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Bake Off made me braver – but I’m still petrified!
Nadiya Hussain, last year’s champion, on how the show changed her life – and her new TV travelogue that took her back to her roots in Bangladesh
‘My children need to see what Bangladeshi kids go through’
Nadiya Hussain is beside herself. She’s been without an oven for a week because she’s moving house and she can barely stand it. ‘My hands are itching!’ exclaims the reigning champion of The Great British Bake Off. ‘I desperately need to bake. It’s the first time in 11 years I haven’t been able to. I bake almost every day. I still buy sliced bread but even if I’ve got some I need to smell bread in the house, so I’ll bake some. For me, cooking and baking are more about the memories they conjure up, and the sharing. I like creating those memories with my family.’
Family is her husband Abdal, 34, a technical manager who became quite a heart-throb last year as he supported Nadiya during Bake Off, sons Musa, nine, and Dawud, eight, and daughter Maryam, five. But while their memories may be of freshly baked bread, Nadiya’s are somewhat different. A whole sheep on the dining table, for instance.
When she was a child, Nadiya’s father Jamir, who ran a restaurant and whom she lovingly describes as ‘eccentric’, would often arrive home with a sheep slung over his shoulder. ‘On a day he felt like having mutton, he’d go and spend £150 on a sheep,’ she grins. ‘He’d have called my mum and said, “Clear the table!” He’d plonk this sheep down and teach us how to butcher it – you need a hacksaw. Then he’d say, “How much do you think you can eat?” And that was it, all the pans were on and we were eating meat until it came out of our ears. He’d say, “How is it you’ve only eaten a quarter of that sheep? I’ve raised wimps!”’ she laughs. ‘I’m one of six children, but there are grandkids now so we can manage half a sheep.’
Nadiya’s father is also responsible for her childhood memories of Bangladesh – recollections she revisits in BBC1’s ingeniously titled two-part foodie travelogue The Chronicles Of Nadiya. Although she was born and raised in Luton and now lives in Milton Keynes, Nadiya, 31, and her family spent every summer in her paternal grandfather’s village in the Sylhet region of north-east Bangladesh.
Back then children taking holidays during term time was less of an issue and they once stayed for eight months, but it was clearly an education in its own right. ‘My grandad was a rice farmer and my dad wanted us to see the entire season there,’ Nadiya explains. ‘We’d get up at 4am to milk the buffaloes, then churn the milk to make cream and butter. We’d collect the duck eggs, then plough the fields. We did everything. That was our last summer with our grandad.’
It was clearly a magical time, and couldn’t have been more dissimilar to life in the UK. ‘Here, we can keep white things white,’ she laughs. ‘You can’t in Bangladesh because of the dust. It was a different life there. Dad would say, “If the children are going to Bangladesh they get no special treatment. They have to live like their cousins over there.” But my mum would sneak out some baked beans and sardines, and Dad wouldn’t know,’ she laughs. ‘In my grandad’s village you just eat what you grow, what’s in season. There’s a lot of fish in nearby lakes and a lot of fruit, and the two are combined in curries.’
It’s more than a decade since her last visit to the village, an extra special occasion because it was also when she married Abdal – they’re now planning to have a wedding ceremony in Britain – and her return became a trip down memory lane as she baked a pumpkin celebration cake for a relative’s wedding.
‘Going back after 11 years was quite emotional,’ she says. ‘Lots of people are no longer around. We call it my grandad’s village. He’s not been around for a long time but it’s still his. You can sense him. When I came back to England I thought, “I need my kids to see that.” You need to experience life from other people’s points of view to really appreci- ate the one you’ve got. I’d forgotten that. And I’m really lucky I have this other place I can call home.’
For the show Nadiya also travelled to other parts of Bangladesh that even her family there had never been to. ‘It felt like I was on an adventure,’ she says. She cooked for the crew of one of the country’s famous paddle steamers that ply the waterways, and visited a riverside village where they still practise the ancient art of otter fishing. ‘It was one of the best things I’ve done,’ she says. ‘The otters are just lovely. The fishermen send them out on ropes. They go under the water and herd fish into a net, but if they’re down there too long the fishermen know they’re stealing the fish!’
In the capital Dhaka she helped Thrive, a charity delivering meals to deprived schoolchildren. ‘We were in the slums delivering treats and it was amazing. Again I thought, “My kids have to see this.” They think they’ve had a bad day when they’ve dropped a fish finger on the floor, but there
are kids there who go to school because it means they’ll get a meal.’
Leaving her children at home was a concern for Nadiya. ‘I’d never been away from them for two weeks, so it was a big deal, but Abdal said, “It’s an amazing opportunity. Go. I’ll have them”.’ There was a downside, though, if not for the kids. ‘Abdal bought them toys every day,’ she laughs. ‘I said, “That’s not parenting! If you go away I don’t buy them toys every day.”’
The past year has been a whirlwind for Nadiya. She now has a newspaper cookery column, her debut cookbook, Nadiya’s Kitchen, is a bestseller, her new children’s book of tales and recipes, Bake Me A Story, is out next month – and she was asked to bake the Queen’s 90th birthday cake. How has she coped with fame? ‘I’m lucky because it’s there when it’s there – if I’m out and somebody recognises me – but it’s switched off at home, and I still do all the things every mum has to do. It’s nice to have that balance.’
She says she’d love to do more foodie travelogues and possibly open a restaurant. But hers, unlike the one her father ran, would champion Bangladeshi food. ‘ He served Anglicised versions of Indian curries but I wondered why he didn’t offer the food we ate. He said people wouldn’t like it, but I beg to differ. Bangladeshi cuisine hasn’t been shown to its full potential. I’d love to do something like that– with cakes for dessert!’
Her children could maybe help out; she says they love experimenting in the kitchen and seem to have sophisticated tastes. ‘Their birthdays are coming up and they don’t want the cakes kids normally want. Musa said, “I’ll have a croquembouche, Mum.”’ That’s the grand French dessert consisting of a pyramid of choux pastry balls bound with caramel threads. ‘I think he just likes the word, though,’ she laughs.
Baking cakes was alien to Nadiya at her son’s age. The only reason there was an oven at home was because it was attached to the hob. Her mum used it as storage and never baked. Nadiya fell in love with baking at school thanks to her home economics teacher Mrs Marshall. ‘I owe her a lot,’ she says. ‘I thought she was a magician when I watched her do the whole eggs, sugar, butter, flour thing, stick it in the oven and out comes a cake. I thought, “How does she do that?”
‘When I passed my GCSEs the school had this awards ceremony. Mrs Marshall told them, “You must give Nadiya a cookbook”, so they gave me Classic Cakes – with things like Swiss roll, Madeira cake and fruit cake. That was my go- to book. I saw Mrs Marshall when I turned on the Christmas lights in Luton last year. She’s so proud. I don’t think she realised what a good teacher she was. But she inspired something in me, and that’s a good teacher.’
Nadiya’s also proving inspirational, and her acceptance speech when collecting the Bake Off trophy was so rousing it made Mary Berry cry. ‘I’m never gonna put boundaries on myself ever again,’ she said. ‘I’m never gonna say: “I can’t do it.” I’m never gonna say: “Maybe.” I’m never gonna say: “I don’t think I can.” I can and I will.’
The Nadiya we witnessed then was so much more confident than the one who walked into the Bake Off tent on day one. She has admitted suffering anxiety attacks since the age of seven when bullies rubbed chalk dust on her face at school, and has said she wouldn’t have entered Bake Off if Abdal hadn’t persuaded her to.
‘It was really emotional,’ she says of her win. ‘Those were the hardest ten weeks I’ve had. I was living on four hours’ sleep, doing the school run still in my apron, coming home and baking. But it was a stepping stone to a different me. It’s made me braver. I’m still petrified on the inside – every time an opportunity comes up I think, “I’d like to do that but I’m scared.” But before I’d never have said yes to anything; now, I think it’s good to feel the fear and do it anyway. Everything I did on Bake Off scared me but I did it anyway and survived. I did it by being myself. I’m out the other end now and reaping the rewards.’ The Chronicles Of Nadiya begins on Wednesday at 9pm on BBC1.