Microwave? I call it the ‘you-know-what’ now, says Nigella

NIGELLA LAWSON has admitted she feels self-conscious about saying the word microwave after her unique pronunciation led to a deluge of jokes and memes online.

The celebrity chef went viral in December 2020 when, on her show Cook, Eat, Repeat, she said she needed to use some warmed milk for a recipe, and had done so by using the “meecrowah-vay”. In a Christmas Day interview with BBC Breakfast, Lawson revealed that her widely ridiculed mispronunciation was not a mistake but is in fact what she calls the kitchen device when at home.

But the attention it drew has left her feeling “self-conscious” about saying the word out loud. “I tend to refer to it as the ‘you-know-what’ now,” she added. Ms Lawson told the BBC she was contacted by many fans who shared mispronunciations that they had inherited afterwards.

She said: “So many families do have that – so they mispronounce a word because a child in the family could never say it properly and that’s become part of their family language, or just because they make jokes and they stick.”

Last year the chef and food writer said many people at Christmas overeat because they felt they should be “picking at things non-stop” throughout the day and urged people to eat for pleasure rather than for the sake of it.

She added that “obscene overindulgence” should be avoided and to avoid feeling overly full you should skip the “madness” of starters before the traditional dinner.

This year she advised that families should ditch traditional Christmas cake and instead opt for a more familyfriendly chocolate cake.

“As much as I love a slice of dense, damp Christmas cake, especially when eaten with a slice of strong, sharp cheese, I am surrounded by those who abominate dried fruit in all its seasonal manifestations,” she told The Sunday Times.