It’s not hard to imagine Nigella Lawson whipping up a six-course dinner for her friends on a weekly basis. She is, after all, the undisputed queen of the kitchen.
But after a lifetime of sharing her voluptuous cooking style with admirers all over the world, she has something to confess – she no longer hosts lavish dinner parties.
“I’ve got out of the habit of it,” says Nigella, 64. Instead, “I’m very happy for a friend to come over in their pyjamas to have supper.
“I’ll see people for not-quite-lunch and not-quite supper. I try to stop myself turning to roast chicken, but I often do. I’ll make potato salad with gherkins, capers, oil and vinegar, like my mother and grandmother. Everyone says, ‘Oh, I’m not eating carbs,’ but they always eat it.”
It’s been 25 years since Nigella made her TV debut with her first cooking show, Nigella Bites. It came hot on the heels of her first cookbook, How to Eat.
And with her mantra of deliciousness and pleasure over all else, she’s been tempting us with her kitchen creations ever since. At last count, she’s sold eight million books worldwide.
There have been times, of course, when her London home was stuffed with people on a regular basis, all happily chowing down on everything from her famous buttermilk roast chicken to her decadent chocolate raspberry pudding cake.
These days, she’s more likely to be sharing her goodies with the hired help.
“A man has only to come to fix the boiler and I’m giving him things gift-wrapped in foil,” she laughs. “My postman is always being called on to tell me which of the two cakes he likes the most.”
Nigella – mum to daughter Cosima, 30, and son Bruno, 28, from her marriage to journalist John Diamond, who died of throat cancer in 2001 – hit the headlines in 2020 when she pronounced the word microwave as “meecro-wah-vay”.
The video clip went viral, sending fans into fits of mirth, and she later explained the wacky pronunciation was a long-running family joke that she’d let slip by mistake.
Four years later, she says, she still feels too embarrassed to use the word, even pronounced correctly.
“It’s made me quite self-conscious,” she grins. “I tend to refer to it as ‘the you-know-what’ now.”
Despite her sometimes calorific creations, Nigella says she never fears putting on weight because of what she eats.
“I would rather have more flesh and eat more food,” she shares. “You have to work out what matters to you in life and what matters to me is eating. It is the way I celebrate life.
“If I did not make every meal something that I really want to take pleasure in, I think I would feel overwhelmed with lassitude, slight depression and disconnection.”
And the recent hubbub over the new weight-loss drug Ozempic leaves her cold.
“I read about someone saying, ‘I was on Ozempic and it was the first time I didn’t think about food all the time.’ Personally, I take great pleasure in thinking about food all of the time.
“I have spent a lot of my life trying to help people not feel that food is the enemy. I would prefer to think about what I add to my diet than what I remove.”
Nigella, who is also a judge on MasterChef Australia, credits her mother Vanessa for her love of cooking.
“My mother believed in child labour,” she smiles. “I was six and my sister was five. We cooked on a wooden chair. Very unsafe, standing stirring the white sauce or hollandaise sauce. My mum would start it and it was a way of getting it done.”
But all these years later, she still considers herself a cook, not a chef.
“I don’t have a particularly fancy palate,” she confides. “I love all sorts of foods… I’m inspired by chefs but I don’t want to cook like one. I love stirring the pot.”
Just don’t give her niggle about cleaning up after the pots are in the kitchen sink.
“I hate washing up,” she says. “And I hate putting away. I stack up and up and up. I don’t like washing, cleaning or putting clothes away either. It makes me feel very tetchy.”
What’s the one ingredient she can never be without?
“Butter,” she enthuses. “It’s so unthinkable not to have it. It is so unthinkable it makes me hyperventilate.”
Keep up with Nigella’s happenings on her site, nigella.com.
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