In the lead-up to the festive season, the UK’s ‘queen of Christmas’ is going back to her roots, brightening the tables of foodies around the world.
One of the upsides of this year’s lockdowns and restrictions was a worldwide resurgence of interest in home cooking and baking. In the lead-up to the festive season, the queen of Christmas, Nigella Lawson, is going back to her roots, brightening the table
“FOOD HAS TO IGNITE PEOPLE’S IMAGINATIONS.” NIGELLA LAWSON
“LOCKDOWN MADE SO MANY PEOPLE REALISE THE POWER OF FOOD TO TRANSFORM THE DAYS.” NIGELLA LAWSON
Nigella Lawson has a new word for us: anchovising. The linguistic invention appears in the food writer, television personality and UK celebrity’s new cookbook Cook, Eat, Repeat. It means, roughly speaking, to add a touch of depth and richness to food. But after the chaos of 2020, ‘anchovising’ is a word well worth appropriating to lend a sense of hope for the future. Adding a touch of richness to the lives of her worldwide fan base of foodies has been Lawson’s mission throughout her entire career, encompassing 12 cookbooks, 11 TV shows, numerous reality TV and live appearances, and countless newspaper and magazine articles, which all began with her 1998 breakout cookbook, How to Eat.
This talk of anchovising elicits that famous throaty laugh which, like all things 2020, is being beamed through a Zoom call from one kitchen table to another, halfway around the world.
“Food has to ignite people’s imagination,” says Lawson, whose new book weaves in the kind of joyful essays on food she is so loved for with more than 100 of her favourite dishes. “And I don’t mean the recipes, but the thinking about food. There has to be a freedom about it, to just talk about an ingredient and what its potential is. And people can take it where they want.”
Anchovising Christmas this year in the UK will be difficult, even for the self-proclaimed ‘domestic goddess’, as it stumbles into its Yuletide season amid social restrictions and uncertainty about its messy Brexit divorce.
With her offspring, Cosima and Bruno, now in their twenties, Lawson spent the UK lockdown on her own in her central London home. Far from feeling lonely, Lawson says she enjoyed her solitary days spent writing her first book in three years, and her afternoons on the couch with a Campari and soda and “crisps in a bowl”. But she sounds less cheerful about the thought of a COVID Christmas. As a result of the ‘rule of six’ entertaining limits on social gatherings (any gathering of more than six people in England is illegal, with few exceptions), Lawson says her Christmas celebrations have been left up in the air. “I’m making no plans, because I don’t know what will be possible, and I rather suspect nothing much will be possible. I don’t think one can plan.”
Bleaker still, London residents have been invited to pass on details of suspected law-breaking partying through non-emergency numbers as the country gets Grinch-like in its efforts to contain the pandemic.
However, Lawson says she has fond recollections of small-scale celebrations, including the treasured memory of enjoying a toasted sandwich and bag of crisps for Christmas dinner in the company of only her two-weekold daughter, Cosima, and first husband, John Diamond, in 1993. Their house was being renovated and the kitchen was a bomb site, and that simple meal was all the exhausted young mother could rustle up. “I did put a bit of cranberry in the toasted sandwich, to make it feel a bit more Christmassy,” she laughs.
This memory no doubt has extra resonance for Lawson, as Diamond died of cancer in 2001. In fact, Lawson has dealt with her fair share of heartbreak. In addition to Diamond, her mother and younger sister also died from cancer. She later went through a highly public divorce from her second husband, famed art collector Charles Saatchi, in 2013.
Despite it all, Lawson has shown considerable grace under fire to persevere, and perhaps gone on to greater fame, with appearances on MasterChef in the US and Australia, as well as book tours. She is also a familiar face to Kiwis as the star of their Whittaker’s chocolate commercials. Always one to find the positive, Lawson says the UK’s long lockdowns and restrictions have underlined how important food is in keeping people’s morale up and in giving the day some structure and focus.
UPSIDE OF LOCKDOWN
“All of this made so many people realise the power of food to transform the days, which I think is always the case, even in more benign circumstances,” she says. “It was just more emphatically the case.
“When you have a lockdown for several months, the only way of eating was cooking for yourself, and it made people take note of food much more, and necessarily so.”
In Australia, things are looking rather more positive for Christmas festivities, a point not lost on the self-taught cook who was due to visit our shores this year on a book-release tour but says instead, “I don’t think you want us contaminated people from Europe.”
“But it’s something I miss, as I love meeting readers. I miss Australia and New Zealand, too. But, you know what? I’m not a great planner in life and the minute I can visit, I will.”
For those of us here disappointed about missing out on Lawson’s famous warmth and wit, there’s plenty of it to be had in Cook, Eat, Repeat.
Its style, Lawson says, harks back to her first cookbook, and one that the former journalist, restaurant critic and columnist handles with aplomb. The Oxford-educated
daughter of conservative British politician Nigel Lawson and his first wife, Vanessa Salmon, Lawson’s somewhat self-deprecating claims of being ‘just a self-taught home cook’ are buttressed by a wonderful ability to relate the smells, sensations, textures and flavours of the kitchen.
From scoring the skin of a poached pork belly – “a curiously pleasant sensation” – to a chapter entitled ‘A Loving Defence of Brown Food’, she is again anchovising the once seemingly dull chore of home cooking.
Perhaps more than any of her other books, this one is anchored in the zeitgeist. When she talks in the book about Christmas celebrations, it’s couched in terms such as, “Heavy duty entertaining is off the cards this year”.
“I think it’s impossible to write a book like this and ignore what’s been going on,” she says.
“For me, food is something to reflect on, rather than just a practical cooking exercise.”
Despite the restrictions imposed by the UK lockdowns, Lawson has had a remarkably productive year, also managing to film a TV show to complement her book.
Called Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat, it comprises six half-hour episodes as well as a one-hour Christmas Special, and filming wrapped in early October.
Her UK fans reacted warmly to news that a Christmas special is included in the series – at least that tradition has survived to make December feel a little more like usual.
Lawson says, like so many things this year, the experience was unlike any filming she’s done before. “We managed to film while social distancing – it was pretty weird,” she admits.
There is a Nordic theme running through the Christmas recipes in her book, such as the juniper-berryand-dill-infused Norwegian Pork Rib and the potato and Swedish ansjovis dish, Jansson’s Temptation.
Lawson says that “while we’re confined to quarters” not only does she like the notion of “travelling through the kitchen” and having food from other places, she actually has a very long-standing connection with Norway – she visited frequently as a child with her family and learnt to speak Norwegian.
“These are recipes that I generally have a connection with and just added my little bit. If you come from a country like the UK, Nordic food makes a certain amount of sense, so that appealed to me.
“But in the end, I just write about the food I like and how I like to cook it.”
Despite her recipes essentially being crafted for the seasons of her homeland, she plays straight into the hands of Kiwi cooks with her Summer Berries dessert this Christmas.
“You can use fresh berries, how fabulous!” she laughs. “I certainly think that something so fresh and sort of fruity is the perfect thing to have after a big feast.
“Our countries have quite a lot in common in terms of sensibility, but of course, Christmas food couldn’t be more different because we’re eating under such different conditions. I write recipes for where I am, but I think that more people in Australia and New Zealand are beginning to really think about food that reflects where they are rather than where people were from hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
“So when we start getting into salads and everything you all will be eating things from my ‘brown food’ chapter,” she laughs.
TALKING ABOUT WHAT YOU LOVE
But she says there is, and always has been, something about food that connects people, regardless of your culture or where you live.
“I don’t think it matters whether I’m talking about stews or you’re thinking about having some cold seafood because one understands the language of food, and it tells a story about us all individually.
“And that’s what you share when you talk about food. There’s no room for the rubbish that can take over so much discourse, and instead it’s just talking about what you love, and the things that move you.”
Her simple advice for home cooks this Christmas is to keep things as manageable as possible and to use recipes that will make your life easier: “You don’t need to be able to chisel a radish so it looks like a chrysanthemum.”
VISIT MiNDFOOD.COM
On a 2018 trip to New Zealand, Nigella Lawson opened up about her personal values, work philosophy, gender equality, the Me Too movement and being driven by her fear of failure. mindfood.com/nigella-lawson-new-zealand-trip