Nigella Lawson Wants to Talk to People

“In cooking, as in writing, you must please yourself to please others,” Nigella Lawson wrote, in her first book, “How to Eat,” from 1998. In the course of eleven subsequent books (and more or less the same number of television series), she has rarely strayed from this gastronomic axiom. To please oneself requires confidence, which in turn requires knowledge—emotional, intellectual, sensual. Lawson’s most recent book, “Cook, Eat, Repeat,” was written almost entirely during London’s coronavirus lockdown, during a four-month period that she spent in near-total solitude. Its essays and recipes take a more intimate—and, consequently, more expansive—approach to the nature of pleasure. Lawson devotes one chapter to the unglamorous anchovy. Another is titled “A Loving Defense of Brown Food.”

In England, where Lawson lives, she is a titanic figure—the Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman recently noted that, after Princess Diana, she is Britain’s only no-surname-required public figure. This status is a consequence not only of her success as a writer and television star but also of the tabloid frenzy surrounding the end, in 2013, of her second marriage, to the billionaire Charles Saatchi. It can be striking to compare the Lawson of the broadsides—a posh, exquisite cypher, sorrowful and sharp-edged—with the affable, idiosyncratic person who began her career as a journalist and maintains an aversion to the trappings of fame. I spoke to Lawson last week, over Zoom, as she sat on a sofa adjacent to her kitchen. Her son’s cat, whom she has been caring for during the pandemic (and who is named Cat), slinked in and out of frame. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we talked about performance and privacy, breaking the rules of her own recipes, and the fiction of the food-magazine dinner party.

Do you think there’s something particularly intimate about cookery writing, and putting that sort of writing out into the world?

I think there both is and isn’t. I feel that writing about food allows one to be utterly honest, and personal, and in no way guarded. But, in some sense, it’s a metaphor for the personal, rather than being actually personal. It’s not revelatory, I would say. It’s personal without being confessional. That’s the kind of personal that I feel more comfortable with.

There’s such a desire, I think, on the part of readers and maybe publishers, to want the confessional—the deep, “I’m pouring out my viscera on the page” kind of piece, and then here’s the recipe as punctuation at the end.

I don’t know that I feel pushed toward that, except perhaps when it comes to that curious thing—more in this country than in yours—whereby you’re put on trial for having written a book, and you’re asked to defend the book in all manner of ways. Things are always thought to have some deep meaning to uncover. In a way, I feel I’m quite personal in this new book, about my mother, and other things, but it feels within the context. It doesn’t feel like hideous oversharing, even if it’s indiscreet. It doesn’t feel like Coriolanus is being begged to go into the marketplace to show his wounds.

Is that a degree of personal that you think you would have been capable of with your earlier books?

I don’t feel a great need to talk about every aspect of my life. I remember, in, oh, my fourth book or something, I said in a recipe something like, “You can’t rely on anything, you can’t rely on anything or anyone else in this world, and therefore you have to do it yourself.” It was in the context of a recipe for one, which was some chicken with lardons and lentils. And some reviewer said that the focus on food often hid the fact that I had a rather bleak outlook on life.

On the whole, a book always feels so much more intimate anyway than other forms of discourse. It certainly feels that only those who are wanting to read it will be reading it. Television is slightly different—it can feel very intimate while you’re making television, but you do have to remember that it isn’t just the people in the room who are going to see the program.

But I think long ago, even when I did interviews, I felt that it was possible to be open without being revelatory. You can protect yourself without being dishonest.

In the essay about brown food, you describe how so many of the foods that are exquisite in real life, like stews and braises, just have a total flattening effect in photos, all of their beauty is taken away when they’re put behind a camera lens. It does feel ripe for a metaphor.

Yes. It does, doesn’t it? And that’s right, you see, in the sense that so much of what we prize in life, in people, in food, in our surroundings, is such a mixture of mess and beauty. The polarization that goes on in our world now, in far more sinister ways than this, makes actually talking about things other than in one’s own terms impossible. Because things always have to be good or bad, or be a pithy answer, or a way of soothing other people.

Do you keep that in mind as you write?

The first time I did publicity in the States, I was on some talk show—I don’t know where it was—and someone said to me, “You’ve suffered a lot of loss in your life. What has it taught you?” And I said, “It’s taught me that the universe is random and cruel, or chaotic also.” The panic in this man’s eyes when I said that! Because that’s not an answer he could deal with. I waited for a while, and then I thought, I’ll be kind, so I said, “And it’s taught me to cherish life and be grateful for the good things.” And, oh, the look of relief! He almost sank back in his chair. I feel that often—people ask you questions, but there are only certain answers they want.

Do you mean he couldn’t handle that answer journalistically? Or was it more of an existential thing?

I think it was probably the sort of show to make people feel better and cozy and that sort of thing. So it was probably the wrong thing for me to say, but I also think that there’s such a false view about people who cook. Yeah, people who cook are nurturing, but we’re also controlling. It’s quite interesting that people always read the desire to take pleasure in small things as an optimistic response. Whereas you could say it was the response of a seasoned pessimist. That you grab what you can, and you’re not waiting for the great golden horizon.

It feels like that old line about how the optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist is sure that it is.

That’s brilliant. I love that.

I was thinking earlier that you can play a similar trick with the title of your new book—“Cook, Eat, Repeat”—where, depending on how you approach it, it can read as an invitation or a threat.

On the one hand, cooking is largely written about as if it’s just this beauteous thing that comes into the world, and it’s also so often written about as if it’s a hobby. And the hobbyist approach I find odd. Even on days when you don’t want to do it, you have to get dinner on the table. The discipline of having to do it means you’re almost not responsible for making the decision, and that makes it easier. You just do it, and then, as you do it, you feel a bit better.

Do you really have to do it? Even if you don’t go to a restaurant, there’s takeout, grocery stores are all doing prepared food.

I don’t know. I can’t quite see the point in getting food that you could cook yourself. I’m so happy to have just bread and cheese. I think, perhaps, in terms of good stuff relative to income, it’s probably a bit less expensive in New York than it is here. But, in a sense, you can’t get takeout forever. I would feel, after a while, a bit shortchanged if I were simply the consumer.

I like that distinction—there is an art to consumption, which is its own thing. But creating it is a very different act.

It is very different, and you need both. In the past year that we’ve been under lockdown, I’ve cooked mainly just for myself—I’m sure friends of mine who’ve had to cook for their family of four, day in and day out over the last year, feel very differently about it—I’ve never cooked just for myself for so long. I have enjoyed it immensely. In the same way, I feel I’ve been shown a troubling, relatively new tendency in myself to be alone for so long without being lonely.

Would you have suspected that you would enjoy being alone for so long?

No, I never used to like solitude much. I went a bit too inward. It must be an age thing—over the past three years, I have found I have grown not just to enjoy solitude but to need it. Like many things, once you get used to it, it becomes very necessary. It doesn’t follow that I would have enjoyed it when it was quite so unremitting, but I did. I do.

I don’t know to what degree this is about solitude, and to what degree it’s about the pandemic, but I have found my relationship to time has changed enormously. I can be sitting on the sofa and two hours have gone by, and I don’t quite know how that’s happened. I find it easier, having days that are not broken up. I’ve never been someone who likes going out for lunch, unless I’m on vacation. I can’t change modes. If I know I’ve got to go out in the daytime, I get very little work done in the morning because I’m thinking I have to go out, and then when I get back I feel like I can’t do anything now.

You’ve written often about cooking for one, starting with your first book. Did your sense of the practice evolve when it came to such sustained solitude?

I have cooked for myself for a long time, because John [Diamond, her first husband] had oral cancer, so I had to cook only for myself, and I got used to it. But, yes, cooking for yourself in the context of a life where, on the whole, you’re feeding other people as well, is very different from when you’re cooking for yourself all the time. Because, if you’re cooking for other people a lot, often you make yourself a little thing from leftovers, or you have a bit of cheese on toast or something like that, or a bit of pasta. But I found, in the first part of the pandemic, it went a bit weird. When I write, I forget to eat at the right times, because the thing of writing about food is you can’t be too full up, but you can’t be too hungry. So, that’s very difficult to get right. But then I thought, “No, I need to get a structure for myself.” And so looking forward to my dinner in the evening—which got earlier and earlier—was something I loved. I don’t think normally I would think of making myself a Dover sole for dinner, but I did because, I mean, I didn’t want to have just enlarged snacks for every meal. And I sat at the table. I eat so terribly fast, it’s almost pointless, but I sit at the table, and I look forward to it. And I would plan what I’m going to eat for the next few days, because shopping was more complicated.

There’s something about suddenly having limited access to ingredients—you get into patterns, and you’re defined by your limitations.

It leads to being more creative with what you’ve got, but I think cooking is so much a matter of temperament. Even though I might plan what fish I’m having, because I have to get it, I don’t plan how I cook it till pretty much the last minute. I find I’m someone who feels confined by plans. In work, in life, I like things to be a bit last-minute. I enjoy myself so much more when I’m having to open the fridge and work out that if I don’t use the cilantro today it really is going to be useless, and I have to use that, and that lime looks like it needs attention. I find that much more of a spur to creativity—I just love the feeling of using up. And I hate having to obey instructions, even though they are mine! I want to change everything, even in the recipe I made myself.

If you are not an experienced cook, you can feel very held hostage by the ingredients list.

I feel I’ve spent the last twenty years trying to say to people, “You can change that! This ingredient is sour, just use something like that.” The other day, I shared a recipe that had cilantro in it, and I know there are a lot of people who can’t cope with that, so I said, “I would suggest some mixture of dill and fresh mint, if you don’t like cilantro.” And then people will say, “I don’t like mint, can I use just dill? Can I use something else?” You could use whatever you want! It’s about your taste.

In your essay on recipes, you write, “There’s a particular immediacy about a recipe, in that it can never be written for posterity. Even if it endures long after its author, it is a message entirely in the present.” This feels almost the opposite of the usual poetics of recipes, where they’re framed as a bridge across time.

Well, they may be in retrospect, but they’re certainly not when you write them. Because, when you write them, you are thinking of people in their kitchens now. Even a recipe that I might have written fifteen years ago I might write differently now, because there are different varieties of food in the shops, people have access to a wider range of ingredients, online is much more present—all those things. That is the journalistic aspect of recipe writing: Why this? Why now?

Recipes, once they outlive the age in which they were born, become curios. They become of historical interest or part of anthropological research—and, also, they may just simply be forgotten. What did James Joyce, was it in “Ulysses,” write about newspapers? “Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof.” And social media takes even further the idea that you can write a recipe and it’s for now: someone is in the supermarket and they want to ask you, “You said to use this sauce, but they’ve only got these two other sauces. Which one do I get?” So you’re very much pulled back into it being just now. I like that, in a way.

There is that one-on-oneness that I’ve always found so inherent to recipe writing. It’s very direct and conversational: I’m telling you what to do, and there is an I and there’s a you. But social media makes that real. In a book it’s more implied.

Well, you hold the microphone for a lot longer with a book. I was late to social media, and then I got quite into it. When the lockdown started—and I put myself in lockdown before lockdown, because you only had to see what was happening in Italy, in France—my hours changed. I woke up very early, bed earlier. I’m not a great sleeper anyway. So, at four in the morning, I would come down to this sofa, make my tea, sit here, and I’d answer people on social media. Before, I would answer questions that related to just my recipes. But I thought that now people were panicking, and they needed answers. They were rather straightforward questions: What can I do with this or that ingredient? I really warmed to that sense of companionship. I like stories. I’m very nosy. I like people telling me what they’ve cooked, and when, and who for. In many ways, that was always the joy of book signings in the old days, before camera phones were invented, and you stopped having conversations with people in the line and started having to do selfies.

This is why social media is, I think, an authentic form of communication. I also feel that people are so generous to cook your food and tell you about it, so it seems to me remarkably graceless not to answer. I mean, obviously you can’t answer everyone, but also it’s a genuine pleasure. Though I find Twitter conversations beyond simple question-and-answer can get harder. It’s always fun and all, but quite difficult if something gets retweeted, to the extent that all the shouting people want to come on board. That holds no allure for me.

It’s absolutely the worst.

I once reviewed a book about Bette Davis—I recall, when she was a bit fed up, she would lie in her room and tear pages off her address book, and that cheered her. I feel, in the same way, there is never something more pleasurable than pressing unsubscribe or pressing block.

It is a very nice feeling. Your recipe for creme caramel serves one, and you mention in the headnote that it’s tremendously liberating to make this only for yourself, because then there’s no performance to the unmolding. There are no stakes to failure.

I used to feel that cooking was something you did for other people—for your kids or friends—and cooking for yourself was this rather delicious aberration. Whereas now I feel much more that the real thing is cooking for yourself, and you have to watch that it doesn’t become corrupted when you cook for others. It has to be just you and the pan, and, when you taste it, you ought not be worrying about judging it as an achievement or not an achievement. This notional dinner party that exists in all magazine editors’ heads is rare. It’s like people who find an apartment that’s got a dining room—how often are they going to use a dining room? You always just store your boxes in it, or it becomes a study. I don’t have people for dinner I don’t know well. I mean, why would you? Mostly I’m cooking for one other friend, or a couple of friends. So, I feel a bit that, when you cook yourself, you’re concentrating on what you want it to taste like. And yet, when you cook for other people, suddenly you’re in view of the judging eye, however you guard against it. When I tell people, in my books, that they mustn’t be like that, I’m also telling that to myself, because it is hard.

Has your sense of this been shaped by having had a life that’s been so public?

Yes, certainly. If I’m here in London, say if I went to a restaurant, excepting a very few restaurants, I don’t feel I’m in a safe private space. I know that a restaurant clearly isn’t private, but what I mean is it’s not what going out to dinner can be, and what I know it should be like. And I don’t really enjoy that. I find it far less frightening to go onto a stage and do a Q. & A. than I would find walking into a restaurant here.

Did you know that this would be what fame was like?

No, I didn’t really. And, also, I’d been a journalist for so long before my first book was published. So you think of just existing in your writing. It was different. And, listen, it was so different then, for a number of reasons. In 2018, I did a tour, and I wouldn’t allow anything to be filmed. It doesn’t matter if it’s fifteen hundred people in the theatre—if I’m on stage and see anyone with a phone, I actually would turn and say to them, “Stop it.” Because people often also ask quite private things in there. People know I have a certain experience with grief or loss, and they bring that sometimes, even if it’s about food. You talk in a different way if you think it’s not going to be on YouTube. You’re either doing a performance that’s going to be filmed, or you’re talking to people; you can’t do both. And I’d rather talk to people.

I find the blurring of private and public slightly difficult. You could say I did bring it on myself: when I started doing TV, I shot the TV programs in my home. At that time in my life, it never seemed to me that I was invading my own privacy by having cameras in the house. It seemed O.K., because it doesn’t feel like that when you’re shooting. Then, when it airs, and you’re the person on camera, it feels like you’re being consumed by others. It’s an alienating feeling.

Is it alienating from yourself, or alienating from the rest of the world, or . . . ?

A bit of both. When people don’t treat you the same, then it’s uncomfortable. And I find it so uncomfortable seeing oneself from the outside, I suppose, or seeing other people’s views of you. For someone who’s quite prone to anxiety, and also quite a porous person, I suppose the thing that’s really been an extraordinary shock to me is how absolutely determined I am not to let other people’s words infect me. Even when I was younger, I was capable of simply not reading something that’s horrible, and now I think I’m probably capable of reading it and not ruminating an awful lot. I’ve got better on the ruminating front. Provided one has health, I can really recommend getting older.

That’s good to hear. I’ll consider it. Is this sense of distance something you’ve cultivated thanks to practice, or is it just a matter of time?

I think it’s that I am generally quite a lazy person. Lazy people work the hardest, I’ve always said, to make time to make themselves happy just lying on the sofa, eating chocolate, and reading novels. So, my laziness is greater than my vanity. I object to vanity. For example, I hate the fact that if I go out somewhere, I’m likely to be papped. But it doesn’t actually make me make the effort to put makeup on, or even brush my hair or get dressed properly. I just don’t have the energy for that kind of an effort. That would ruin my life much more. I don’t enjoy doing famous-people things.

Like what?

Well, going to parties of people I don’t know. Or going out all the time, late nights, movie premières, first nights at the theatre—I mean, all those things. If you have to dress and you’ve got cameras pointed at you, it automatically is hideous. Most of my friends I’ve had for a very long time, and that makes a big difference, I think. And I started all this quite old. I was thirty-eight when my first book came out. And I think I was forty when I started doing my first food TV. At that age, it’s work, not life—but if you’re twenty, it’s your life. And no one knows you except through that. That would be awful, I think. Though there are people who like it. One of the things I think everyone has to be reminded, constantly, is that there are people who like the things one hates.