Doesn’t it seem like everywhere you look,
on every television channel, website, and magazine, there’s an “expert” lurking? Whether it’s how to organize your closet, how to raise your children, how to win friends and influence people, or how to make dinner, there’s a media-friendly somebody at the ready, full of rules and opinions and eager to give them.
Maybe that’s one of the reasons why Nigella Lawson, the English cookbook author and television host (most notably of How to Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food, published in 1998, and the program it inspired, Nigella Bites), is so refreshing. She’s the first to admit that she’s no expert, at least not in the strictest sense.
And you get the feeling she doesn’t care a bit if you follow her advice or not, just as long as her audience is inspired to experiment in the kitchen. She’s not a formally trained chef, but she’s a writer, a mother, a confident cook with the ability to inspire the same in others, and a person with an astute sense of her priorities in an increasingly upside-down world.
“It’s another contemporary neurosis, the fact that we don’t refer to our elders for guidance,” she says. “Now people don’t ask their grandparents about childrearing or food; they look to the ‘experts.’ I’m not an expert. I love food and I sure eat a lot of it. But I always say that if human beings needed training to go into the kitchen, the entire race would have fallen off of the evolutionary cycle long ago.”
It’s that kind of candor, plus her telegenic looks and self-deprecating wit, that’s made this Oxford graduate, former journalist for the Sunday Times arts pages, and restaurant and food columnist a global smash among foodies of all stripes. The first images of Lawson broadcast here in the United States (first on E!, then Style, and now on the Food Network), of her eschewing a carving knife and coyly tearing apart a roasted chicken with her hands, for instance, or licking the occasional finger, marked the beginning of a food revolution. She helped to demystify the kitchen several years before the Rachael Rays of the world were whipping up 5-minute recipes for millions of viewers. Her message—take a deep breath, trust your instincts, and do the best you can—seemed to be just what the first generation raised on takeout needed to hear. “The fact that I’m slightly clumsy, with no training, that I’m just a home cook, lets people see that you don’t need to have special gifts,” she says. “People feel nourished just seeing someone cook.”
At first, however, when a network executive caught wind of her first book (which was serialized in British Vogue) and wanted to create a show with her, she wasn’t interested.
“I had done TV before, as a talking head about public affairs, and I didn’t like it,” she says. Eventually, when they agreed to do it her way—unscripted, filmed in her home kitchen and painstakingly “lit like a movie”—she relented. Except for the lighting part, the circumstances were due to necessity more than self-indulgence, since her first husband was ill with throat cancer when she began filming the show and she didn’t want to be away from him for long. When he passed away in 2001, she stopped filming and concentrated on being with her young children and writing what she calls a “huge book” (Forever Summer).
“You have to make your work fit around your life. You very rarely get second chances,” she says. “When I’m writing, most of the time my work is indistinguishable from my life. But with filming, it’s in competition with my life. So I’m not on TV for two years? Tough. I want my children to feel stable and happy. TV isn’t going to go away, but those two years away from my children will. My self-esteem is not directly linked to my work.”
Today, she is happily remarried to an art collector and continues to work from home. A typical day consists of walking the children to school, coming home to work with her “girls” (a small team of loyal assistants who are as likely to help with math homework as they are to research the history of bread), logging on to “ridiculous websites and pretending to work,” cooking lunch for whoever’s around, writing, picking up the kids, making dinner and collapsing on the sofa in front of “CSI or whatever else is on before I get up and start again the next day.”
When book tours and filming for her latest volume Feast: Food That Celebrates Life and the show it >> inspired, Nigella Feasts (Sundays at 1 p.m. on the Food Network) do take her away from home, it’s with her family’s nod of approval.
“I’ll say, ‘If I do this, I won’t be taking you to school or back for the length of one term. If that’s okay with you, then I’ll do it. And they’re okay with it. They’ll say, ‘But Mom, I’m really proud of what you do,” she says. “They don’t necessarily want me to do ancient handicrafts with them after school. I think it’s important to have a model of a woman who works and gets things done.”
Lawson’s version of getting things done is as rooted in common sense as her approach to cooking, and her advice to other aspiring domestic goddesses is to do something for the act of doing, not exclusively for the end goal. Her experience as a journalist, in particular, was one that she valued for the opportunity it provided to learn something new every day.
“It’s never a waste of your time to gain a skill or experience. People think they have a plan, thinking one thing will lead directly to the next, and it doesn’t always work that way. I just think that the most interesting minds are the minds which can take in a lot of different and disparate information and let that add up to who they are.”
And while there’s a small cadre of formally trained chefs who are less than thrilled about her approach—just jumping in feet-first without worrying about formalities (and, more importantly, the success it’s brought her)—she doesn’t seem to mind.
“I feel vehemently that food and cooking have been dominated for too long by chefs and restaurants.
Home cooking is what I do. It isn’t an arcane art. It’s just putting food on the table.”
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