I first met Nigella Lawson back in 2018. She wandered barefoot down the tiled hallway of an old Melburnian manor and, just momentarily, a hush settled on the room.
It was as if she’d cast the gentlest of spells. Photographers, stylists, caterers, journalists, we were all, for a minute, caught up in her glamour. “Absolutely,” says Manu Feildel, her co-host on the new season of MKR (formerly My Kitchen Rules). “She walks through the door and the light goes on. She sparkles.”
Glamour. It’s an old Scottish word, originally intended to convey a supernatural, spellbinding beauty – the quality possessed by sirens in Greek myth or the girls from Beauxbatons in Harry Potter books.
When I mention the Beauxbatons girls to Nigella, she laughs, a very mortal, throaty chuckle. And suddenly the spell is broken, everyone relaxes. Because that is another of Nigella’s gifts – making those around her feel seen, welcome, comfortable. “It’s not her gorgeousness (powerful magnet though that is) that’s the secret of the affection the readers and viewers have for her,” an old friend, historian Simon Schama, once wrote in The Financial Times. “It’s her deep well of authentic, unstuffy friendliness.”
And that unstuffiness stops her from taking her celebrity (she is famously one of very few British celebrities who need only a single name) too seriously. “I get embarrassed by too much fuss and attention,” she says, quite honestly, “because in a way it’s a distorting lens. We’re all just people, and that’s where we connect. You want to bond with people at that level.”
One of the reasons Nigella has enjoyed her recent stint on MKR is her ability to form those bonds with fellow home cooks and share their personal connections with food.
“People suffer from nerves and lack confidence,” she explains, “and I understand that because often they cook recipes that mean a lot to them, and there’s a lot riding on it. That’s why home cooking is so fascinating to me. It is about the food – of course it is – but it’s also about those deeper connections we make in life. It’s such an emotionally charged arena. You can test out a recipe from a book and if it doesn’t work, yes, you’re disappointed. But if you’re doing a dish that your grandmother made and it’s part of your family’s language, then the desire to do justice to that can be quite anxiety-provoking. Yet it’s also such a welcoming, intimate act. You’re sharing your family’s own private language in a way.
“When we talk about hospitality, we tend to refer to restaurants. But hospitality is absolutely the driving force of home cooking. When you invite people into your home, it is a generous act, and I am aware of the privilege of eating the food that is so important to these people.”
Nigella’s family history with food is, however, somewhat conflicted. As a child, mealtimes were a trial to her, and she ate only reluctantly.
Her mother, Vanessa, a Jewish heiress and gamine beauty, was depressive, quick to anger and suffered with an eating disorder, but nonetheless insisted her children ate every morsel they were served.
Anything left behind was presented to them again, cold, the following day. Even so, Vanessa was a fine cook, and she liked to involve her children (there were four of them) in goings-on in the kitchen.
Today, Nigella says her mother is the cook she has learnt most from. Vanessa died from cancer at just 48, but one can’t help wondering, if she could see her daughter now, what she might think.
“It’s so hard to imagine,” says Nigella. “I don’t think she would have expected this from me, but I think she would be amused, mystified and I hope a little proud of herself for introducing me to food and cooking, although for her it wasn’t enormously straightforward.”
And then she adds, as an afterthought:
“You know, if she were alive today, she would be pretty much exactly the same age as Claudia Roden” – an Egyptian-born British anthropologist and cookbook author who popularised the flavours of the Middle East 50 years before Ottolenghi and has been a friend since Nigella was a teen.
She too influenced the way in which Nigella has placed food at the centre of her life.
“It is such an essential part of me,” she says. “I find a lot of meaning in it. When I’m away for a long time, it feels odd to not be cooking. I don’t know who I am if I’m not involved in that. I don’t know what you do with your days. So it’s the cast of my mind and it’s also the way I give structure to my days and therefore my life. It’s as natural to me as breathing. It is a language as well. It tells stories beyond taste and texture.”
Is it a language she has passed on to her own children, Cosima and Bruno, and does that go towards healing the somewhat conflicted relationship with food in her own family when she was growing up?
“I think so,” she says. “I think it’s been a normal thing for them.”
As Cosima and Bruno are both now in their twenties, Nigella spent much of the long British lockdown in the early days of COVID alone in the light and colour-filled London home where she’s lived since her horribly public and traumatic split from her second husband, Charles Saatchi, almost 10 years ago.
She spent many of those lockdown days honing her most recent book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, and hours chatting with fans on social media (which she famously manages herself). “I think I’ve always had this intimate connection with readers,” Nigella says truthfully, “but in lockdown, I was definitely on Twitter more.”
And her fans were delirious with joy every time she responded personally to a query.
“Normally,” she adds, “I would just answer things to do with my recipes, but I thought people were feeling really stranded in their kitchens, so I did start answering other questions. Things like, ‘This is what I would use if I didn’t have that ingredient.’ They were very often questions about how to adapt. And I liked the conversation. I liked chatting to people. Writing the book felt like a conversation, too – with my own memories and with the people out there.”
As the lockdown dragged on, of course, some of the questions became more challenging. “People would send messages and say, ‘It’s so depressing just cooking for myself’,” explains Nigella. “And I tried to say, ‘It really shouldn’t be depressing. It’s the most wonderful thing.’ I’ve always cooked for myself. It was part of holding onto my sanity when my husband [her first husband, John Diamond] couldn’t eat, because he had oral cancer. At first you go into a thing where you just grab a sandwich, but then I thought, ‘No, it’s really important to prepare a meal’.”
The first UK lockdown was for three months, which, as Melburnians know, is a long while to spend in one’s own company. But in all honesty, Nigella says, she quite enjoyed it.
“I’d already come to the conclusion that I adore solitude, which is just as well,” she says with that languorous smile that she used to reserve for descriptions of breakfast in bed.
“I think that’s also about being a bit older. So, I feel very fortunate that I didn’t feel lonely during lockdown. I don’t know how I would have been if I hadn’t been so busy writing a book, because all those words kept me busy. Though I think all of us had our focus slightly hit. I would write for a while and then walk around for a bit. I had problems reading for a time. I had reader’s block, and that really made me anxious because I’m such a reader. Luckily the reading came back.
“I also think my laziness was compounded. I’m not someone who feels, unless I’m going out of the house to see people, that I need to dress smartly or put make-up on or even brush my hair much. So, I really felt I was in danger of going feral.”
Nigella was pleasantly surprised that she didn’t feel very anxious during those long solitary months. “I think I’ve become less anxious than I was when I was younger,” she suggests. “Maybe that happens. I think it becomes so counterproductive. It can become a bad habit. You can slide down that pole of anxiety without really thinking about it. You can’t change entirely the cast of person you are, but really it is possible to be less anxious. There are things people always say, which sound so cheesy: being in the present, rather than worrying about the past or the future. We all worry about futures that may never exist, so I think being in the present helps a lot and, for me, cooking keeps me there. I find cooking helpful with anxiety. It’s manual work. I think that’s quite important.
“It might be woodwork or gardening. When you put your intelligence into your senses, that is a very good way of short-circuiting an anxious brain … But I do try to protect myself. I need a certain amount of time by myself and I need a certain amount of time lolling about as well as working hard.”
It sounds almost as though Nigella has become a glass-half-full person, which would be a turnaround. This too makes her laugh.
“I used to be not only a glass-half-empty person,” she says philosophically, “but ‘the glass is half empty and the liquid isn’t right’. Now, if not glass-half-full, I am just much more … I don’t know … I think that I’m grateful, as I should be. I know that sounds like a slightly cheesy thing, but I am. I feel very grateful. I was so lucky during COVID. I had a roof over my head, I had work I could do. I had food on my table and a little bit of outdoor space. I just felt so incredibly lucky, and I think it’s important to know that. Life can be very hard for some people – it can be a big struggle. So, I’m aware that I’m lucky.”
What about regrets?
Has this new, equanimous Nigella made peace with her past? If she could go back and change just one small thing, would she?
Unsurprisingly for a woman who has been known to quote philosophers in her cookbooks, Nigella considers the matter seriously.
“That’s a very dangerous question,” she responds gravely. “I don’t know that I could do that. I don’t know that I could take responsibility for the different way things would have gone. I think that human beings spend so much emotional energy thinking about things they should have done differently or that they wish they could change. But you cannot change the past and it’s the greatest waste of one’s life force. It can destroy lives, when people cannot get over things they have done in the past. It’s a great source of human unhappiness – living with your head turned around the wrong way.”
Another source of unhappiness, though perhaps not such a significant one, is the genre of cooking show that Nigella has described as “a theatre of cruelty and humiliation”.
She has said in the past that she would never appear on a program that didn’t show its contestants the requisite respect.
And she stands by that. “Absolutely,” she says. “I don’t like that at all. I think it’s counterproductive for everyone. It makes people at home feel inhibited about cooking too, because they have this persecutory voice in their heads. I couldn’t be-part of a program like that. It doesn’t mean to say you’re not honest, but there’s never a need to be mean.”
Which is yet another reason Manu was delighted to welcome Nigella to the new season of MKR.
“It’s why she was the perfect person to join in,” he explains, “because that’s what we got rid of with MKR this year – the fights and the competition and people stabbing each other in the back. Originally, MKR wasn’t about that … We went away a little bit from what MKR used to be and we’re bringing that back – that sense of encouraging people just to cook and love food.”
Nigella has now returned home to London, after a very Aussie first half of 2022 which included both the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival and filming MKR.
Today, in the short term, Nigella is contemplating rustling up one of her famous urban ploughman’s lunches. In the long term, she feels sure she’ll be back Down Under soon.
Her friends have started teasing her about becoming a “regular Aussie commuter”. But otherwise, she says, she doesn’t like to make too many plans these days.
“I’m quite open to doing different things, to trying different things,” she says with a slightly adventurous tone, “but I’m not one of life’s planners. In a way, life happens as it does. You can make plans, but it doesn’t mean they are going to come to pass. You know, in the kitchen, you need to have some structure, but you also need to be able to go with the flow, and I think it’s the same with life. We’re all different and I think some people would feel rather structureless without plans, but it suits me. I feel I’m in a very nice stage of life.”
