders and almond croissants.
And when I became a journalist, just as I’d put off writing essays as a student by busying myself in the kitchen, so I incubated columns and fought off deadline panic by chopping vegetables, making soups or stirring something, anything.
Then I started restaurant reviewing. Luckily, this had very little impact on the way I cooked. This was, after all, a time of raspberry vinegar, seafood symphonies and kiwi with everything. Although I know the food processor had been invented earlier, this was when Magimix mania really took hold, and it was rare indeed to find a vegetable on any menu that hadn’t been pureed into food for very indulged babies – which, I suppose, was exactly who they were cooking for.
In the 80s, when cooking became a way of avoiding essay writing. Photograph: Courtesy of Nigella Lawson
Risotto bolognese
There’s no denying that this involves a fair bit of fiddle-faddling, but so soothing is the process, so welcoming and enveloping the savoury smells emanating from stove and oven as it cooks so ambrosial the taste, that the labour involved can be embraced gladly. If you don’t appreciate this, then you don’t deserve it.
This is really a meat sauce risotto, but that makes it sound too sloppy, too unspecial. I buy jars of good-quality veal stock to have on standby, because I know I’d make this much less often were I to have to go shopping especially. I’d make it even less if I had to make my own veal stock.
And if it seems unorthodox to be cooking the meat sauce in the oven, I agree, it is. You can ignore me and just cook everything on the hob, but putting the pot in the oven and leaving it there to cook is hardly what football managers would call a big ask. Besides, the method is vastly superior: flavour is intensified, texture is more melting and tender. If I have the time, this is now my ragù route of choice.
A final note: I have marked the anchovies “optional” simply because I know that some people have a thing about them. As a general rule, I would advise you to pay no heed to such faddiness, not least because good anchovies just melt into the sauce, bringing their salty resonance with them. Serves six to eight.
1 onion, peeled and quartered
1 carrot, peeled and halved
1 stick celery, halved
1 small clove garlic, peeled
1 handful fresh parsley
75g rindless streaky bacon
4 anchovy fillets (optional)
50g unsalted butter, plus 15g extra
½ tsp regular olive oil
250g minced beef, preferably organic
80ml marsala
400g can chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato purée
2 tbsp full-fat milk
2 litres veal stock, preferably organic
2 bay leaves
500g risotto rice
6 tbsp grated parmesan, plus extra to serve
Salt and pepper, to taste
Heat the oven to 150C/gas mark 2. Put the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, parsley, bacon and anchovy in a processor and whizz to a fine mush.
Heat 50g butter and the oil in a deep, heavy ovenproof casserole with a lid. Tip in the contents of the processor and cook for about five minutes, until softened. Add the meat and let it brown a little, breaking it up in the pan, then add the marsala. Process the tomatoes until smooth, and add to the meat.
Stir the tomato purée into the milk, then add to the pan, along with 500ml of the veal stock and the bay leaves. Bring to a boil, then clamp on the lid and transfer the casserole to the oven for an hour.
Once the meat sauce is out of the oven, fish out the bay leaves. Heat the remaining 1.5 litres of veal stock in a large pan and keep that warm over a very low heat, then put the meat sauce on a low heat next to it.
Stir the rice into the meat sauce, then add a ladleful of the hot stock. Stir until the rice and sauce become thick again, then add another ladleful of hot stock. Continue to add the stock as needed, though only a small ladleful at a time, and stirring as you go. After about 18 minutes, check to see if the rice is cooked – you may not need all the stock.
When it’s ready, turn off the heat and stir or beat in the cheese and the extra butter, before seasoning to taste and doling out into shallow warmed bowls. Serve with extra parmesan, if you like. (From Kitchen, 2010.)
The nineties: a bittersweet decade
FacebookTwitterPinterest With children Cosima and Bruno. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein/Camera Press
I had three children in the 90s: my daughter, my son and my first book, How To Eat. Although the book was in some sense a compendium of everything I’d eaten up till then, my present featured: there is a chapter in it on feeding infants and small children, with my earnest thoughts on weaning; but it was also, for me, an important in memoriam. My mother had died in the mid-80s, and my sister, Thomasina, had died in the early 90s, and How To Eat was in a sense my book for them. My mother’s food, her way of cooking, permeates every page; even the food I ate with my sister had its roots in the longer ago past, but some dishes speak more of the decade in question: quail that were spatchcocked, flattened, then marinaded, seared and sauteed, and given a lick of sauce (no more than their juices with a little stock and wine), was a more modern addition to our sisterly cooking sessions. Restaurant influences made themselves felt, too: the black cod in miso that I’d eaten in the first, New York, Nobu found its way in, though I used more accessible salmon; Alastair Little’s oysters with spicy sausages (itself a reworking of 19th-century food writer Edouard de Pomiane) featured, too. Ice-cold oysters with cocktail sausages, doused with Tabasco before being blitzed in a hot oven, was my version, and I still think it of it as the perfect treat.
Nineties food seems to have endured in contemporary restaurant menus – without irony – in a way that earlier decades don’t. But with reason: the plate arrangement of the 80s had given way to cooking that was bold but simple at the same time. I ate my first ceviche – my version adds hot cubed potatoes (cut like croutons), as does my caesar salad. Balsamic vinegar, with which I have a love-hate relationship, made its way to Britain: escalopes of salmon with warm balsamic vinaigrette remind me of warm evenings in the garden of my own first family home in the 90s. This was the decade I started doing desserts. Having been brought up in a pudding-free household, I brought up my children likewise, but there was an open-door policy at my Shepherd’s Bush kitchen and, with people around my table, I began to play. Tiramisu I condemned as the black forest gateau of the 90s, yet at the same time toyed with it; now that the age has passed, I make it without apology.
But it was really the beginning of my life as a pavlovaholic. The simplest of pavlovas – just fragrantly sour passion fruit on top of cream and marshmallow-meringue – which I learned from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion, probably the best cookbook of the 90s, is a fitting dessert of the decade, a bittersweet one for me.
Pavlova
I was especially taken by the tip of turning the cooked meringue over before smearing it with cream, so that (in Stephanie Alexander’s words) the marshmallow middle melds with the cream and the sides and the base stay crisp. Serves six.
4 egg whites at room temperature
250g caster sugar
2 tsp cornflour
1 tsp white-wine vinegar
A few drops pure vanilla extract
300ml double cream, whipped until firm
10 passion fruits
Heat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Line a baking tray with baking parchment and draw a 20-23cm circle on the paper. I often don’t, and just imagine what size the circle should be as I dollop the meringue on. This seems to work fine.
Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until satiny peaks form. Beat in the sugar, a third at a time, until the meringue is stiff and shiny. Sprinkle over the cornflour, vinegar and vanilla, and fold in lightly. Mound on to the paper on the baking tray within the circle, flatten the top and smooth the sides. Place in the oven.Immediately reduce the heat to 150C/gas mark 2 and cook for an hour and a quarter. Turn off the oven and leave the pavlova in it to cool completely. Invert the pavlova on to a big, flat-bottomed plate, pile on the cream and spoon over the passion fruit pulp, scooped, pips and all, from their shells. Don’t be tempted to add other fruit. (From How To Eat, 1998.)
The noughties: and then there was cake
Believe me, I didn’t mean to become a domestic goddess, and nor am I one. I just learned to bake. For me, it wasn’t an act of submission, but a liberation. Yes, the title was provocative, but only if you miss the irony, and given the endpaper pictures in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, it seems to me hard to do so. Hitherto, I’d felt bakers to be a breed apart from cooks – brisk, efficient, organised people who at the same time had access to some mystical prowess. I’d always cooked: I took it for granted, yet at the same time it was an important part of my identity, my family inheritance. Learning to bake didn’t seem to me to be about acquiring a skill, so much as realising I could be liberated from the constraints of who I thought I was, and what I thought I could do. And there is something transformational in baking: when you make a stew, you can tell from the raw ingredients what it will become; it always seems a miracle that mixing eggs, sugar, butter and flour becomes a cake.
In the age of Bake-Off, it is difficult to convey how outlandish such a book seemed in 2000. But it felt right to me: it was the book I wanted to write. Out of my oven came scones, Victoria sponges, madeira cakes, banana breads, brownies, pies and, of course, cupcakes. In an age when there seemed to be ever less time to spend in the kitchen, baking gave me the glorious opportunity and excuse to luxuriate in it.
Chocolate cherry cupcakes
These are very easy, very good – somehow light and dense at the same time – and I love their dark, glossy elegance. When I made them for the cake stall at my daughter’s school fair, they sold, even at a pound a piece, quicker than anything else. I use the morello cherry preserve from Sainsbury’s special selection; if you’re using a less elegant, and probably sweeter confection, reduce the sugar content a little. And if you have any kirsch about the place, then add a splash to the batter and icing. Makes 12.
For the cupcakes
125g soft unsalted butter
100g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
300g morello cherry jam
150g caster sugar
A pinch of salt
2 large eggs, beaten
150g self-raising flour
12-bun muffin tin and papers
For the icing
100g dark chocolate
100ml double cream
12 natural-coloured glacé cherries
Heat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Put the butter in a heavy-bottomed pan on the heat to melt. When the butter has nearly melted, stir in the chocolate. Leave for a moment to begin softening, then take the pan off the heat and stir with a wooden spoon until smooth and melted. Add the jam, sugar, salt and eggs, stir with a wooden spoon and, when all is pretty well amalgamated, stir in the flour.
Scrape and pour into the muffin papers in their tin and bake for 25 minutes. Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes before turning out. When the cupcakes are cool, break the chocolate for the icing into little pieces and add them to the cream in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, remove from the heat, then whisk until thick and smooth. Ice the cupcakes, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon, and stand a cherry in the centre of each. (From How To Be A Domestic Goddess, 2000.)
Now: all about my mother
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘I enjoy cooking so much more than my mother ever did, perhaps because I allow myself to enjoy eating more.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks
Let’s get the embarrassing part over with: chia seeds, flaxseeds, matcha, cocoa nibs, coconut milk yogurt – these are some of the ingredients I would never have found in my kitchen in an earlier age. I think of myself as someone who resists fads in food, but I have to admit that such protestations might be looking a little puny.
I have always been an eclectic cook, mixing the comfort of the familiar with the exuberance of the new, and believing in balance. I don’t have the patience, skill or desire for complicated food, and I need what I cook to make me feel as happy when I cook it as when I eat it. The food I’m cooking now is simply the food I want to eat. It doesn’t have a theme, but then life doesn’t have a theme. It may be a warm salad of spiced roast cauliflower, chickpeas, parsley and pomegranates; a tray of slow-roasted lamb ribs (back to the breast of lamb I cooked as a student); an easy oven version of chicken shawarma; a salmon, avocado, watercress and pumpkin salad (avocados, which always make me think of geranium-lipsticked Great-Aunt Myra, are unapologetically abundant in my new book); banana bread with cardamom and cocoa nibs; a salted chocolate tart (assurance: no pastry involved); pasta snails with garlic butter, my reworking of a childhood treat.
And while I have not gone gluten-free, or anywhere near, there are quite a few new gluten- and dairy-free recipes. Cooking brings me pleasure, but I also wish to bring pleasure to those who eat around my table – and since there is always a contingent in either camp, I want to make food they can eat.
My repertoire is very much larger than my mother’s, but the way I cook is hers – spontaneous and impatiently slapdash – yet I enjoy cooking so much more than she ever did, perhaps because I allow myself to enjoy eating more. Each generation has found a way of telling women which foods they must resist, what dietary path they must follow to take up less space in the world, and every book of mine tries to find a way to undermine this reductive ideology. Recently, I have been particularly alive to the power of food to make us stronger and, as I get older, feeling well and vital is more central.
But this can never be at the expense of pleasure: a restricted diet speaks of a constrained life, a turning away from the world. I am so happily no longer the child who dreaded meals, and for whom food was an anxiety-provoking punishment. Everything I cook or eat is a grateful act of engagement with life and a celebration of it. And while my recipes, which are my way of keeping a diary, tell the broader story of how I live, how I feed my family and friends and myself, they are inseparably part of my fervent belief that what and how we cook can make our lives easier, make us feel better and more alive.
Warm spiced cauliflower and chickpea salad with pomegranate seeds
This is one of my favourite suppers, although there’s nothing that says you can’t serve it as a vegetable side as part of a more conventional meal. And you could also bolster it further by crumbling in some feta. But for me, it is perfect just as it is: the tomatoes almost ooze into a dressing in the oven, and the cauliflower softens, but not soggily.
For choice, I’d always use home-cooked chickpeas (I cook batches in my slow cooker and freeze them in 250g portions for everyday use), but otherwise I like the pre-cooked Spanish chickpeas in jars. Yes, they are more expensive than the canned variety, but the cheapest option is always to buy dried. Don’t feel bad about using chickpeas out of a tin, though: they won’t be as soft; but then, you don’t necessarily need them to be. The cauliflower and juicy tomatoes can stand some nubbliness.
The parsley is not a garnish – ugh, that word – but used as a salad leaf. And this is also very, very good cold; if you have some left over, it makes a fabulous packed lunch, or provides instant gratification on those days you have to eat fridge- side, with your coat still on, you’re so hungry. Serves two heartily.
1 small head cauliflower
3 tbsp regular olive oil
½ tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp cumin seeds
250g home-cooked chickpeas (or the same drained weight from a jar or can)
1-2 tbsp harissa, to taste (and depending on its heat levels)
4 smallish ripe vine tomatoes (about 150g)
1 tsp sea salt flakes, or to taste
3-4 tbsp pomegranate seeds
1 large bunch flat-leaf parsley, picked
Heat the oven to 220C/gas mark 7. Trim the cauliflower and separate it into small florets. Pour the oil into a large bowl, add the cinnamon and cumin, and stir or whisk to help the spices disperse. Tip in the cauliflower florets and toss to coat. Pour the contents of the bowl into a small oven tray and roast for 15 minutes. Don’t wash out the bowl you’ve been using just yet.
Tip the chickpeas into the empty cauliflower bowl, and add the harissa, tasting it first for heat, to see if you want to use both tablespoonfuls. At the risk of being repetitive, toss to coat. Quarter the tomatoes, add them to the bowl, and shake or stir to mix. When the cauliflower has had its 15 minutes, remove the tray, tip in the chickpeas and tomatoes, toss to combine and return to the oven for a further 15 minutes, until the cauliflower is tender.
When the cauliflower is ready, remove from the oven and sprinkle the salt over the vegetables, then (and this isn’t the last time) toss to combine with half the pomegranate seeds, before dividing between two bowls. Divide the parsley leaves between the two bowls and toss to mix. Scatter with the remaining pomegranate seeds and serve. (From Simply Nigella, 2015.)
• Nigella Lawson’s new book, Simply Nigella, is published next week by Chatto & Windus at £26. To order a copy for £20, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.. Nigella Lawson will be speaking to Zoe Williams on stage in London on 10 December. To book tickets, go to membership.theguardian.com
Nigella Lawson
Saturday 3 October 2015
I think of myself, in part, as the sum of all the meals I’ve eaten, as much as I feel I’m the sum of all the books I’ve read. (I’m not alone in this: it’s why Nigel Slater’s Toast, or Samantha Ellis’s How To Be A Heroine, resonate so with readers.) Having just published my 10th book, I see the mark the food I’ve eaten throughout my life has made on it, and at the same time how it is shaped by the foods I’ve more recently taken to. I don’t suppose it could honestly be otherwise.
All recipes, whether one is writing or cooking them, tell the story of one’s eating evolution. This is mine.
The sixties: a different universe
I had quite the wrong start for a future food-obsessive: I absolutely loathed eating as a child. Or perhaps more accurately, it was mealtimes I hated. And there weren’t, then, occasions for eating outside mealtimes – or at least not in my home. My earliest memories of food are of sitting at the table, being told I had to eat everything on my plate. And the plate I always see in front of me is stew. Stew getting colder, the fat congealing as I sat there, staring it out; the stew always won.
There was no intimation that there was meant to be pleasure in food. It was there, and it had to be eaten. I was made to sit until I’d eaten, and if after hours (it was probably never hours, but it felt like that then) I had failed to clean my plate, the same plate, with its cold, unloved remains, was put in front of me at the next meal. I am not singling out my parents for strange and unusual punishment: this was just how children were routinely brought up in the olden days.
FacebookTwitterPinterest In 1965 with her father Nigel, mother Vanessa and younger sister Thomasina. Photograph: Rex Features
It was a curiously divergent upbringing, foodwise. There were the meals we ate without my parents, lunch and tea in the week, and those we ate with my parents: at the weekend, and supper once we’d reached the age of eight. This was a different universe, and one my older self would have fitted into so much better than the child I was. Here the talk was all food: eating was not duty but pleasure, at least for the others. My family would sit around the large, pale blue Formica table in the kitchen eating and talking about what they’d eaten previously and what they were going to eat next. This was otherwise still an age when it was considered vulgar to talk about food: even to comment favourably on it was just not done. I’d go to friends’ houses for tea (this was before the age of the sleepover) and meals were eaten in silence. My family (except for me, anxiously quiet) talked noisily about it all and, moreover, with their mouths full.
Nigella Lawson: I eat, therefore I am – in pictures
My mother had quite a different take on table manners. She considered it a slight to the cook (ie, her) not to start to eat once your food was in front of you: no waiting for everyone to begin before you started. And conversation should never be interrupted by the tiresome asking for peas or potatoes: “Don’t ask, stretch!” she would hiss.
Her food was different, too, from the food at my friends’ houses. She and my aunts had had an Italian au pair when they were growing up, and though spag bol had begun to make a showing in the traditional English culinary canon, she cooked spaghetti aglio e olio, even if the olive oil came from Timothy Whites, the high-street chemist. France was still the leading influence: we ate garlicky lamb cutlets (which wore frilly white cuffs if company were present) with herbes de provence, bowls of ratatouille, and there were always sauces: béarnaise, hollandaise, béchamel (only ever called white sauce).
But chiefly what I remember eating was chicken: roast chicken with butter smeared under its skin, a lemon half squeezed and then chucked into its cavity, or – the central food of my childhood – cooked with wine and water and vegetables on the hob, with rice on the side. With this, my mother would make her own version of hollandaise, adding saffron strands to the yolks, and a ladleful of the chicken broth with the butter. I still cook cabbage her way, too: not boiled, but tossed with butter (and a drop of oil to stop the butter burning) and caraway seeds, and when it had begun to wilt, only a little water added, and a lid clamped on so it steamed in the scant liquid.
Otherwise, vegetables always seemed to come with a sauce: if the broad beans weren’t draped in parsley sauce, they came, idiosyncratically, with a sweet-and-sour sauce in a jug to be poured over them at the table, something I’ve never encountered since. Leeks were always in a white sauce, some of their cooking water added with the milk, although towards the end of the 60s they started appearing, halved lengthwise, in a vinaigrette. And, at all times, black pepper was verboten: only white peppercorns were allowed in the grinder, something I’ve since read was also an edict of the food writer Bee Wilson’s mother; it must have been the age.
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘We ate with our parents at the weekend, and supper once we reached the age of eight.’ Photograph: Getty Images
Different rules held sway at my grandparents’ homes. At my paternal grandparents’, you could tell what day it was by what they served. I wish I could remember the exact timetable now, but that memory is swamped by the exciting fact that they had puddings and cakes and sweets – child-seducing delicacies that never found their way onto my mother’s table. A special drawer below the drinks cabinet (hovering below the Tio Pepe, which my grandmother would never drink, not that any of my family were serious drinkers, without telling us that the doctor had informed her that it had no calories) held tins of what used to be called car sweets, boiled cubes dusted with glucose, and stale Penguin bars.
My maternal grandmother’s cooking was held slightly in scorn by my mother, who herself cooked instinctively and well. For my granny cooked from recipes, torn out of magazines and full of whim and fancy. She went through a period of cooking nasi goreng, referred to by my parents as Nazi Goering; chicken salad had fruit in it and grapefruits were grilled and served as a starter.
But if I was taught how to cook by my mother – from about six, I would be put on a wonky wooden chair by the New World gas range, stirring butter into bain-maries of egg yolks to make hollandaise – I loved cooking with my grandmother. What’s more, I loved eating what I cooked with her. On Fridays, we’d go to the butcher, buy some brains and go back to make some brown butter and capers to cook them in. She indulged my love of spinach: sometimes, for a special treat, I’d be allowed a big buttery bowl of it, just by itself, maybe with a mug of hot chocolate on the side, for lunch. So if I began the 60s (I was born at the very beginning of 1960) as a grudging eater, I ended it an idiosyncratic one.
I’ve chosen a recipe for jam tarts to sum up that decade for me, not because they featured greatly in it, but because, to my dismay, they didn’t. They were rare treats for birthday parties (no doubt bought rather than made) and, as a child, they had some magic literary allure about as near to eating nirvana as I thought it was possible to get.
Jam tarts
An old-fashioned nursery delicacy, which in truth I can’t remember ever having at home when I was a child, but which I am drawn to for the same sentimental reasons my own children are: jam tarts evoke not the real but the super-real, the world of picture books and nursery rhymes.
Since children like little things, we make these in mini tartlet tins. The pastry rolls out easily – the acid of the yoghurt or buttermilk makes it tenderly cohesive – so let children practise. And use cheap jam, the sort without one iota of fruit in it: it saves having to sieve it before spooning it into the pastry cases. Makes 24 small tarts.
120g flour (preferably Italian 00)
60g cold butter, cut into 1cm dice
5 tbsp buttermilk (or 3 tbsp yoghurt diluted with 2 tbsp iced water and a pinch of salt)
7 tsp strawberry jam
1½ tsp water
Put the flour in a bowl with the butter and put in the freezer for 10 minutes. Empty the bowl into a food processor and mix until crumbly; add the buttermilk, and process again. If it’s not beginning to form a dough, add some iced water teaspoon by teaspoon, with the machine running. When the dough is just starting to come together, remove, form into a fat disc, wrap in clingfilm and leave in the fridge for 20 minutes.
Heat the oven to 210C/gas mark 7. Roll out the pastry and, with a 6cm crinkly cutter, stamp out 24 little circles. (Obviously, for full-sized tarts you will need a bigger cutter and will end up with fewer.) Press the pastry circles into place in the tartlet tins (if you’ve got only one such tin, divide the dough in two and make up one batch after another) and put back in the fridge while you heat the jam and water in a saucepan until it’s a syrup liquid. Put a spoonful of jam on the base of each tartlet case and bake for about 15 minutes. (From How To Eat, 1998.)
The seventies: my avocado years
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘I began a love affair with avocadoes at my Great-Aunt Myra’s house; she was a great one for the New.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks
I think of the 70s as the egg mayonnaise decade. It’s true that my sister and I had been whipped into service making mayonnaise before I had entered double figures, one of us drip-dripping the oil on to the yolks (the eggs left in their shells in a bowl of warm water for 10 minutes first), the other whisking furiously, but never fast or furiously enough for my mother. The 70s seemed dominated by them; the stove was never without a noisy pan of water with eggs jumpily boiling in it, even while the last batch of hard-boiled eggs were in the fridge, waiting to be coated in thick mayonnaise and criss-crossed with anchovies.
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My parents had started holidaying in Greece, and my mother returned with a passion for taramasalata. Her blender, with its plastic, bronze-grey goblet and olive-green plastic lid, would judder with bread, garlic, smoked cod’s roe, lemon and oil. Eternal supplies would be stashed in the fridge, often alongside that other coral delicacy – though this from eastern Europe – liptauer, a mixture of curd and cream cheeses with capers, mustard, caraway and paprika that you never come across now, but then seemed to be in every deli, themselves quite a novelty. My mother also became quite a moussaka maker: while other people brought back holiday snaps, she returned with recipes, even if she didn’t, in fact, ever cook from one. Her notion of how to cook something came from eating it, and we travelled vicariously at the kitchen table.
We were taken to France to eat, though all I remember of early trips was the joy of snails in garlic butter, and the frisson of surgical delight that came from clamping the shell as you ate. My mother made them back at home, too, complete with dimpled metal snail holders, clamping devices and winkling tools. That was just for a treat, for us. When people came for dinner, they’d get coquilles St Jacques, and my mother would keep the cleaned-out shells for visiting smokers to use as ashtrays.
It was in the 70s that I began a lifelong love affair with avocados, though this certainly wasn’t at home; my mother considered them an overpriced novelty. It was at my Great-Aunt Myra’s house and Myra – as she insisted on being called – gave them a very good showing; she was a great one for the New. Calves’ liver with long slices of sauteed avocado was perhaps not her finest moment, but her avocado, pea and mint salad is something I still make today. Ostentatiously unstuffy and proud befriender of the young, she’d been at art school with thepainter John Minton in the 40s, and loved telling us all about her wild affairs.
Although Myra still painted, domesticity had largely claimed her, and much of her creativity went into her cooking. Days would be spent creating dishes to go into her cavernous chest freezer (the first I’d ever seen) and any guest would face an onslaught of food, each dish with its own styling. Chilli con carne came in individual wooden bowls, a baked potato with chive-flecked sour cream on a dark brown pottery plate and a hessian weave napkin to the side; gravad lax was served on green pottery, decorated with fresh dill, along with a warm potato salad and a Scandi-patterned napkin in a pewter ring; boeuf bourguignon came in a miniature orange casserole, with glazed carrots, dotted with parsley (curly, of course) and slick with butter in a bold-to-the-point-of-pyschedelic nasturtium-patterned Midwinter Pottery dish, and an obliquely sliced baguette in a basket. In Myra’s defence, her painting was rather more free-flowing.
FacebookTwitterPinterest Nigella Lawson in the 70s. Photograph: Courtesy of Nigella Lawson
Myra had (olive-green) shelves filled with the Time Life Foods Of The Worldseries; each volume came in two parts, with the recipes in a hardback and the photographs in a spiral-bound, large-format edition. Or it might have been the other way around. Either way, this was my official introduction to the cookery book and, since she wouldn’t allow anyone in the kitchen as she cooked or arranged her table, I’d spend hours reading them. I’ve been a compulsive collector of cookbooks ever since.
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At the end of the decade, I went to Italy for my gap year to learn how to speak Italian. By great fortune, I learned how to cook Italian, too. I worked as a chambermaid in a small, family-run pensione, and it so happened that there was a nonna from central casting on the premises.
While I was banned from going into the private sanctuary of the kitchen, she got lonely there in the day by herself (her son and daughter-in-law made frequent visits to the family farm in Arezzo), and I was ushered in to chat and watch her stir sauces, make broth, braise beans and pot-roasts (rosbif all’Inglese turned out to be cooked in a pan on the stove with rosemary and red wine); she made the best mashed potato I’ve ever tasted, with more butter than non-Italians ever credit the Italians with actually using.
Pea, mint and avocado salad
This is one of my Great-Aunt Myra’s recipes. Of course, you can use frozen peas, though in summer that feels odd somehow, like having a lightbulb on in brightest daylight. Alternatively – and this is probably the genuine compromise position – pod and cook the peas in advance and leave them steeped in the dressing. Nothing beats freshly podded, just-cooked new season’s peas, but we must be prepared to bend a little for our sanity’s sake. Serves eight as a side.
9 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
1½ tbsp good white-wine vinegar
1 fat pinch caster sugar
1 bunch mint, picked
1.5kg peas in pod (about 500g podded weight)
Assorted salad leaves
2 chicory heads
3 ripe avocados
First make the dressing: put the oil and vinegar and a pinch of sugar in a large bowl, then add a decent handful of finely chopped mint and stir to amalgamate. Cook the podded peas for a short time in salted boiling water, just so they’re ready, but not soft: taste after two minutes and keep tasting. Pour the peas into a colander and then tip straight away into the bowl of dressing and leave to steep for an hour or up to a day.
Just before serving, stir in about a packetful of mixed salad leaves, the chicory, which has been separated into its leaves, and the avocado, cut into bite-sized chunky slices. You may need to drizzle in a bit more oil after tossing.
Serve on a big plate sprinkled with more chopped mint. (From How To Eat, 1998.)
The eighties: the Queen of Onion Soup
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘In the 80s, I started restaurant reviewing. This was a time of raspberry vinegar, kiwi with everything and pureed vegetables – food for very indulged babies.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks
I entered the 80s as a student and, after a year of living in college, with a dining hall that posted up menus boasting chicken marengo and chicken à la king, neither of which bore any similarity to the original creations but were, despite the shiny new decade, more in the fashion of postwar slops, I moved out and got my first (shared) kitchen.
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I already cooked, but here I could be in charge of what I was cooking. I became the Queen of Onion Soup, ransacking my housemates’ rooms for alcohol to add to it, finding a miniature bottle of chartreuse here, a drop of vinegary red there. I’d buy breast of lamb for 25p at the butcher’s in the market and braise it for long hours with whole spices. I’d get mince to make vats of meat sauce, assiduously stirred risotto (the two are conflated slightly in the recipe here), made pasta with lentils, pasta with chickpeas, pasta with beans. From Delia, I made kidneys stroganoff; from The Hungry Monk cookbook, I made banoffee pie. Outside the kitchen, I discovered brandy alexanders and almond croissants.
And when I became a journalist, just as I’d put off writing essays as a student by busying myself in the kitchen, so I incubated columns and fought off deadline panic by chopping vegetables, making soups or stirring something, anything.
Then I started restaurant reviewing. Luckily, this had very little impact on the way I cooked. This was, after all, a time of raspberry vinegar, seafood symphonies and kiwi with everything. Although I know the food processor had been invented earlier, this was when Magimix mania really took hold, and it was rare indeed to find a vegetable on any menu that hadn’t been pureed into food for very indulged babies – which, I suppose, was exactly who they were cooking for.
In the 80s, when cooking became a way of avoiding essay writing. Photograph: Courtesy of Nigella LawsonRisotto bolognese
There’s no denying that this involves a fair bit of fiddle-faddling, but so soothing is the process, so welcoming and enveloping the savoury smells emanating from stove and oven as it cooks so ambrosial the taste, that the labour involved can be embraced gladly. If you don’t appreciate this, then you don’t deserve it.
This is really a meat sauce risotto, but that makes it sound too sloppy, too unspecial. I buy jars of good-quality veal stock to have on standby, because I know I’d make this much less often were I to have to go shopping especially. I’d make it even less if I had to make my own veal stock.
And if it seems unorthodox to be cooking the meat sauce in the oven, I agree, it is. You can ignore me and just cook everything on the hob, but putting the pot in the oven and leaving it there to cook is hardly what football managers would call a big ask. Besides, the method is vastly superior: flavour is intensified, texture is more melting and tender. If I have the time, this is now my ragù route of choice.
A final note: I have marked the anchovies “optional” simply because I know that some people have a thing about them. As a general rule, I would advise you to pay no heed to such faddiness, not least because good anchovies just melt into the sauce, bringing their salty resonance with them. Serves six to eight.
1 onion, peeled and quartered
1 carrot, peeled and halved
1 stick celery, halved
1 small clove garlic, peeled
1 handful fresh parsley
75g rindless streaky bacon
4 anchovy fillets (optional)
50g unsalted butter, plus 15g extra
½ tsp regular olive oil
250g minced beef, preferably organic
80ml marsala
400g can chopped tomatoes
1 tbsp tomato purée
2 tbsp full-fat milk
2 litres veal stock, preferably organic
2 bay leaves
500g risotto rice
6 tbsp grated parmesan, plus extra to serve
Salt and pepper, to taste
Heat the oven to 150C/gas mark 2. Put the onion, carrot, celery, garlic, parsley, bacon and anchovy in a processor and whizz to a fine mush.
Heat 50g butter and the oil in a deep, heavy ovenproof casserole with a lid. Tip in the contents of the processor and cook for about five minutes, until softened. Add the meat and let it brown a little, breaking it up in the pan, then add the marsala. Process the tomatoes until smooth, and add to the meat.
Stir the tomato purée into the milk, then add to the pan, along with 500ml of the veal stock and the bay leaves. Bring to a boil, then clamp on the lid and transfer the casserole to the oven for an hour.
Once the meat sauce is out of the oven, fish out the bay leaves. Heat the remaining 1.5 litres of veal stock in a large pan and keep that warm over a very low heat, then put the meat sauce on a low heat next to it.
Stir the rice into the meat sauce, then add a ladleful of the hot stock. Stir until the rice and sauce become thick again, then add another ladleful of hot stock. Continue to add the stock as needed, though only a small ladleful at a time, and stirring as you go. After about 18 minutes, check to see if the rice is cooked – you may not need all the stock.
When it’s ready, turn off the heat and stir or beat in the cheese and the extra butter, before seasoning to taste and doling out into shallow warmed bowls. Serve with extra parmesan, if you like. (From Kitchen, 2010.)
The nineties: a bittersweet decade
FacebookTwitterPinterest With children Cosima and Bruno. Photograph: Jillian Edelstein/Camera Press
I had three children in the 90s: my daughter, my son and my first book, How To Eat. Although the book was in some sense a compendium of everything I’d eaten up till then, my present featured: there is a chapter in it on feeding infants and small children, with my earnest thoughts on weaning; but it was also, for me, an important in memoriam. My mother had died in the mid-80s, and my sister, Thomasina, had died in the early 90s, and How To Eat was in a sense my book for them. My mother’s food, her way of cooking, permeates every page; even the food I ate with my sister had its roots in the longer ago past, but some dishes speak more of the decade in question: quail that were spatchcocked, flattened, then marinaded, seared and sauteed, and given a lick of sauce (no more than their juices with a little stock and wine), was a more modern addition to our sisterly cooking sessions. Restaurant influences made themselves felt, too: the black cod in miso that I’d eaten in the first, New York, Nobu found its way in, though I used more accessible salmon; Alastair Little’s oysters with spicy sausages (itself a reworking of 19th-century food writer Edouard de Pomiane) featured, too. Ice-cold oysters with cocktail sausages, doused with Tabasco before being blitzed in a hot oven, was my version, and I still think it of it as the perfect treat.
Nineties food seems to have endured in contemporary restaurant menus – without irony – in a way that earlier decades don’t. But with reason: the plate arrangement of the 80s had given way to cooking that was bold but simple at the same time. I ate my first ceviche – my version adds hot cubed potatoes (cut like croutons), as does my caesar salad. Balsamic vinegar, with which I have a love-hate relationship, made its way to Britain: escalopes of salmon with warm balsamic vinaigrette remind me of warm evenings in the garden of my own first family home in the 90s. This was the decade I started doing desserts. Having been brought up in a pudding-free household, I brought up my children likewise, but there was an open-door policy at my Shepherd’s Bush kitchen and, with people around my table, I began to play. Tiramisu I condemned as the black forest gateau of the 90s, yet at the same time toyed with it; now that the age has passed, I make it without apology.
But it was really the beginning of my life as a pavlovaholic. The simplest of pavlovas – just fragrantly sour passion fruit on top of cream and marshmallow-meringue – which I learned from Stephanie Alexander’s The Cook’s Companion, probably the best cookbook of the 90s, is a fitting dessert of the decade, a bittersweet one for me.
Pavlova
I was especially taken by the tip of turning the cooked meringue over before smearing it with cream, so that (in Stephanie Alexander’s words) the marshmallow middle melds with the cream and the sides and the base stay crisp. Serves six.
4 egg whites at room temperature
250g caster sugar
2 tsp cornflour
1 tsp white-wine vinegar
A few drops pure vanilla extract
300ml double cream, whipped until firm
10 passion fruits
Heat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Line a baking tray with baking parchment and draw a 20-23cm circle on the paper. I often don’t, and just imagine what size the circle should be as I dollop the meringue on. This seems to work fine.
Beat the egg whites with a pinch of salt until satiny peaks form. Beat in the sugar, a third at a time, until the meringue is stiff and shiny. Sprinkle over the cornflour, vinegar and vanilla, and fold in lightly. Mound on to the paper on the baking tray within the circle, flatten the top and smooth the sides. Place in the oven.Immediately reduce the heat to 150C/gas mark 2 and cook for an hour and a quarter. Turn off the oven and leave the pavlova in it to cool completely. Invert the pavlova on to a big, flat-bottomed plate, pile on the cream and spoon over the passion fruit pulp, scooped, pips and all, from their shells. Don’t be tempted to add other fruit. (From How To Eat, 1998.)
The noughties: and then there was cake
Believe me, I didn’t mean to become a domestic goddess, and nor am I one. I just learned to bake. For me, it wasn’t an act of submission, but a liberation. Yes, the title was provocative, but only if you miss the irony, and given the endpaper pictures in How To Be A Domestic Goddess, it seems to me hard to do so. Hitherto, I’d felt bakers to be a breed apart from cooks – brisk, efficient, organised people who at the same time had access to some mystical prowess. I’d always cooked: I took it for granted, yet at the same time it was an important part of my identity, my family inheritance. Learning to bake didn’t seem to me to be about acquiring a skill, so much as realising I could be liberated from the constraints of who I thought I was, and what I thought I could do. And there is something transformational in baking: when you make a stew, you can tell from the raw ingredients what it will become; it always seems a miracle that mixing eggs, sugar, butter and flour becomes a cake.
In the age of Bake-Off, it is difficult to convey how outlandish such a book seemed in 2000. But it felt right to me: it was the book I wanted to write. Out of my oven came scones, Victoria sponges, madeira cakes, banana breads, brownies, pies and, of course, cupcakes. In an age when there seemed to be ever less time to spend in the kitchen, baking gave me the glorious opportunity and excuse to luxuriate in it.
Chocolate cherry cupcakes
These are very easy, very good – somehow light and dense at the same time – and I love their dark, glossy elegance. When I made them for the cake stall at my daughter’s school fair, they sold, even at a pound a piece, quicker than anything else. I use the morello cherry preserve from Sainsbury’s special selection; if you’re using a less elegant, and probably sweeter confection, reduce the sugar content a little. And if you have any kirsch about the place, then add a splash to the batter and icing. Makes 12.
For the cupcakes
125g soft unsalted butter
100g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
300g morello cherry jam
150g caster sugar
A pinch of salt
2 large eggs, beaten
150g self-raising flour
12-bun muffin tin and papers
For the icing
100g dark chocolate
100ml double cream
12 natural-coloured glacé cherries
Heat the oven to 180C/gas mark 4. Put the butter in a heavy-bottomed pan on the heat to melt. When the butter has nearly melted, stir in the chocolate. Leave for a moment to begin softening, then take the pan off the heat and stir with a wooden spoon until smooth and melted. Add the jam, sugar, salt and eggs, stir with a wooden spoon and, when all is pretty well amalgamated, stir in the flour.
Scrape and pour into the muffin papers in their tin and bake for 25 minutes. Cool in the pan on a rack for 10 minutes before turning out. When the cupcakes are cool, break the chocolate for the icing into little pieces and add them to the cream in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, remove from the heat, then whisk until thick and smooth. Ice the cupcakes, smoothing the tops with the back of a spoon, and stand a cherry in the centre of each. (From How To Be A Domestic Goddess, 2000.)
Now: all about my mother
FacebookTwitterPinterest ‘I enjoy cooking so much more than my mother ever did, perhaps because I allow myself to enjoy eating more.’ Photograph: Jay Brooks
Let’s get the embarrassing part over with: chia seeds, flaxseeds, matcha, cocoa nibs, coconut milk yogurt – these are some of the ingredients I would never have found in my kitchen in an earlier age. I think of myself as someone who resists fads in food, but I have to admit that such protestations might be looking a little puny.
I have always been an eclectic cook, mixing the comfort of the familiar with the exuberance of the new, and believing in balance. I don’t have the patience, skill or desire for complicated food, and I need what I cook to make me feel as happy when I cook it as when I eat it. The food I’m cooking now is simply the food I want to eat. It doesn’t have a theme, but then life doesn’t have a theme. It may be a warm salad of spiced roast cauliflower, chickpeas, parsley and pomegranates; a tray of slow-roasted lamb ribs (back to the breast of lamb I cooked as a student); an easy oven version of chicken shawarma; a salmon, avocado, watercress and pumpkin salad (avocados, which always make me think of geranium-lipsticked Great-Aunt Myra, are unapologetically abundant in my new book); banana bread with cardamom and cocoa nibs; a salted chocolate tart (assurance: no pastry involved); pasta snails with garlic butter, my reworking of a childhood treat.
And while I have not gone gluten-free, or anywhere near, there are quite a few new gluten- and dairy-free recipes. Cooking brings me pleasure, but I also wish to bring pleasure to those who eat around my table – and since there is always a contingent in either camp, I want to make food they can eat.
My repertoire is very much larger than my mother’s, but the way I cook is hers – spontaneous and impatiently slapdash – yet I enjoy cooking so much more than she ever did, perhaps because I allow myself to enjoy eating more. Each generation has found a way of telling women which foods they must resist, what dietary path they must follow to take up less space in the world, and every book of mine tries to find a way to undermine this reductive ideology. Recently, I have been particularly alive to the power of food to make us stronger and, as I get older, feeling well and vital is more central.
But this can never be at the expense of pleasure: a restricted diet speaks of a constrained life, a turning away from the world. I am so happily no longer the child who dreaded meals, and for whom food was an anxiety-provoking punishment. Everything I cook or eat is a grateful act of engagement with life and a celebration of it. And while my recipes, which are my way of keeping a diary, tell the broader story of how I live, how I feed my family and friends and myself, they are inseparably part of my fervent belief that what and how we cook can make our lives easier, make us feel better and more alive.
Warm spiced cauliflower and chickpea salad with pomegranate seeds
This is one of my favourite suppers, although there’s nothing that says you can’t serve it as a vegetable side as part of a more conventional meal. And you could also bolster it further by crumbling in some feta. But for me, it is perfect just as it is: the tomatoes almost ooze into a dressing in the oven, and the cauliflower softens, but not soggily.
For choice, I’d always use home-cooked chickpeas (I cook batches in my slow cooker and freeze them in 250g portions for everyday use), but otherwise I like the pre-cooked Spanish chickpeas in jars. Yes, they are more expensive than the canned variety, but the cheapest option is always to buy dried. Don’t feel bad about using chickpeas out of a tin, though: they won’t be as soft; but then, you don’t necessarily need them to be. The cauliflower and juicy tomatoes can stand some nubbliness.
The parsley is not a garnish – ugh, that word – but used as a salad leaf. And this is also very, very good cold; if you have some left over, it makes a fabulous packed lunch, or provides instant gratification on those days you have to eat fridge- side, with your coat still on, you’re so hungry. Serves two heartily.
1 small head cauliflower
3 tbsp regular olive oil
½ tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp cumin seeds
250g home-cooked chickpeas (or the same drained weight from a jar or can)
1-2 tbsp harissa, to taste (and depending on its heat levels)
4 smallish ripe vine tomatoes (about 150g)
1 tsp sea salt flakes, or to taste
3-4 tbsp pomegranate seeds
1 large bunch flat-leaf parsley, picked
Heat the oven to 220C/gas mark 7. Trim the cauliflower and separate it into small florets. Pour the oil into a large bowl, add the cinnamon and cumin, and stir or whisk to help the spices disperse. Tip in the cauliflower florets and toss to coat. Pour the contents of the bowl into a small oven tray and roast for 15 minutes. Don’t wash out the bowl you’ve been using just yet.
Tip the chickpeas into the empty cauliflower bowl, and add the harissa, tasting it first for heat, to see if you want to use both tablespoonfuls. At the risk of being repetitive, toss to coat. Quarter the tomatoes, add them to the bowl, and shake or stir to mix. When the cauliflower has had its 15 minutes, remove the tray, tip in the chickpeas and tomatoes, toss to combine and return to the oven for a further 15 minutes, until the cauliflower is tender.
When the cauliflower is ready, remove from the oven and sprinkle the salt over the vegetables, then (and this isn’t the last time) toss to combine with half the pomegranate seeds, before dividing between two bowls. Divide the parsley leaves between the two bowls and toss to mix. Scatter with the remaining pomegranate seeds and serve. (From Simply Nigella, 2015.)
• Nigella Lawson’s new book, Simply Nigella, is published next week by Chatto & Windus at £26. To order a copy for £20, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.. Nigella Lawson will be speaking to Zoe Williams on stage in London on 10 December. To book tickets, go to membership.theguardian.com
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