‘I have 4,500 food books and I love reading them’ TV chef Nigella Lawson tells Nivriti Butalia how her love for food is intertwined with her love for words

‘I have 4,500 food books and I love reading them’

TV chef Nigella Lawson tells Nivriti Butalia how her love for food is intertwined with her love for words

Hangovers, for the majority of us with limited kitchen skills, are cured best with fried eggs, hot buttered toast, and other greasy whatever-we-can-get-our-hands-on food. Such plebian measures, however are not for Nigella Lawson. The celeb chef, and author of How to Eat, cures hangovers with a Cuban chorizo (a spicy pork sausage) and black bean soup. In an email interview with The Mag, Lawson shares with us her attitude to food. Excerpts from the interview: Your cookbooks are gorgeous. Your TV shows have legions of fans. But your recipes, in your own words, are ‘not particularly healthy’. What role do diet and exercise play in your life? I’m a great believer in real food, which is to say that I’m very happy about butter. I know how it’s made… People always exaggerate the amount used because I think that maybe people don’t cook a lot. So if they see you put four spoons of cream in something, they don’t take into account that maybe six to eight people are going to eat that dish. Plus, you don’t cook like that every, single day. Do you allot calories to foods? As in, if you’re drinking lots of wine, will you take it easy on dessert or is the philosophy more like you only live once? I feel that there’s certain amount of hysteria and I often feel that the people who are the most worried about whether something is healthy or not probably eat an unhealthy diet because they don’t eat real food. There’s a French saying, which is, “Everything in moderation, even moderation.” You have some excellent recipes for aloo gobi, caramelised onion and lentil pilaf, south Indian vegetable curry, and chicken Mughlai. Do you experiment a lot with Indian food? The London of my childhood was full of Indian food and I think an Indian restaurant probably was one of the first restaurants I ever went to. And these days, we have much more of a mixture of Indian cuisines represented in London. So I suppose what I can do honestly is translate Indian food into my own repertoire, bringing my own way of cooking to it because I could not ever really do authentic Indian food. But I certainly have amassed Indian recipes in my time and I am always grateful. I just find Indian food remarkably sensual and beautifully fragrant, I love that. I feel it has a lot of depth. You’ve been a journalist. You are a writer. You cook cinnamon rubbed pousin with a scented couscous ‘baubled’’ with amber pomegranate seeds. Baubled! What is the connect between your love for food and your love for words? I’m not scripted. I just talk out of my head. But when I wrote my first book, the task I set myself was to use language to evoke very non-verbal languages, the language of taste, texture, smell… So my love of language and my love of food are very much intertwined. And I often think that it’s very similar when I can taste a sentence in the way that I taste food. Favourite food memoir? It’s difficult. I think my mother’s way of cooking chicken in a pot with water and vegetables and seasonings. It’s not a soup and it’s not exactly poached chicken, it’s somewhere in between. And I felt that in a sense, these unfashionable, perhaps not entirely photogenic ways of cooking get very ignored in modern life. And so it was a real pleasure for me and I call it my mother’s braised chicken. Personal vice you have no intention of giving up? I am actually quite opposed to a low-fat diet because I think it’s bad for your spirits and I also think it’s very bad for your skin. I eat quite a lot of avocado, quite a lot of olive oil and a certain amount of other fats and I feel it’s healthy. Radical view, but I believe in it. How do you keep coming up with new ideas and reinventing your shows. I am a complete food book junkie. I now have over 4,500 food books and I love reading them. It’s not that I read them and then copy a recipe. It’s that I might suddenly be reminded of an ingredient I hadn’t used for a while. I feel that I think in flavours or something, so I find that helpful. A lot of the recipes I do are simple; for example, my Nigella Express had recipes I cook at home. And sometimes they come into being simply because those are the ingredients I had. Obviously I refine them. I do experiment often, but I don’t experiment laboriously. I feel that I’m like the American penal system, three strikes and you’re out. If a recipe doesn’t get right in three goes, I feel it’s not meant to be.