Nigella celebrates comfort cooking

Home cooking can be languid or hurried, depending on the demands of the moment. It can be spontaneous, dictated only by the contents of one’s fridge, or carefully plotted out.

But despite the exacting standards put forward by some reality TV competition shows and meticulous Instagrams, it doesn’t have to be complicated. “Experience teaches you how to cook the way you want to cook,” Nigella Lawson says. “But it takes awhile. And we live in a society where people think they’re not allowed to make mistakes, and if it goes wrong, it’s shameful. I don’t know how you stop that, but it’s important to stop that.”

For two decades, she has been a passionate proponent of home cooking. Despite the reach of her 10 television series, bestselling cookbooks and cumulative 5.7 million social media followers, Lawson describes her cooking as “still very small-scale and domestic.”

In her 11th cookbook, At My Table (Penguin Random House Canada), she illustrates that there’s pleasure to be found in embracing home cooking as an unapologetically un-cheffy craft. “In terms of the rapport I have with my readers, I feel that we come from the same place. And that makes a big difference, I think,” she says. “I never write a recipe thinking, ‘I need to make this easy.’ When I cook it myself, I want to make it easy.”

The more than 100 recipes in At My Table flow freely, without chapters but in a natural order.

Dishes are attainable and satisfying, with inspiration from India, Italy, Spain, and the Middle East. In contrast to the muted flavours of many classic comfort foods, Lawson’s take is vibrant without being challenging. “I want to feel safe and wallowing in pleasure. But at the same time I want to feel slightly exhilarated,” she says. “I’m not looking to be sent to sleep or stultified by food … Both cooking and eating should make you feel a bit more alive, and flavour does that.” Recipes excerpted from At My Table: A Celebration of Home Cooking by Nigella Lawson (Appetite by Random House).