Nigella Lawson considers herself a journalist rather than a writer, a home cook rather than a food expert. Tamasin Day-Lewis meets her to discuss food, family and the pragmatism that underlies her cooking. Portrait by David Loftus.
It is a measure of the change in status of the cookery book, and the breed of writer often to be found writing it, that at the recent launch of Nigella Lawson's book How to Eat, novelists outweighed food writers by a considerable margin. The glamourousness of the occasion was offset by an unexpectedly familial cosiness, which the author was clearly enjoying.
The fact that she hadn't eaten on the day of the launch - girls always buy serious frocks for their best weight - is par for the course. The frock in question was floor to ceiling dove grey, slashed at the back, restrained but sexy.
When men describe beautiful women, it is inevitably in terms of "I want her". When women describe beautiful women, it is more often in terms of "I hate her". Nigella is not hatefully beautiful nor, if it makes sense, is she ordinarily beautiful. She is extraordinarily beautiful. But what I was most struck by, as a disinterested observer (I had said I would like to write a profile and had been invited to the launch), is that at what should have been her moment of triumph, Nigella was living through the most unenviable circumstances.
At her side was her husband John Diamond, on his first sortie since his re-release from hospital, after another operation for tongue cancer. And, we learn two Times columns later, experimenting intravenously with champagne thanks to the deft skills and attentiveness of the maître d' at Axis, the venue for the launch party. John was busy conversing on paper. It was clear that the well known and the unknown alike were at the launch to support Nigella, and Nigella and John. Even Nigel Slater, an avid non-party goer, was supporting a pillar as close to the edge of the melee as he could get, and looking like he was finding it difficult not to enjoy himself.
Two weeks later, as I arrive at Nigella's house, her agent, Ed Victor, is on the telephone to say that the Americans have bought How to Eat. It seems that it took the commando unit of Ed and John to force Nigella's hand into writing her first book. John's insistence was reinforced by Ed's certainty, after a lunch they had just had. "He rang up and said to me: 'Do me a favour, just write a book based on everything we've just talked about. Don't think about it. If you're too frightened or too self-conscious, it won't work,'" recalls Nigella.
Nigella Lawson had already established herself in the journalistic arena sufficiently well for people to pay attention - most important in such a cluttered market. If she had been merely beautiful, and not the sharpest knife in the drawer, it would not have been too much of an impediment, but the whole point about Nigella being a food writer is that she brings an intelligence - a balance of intellect and instinct - a journalist's pen and herself to her work.
"I like a mixed portfolio," she states. "I stopped my Times column to judge the Booker prize. I also do a Channel 4 book programme and my monthly food column for Vogue. I strongly resist the notion that one can be interested in only one thing. I don't want to be put in a food ghetto.
"Now I've got children it suits me. I can be here for their tea and work on a book. All these things keep my food writing honest. The people who read me have got jobs and families, and my book's about how to cook in real life. I don't set myself up as an expert. When friends ring and ask me how to cook something, I haven't necessarily got the answer, but I probably know where to find it quicker than them.
"I was pregnant when I signed the contract for How to Eat, and I'd only written three chapters by the time I had Bruno. Then I stopped writing. I was inside that lovely newborn baby bubble. Then suddenly there was a deadline, so on December 28th I sat down and just wrote for six weeks. A chapter a week."
The title of her book is cruelly apposite. "It was John's idea. I certainly wouldn't have kept it if it hadn't been his," says Nigella. John has been unable to eat since his operation - his tongue and epiglottis have been removed. He is now tube-fed through his stomach. "He's got to learn how to eat again. His taste buds have mostly gone. I made him some custard the other day, but he doesn't appear at meals at the moment. But it's important that I cook for the children, and it suits me to eat at five o' clock with them. Otherwise there wouldn't be a family meal."
I ask Nigella whether she misses cooking for John, and the shared pleasure of eating together, more than he misses eating her food. "He's an old-fashioned meat and potatoes man, and he likes bought things like steak pies. When I've made a pizza, my daughter Cosima always says, "Why can't I have one in a box like Daddy?" John always ate the Hawaiian sort with chunks of pineapple. What I miss is no longer being able to buy some vile thing to show him how much I love him. It took years to get him to eat a chickpea. Sometimes he just comes into the kitchen to smell what's cooking. I have girlfriends round and people come to Saturday and Sunday lunch. When his speech improves, I hope he'll be able to cope with being there at dinner. At the moment, it makes people uncomfortable."
Normality is something Nigella is keeping an insistent grasp on. "I mind a lot that we can't go out to dinner, that we haven't been on holiday since John got ill. Holiday pictures of tomatoes, greengrocers, markets. You almost have to lose the memory of these things because you've got to. You're so fixed in the present. I can't project to Christmas."
Memory is at the heart of Nigella's book. Partly dedicated to her mother, who died in 1985, and to her sister Thomasina, who died of breast cancer at the age of 32, 10 days before Nigella gave birth to her first child, the book brings them back to life and evokes the feel, scent and warmth of their family kitchen. Our books have this major element in common. In my book West of Ireland Summers: A Cookbook, I wrote about my father, who also died when I was young, largely to the exclusion of my mother. I ask Nigella about not including her father in How to Eat and we reach a mutual conclusion: "It keeps my mother and sister in my memory. I hope he won't mind." Knowing this, I don't see how he could.
"Most of my cooking I learned from watching my mother. It was very influenced by Jewish culture, lots of flour-based sauces, which are a very European thing, and roast chicken with leeks in white sauce, very Hungarian. Our family always talked about food, it is part of Jewish culture, although generally it was considered uncouth to talk about food then. I once cooked for some grand people who thought the polite thing to do was to ignore what they were eating."
Nigella's mother's repertoire also included ratatouille, garlic, tarama, and spaghetti and oil influenced by an Italian au pair. "I don't think children make distinctions. They'll eat porcini or tinned ravioli." A scent of orange from the biscuits two-year-old Bruno is making downstairs suddenly fills the room.
"I remember making profiteroles when I was quite young. I think when you start cooking things that aren't sweet you really start learning to cook. At 16, I was sent off to some friends of my parents in Paris. They did lapin aux pruneaux and blanquette de veau. I remember coming back and cooking pigeon for my father. It's helpful having a greedy father. At university I became Queen of Onion Soup - it was about cooking with no money."
Nigella confesses to being a "control freak" in the kitchen. This comes across in her writing as a charmingly unprescriptive bossiness, alongside the ability to reassure while admitting fallibility. We get used to her begging us not to cook things that would induce a "nervous breakdown" and to her oft-used "frankly", uttered almost conspiratorially and robbing us of the feeling of them and us, writer and reader. And how can you not be cajoled into the kitchen by the admission of failure? "When you cook this Greek lamb stew, please don't do what I did and use retsina." And, writing about her squid with chilli and clams: "the sort of dinner I cook when I've got girlfriends coming over, chapter meetings of the martyred sisterhood." She is, after all, a pragmatic intellectual, endowed with a sense of humour and a deep allergic reaction to pomposity or pretension of any sort. In fact, she seeks unpretentiousness as rigorously as anyone I have ever come across.
Cosima has just started primary school nearby. "I don't want to have to work to maintain an expensive lifestyle. I can't take on a debt if anything happens to John. I don't want my children to go to a school where everyone's got big houses and the children have to wear felt hats. It's another kind of ghetto."
It's the same with her work. I ask Nigella what she calls herself. "I'm a journalist, not a writer. Writer sounds so pretentious. Ten years ago my ambition was to write fiction. In a male world, this was more valued. It's only now that people are beginning to be nice about food writing. It has a different status now. It is no longer like knitting, the barriers have gone down. I think it's absurd to think that it's only food.
"When you read a book, you bring all the other books you've read to it. It's the same with food, so you have to be honest about what you bring to it." Nigella asks me if I've read Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking. I hadn't, but I borrow Nigella's copy and sit late into the night exploding with laughter at a kind of honesty so raw that it dazzles with effrontery.
"If I could be an English version of her I'd be happy. She died young, it's heartbreaking," says Nigella. "If I'd read Laurie's book before I wrote my own, I couldn't have done it." I know just what Nigella means, my reaction is the same, but we often admire people without seeing quite how like them we really are.
The working title of her next book is How to be a Domestic Goddess. It suggests scaled-down perfection, the taking down of something off its pedestal and the plonking down of it on the hearth where it belongs. I suspect it will be for working women who are struggling not to feel alienated from domesticity. Women who long for their kitchen to smell like home. Obviously, Nigella can't talk about it yet.
At the end of our conversation, I think the thing I feel most is solidarity. That somehow our generation has to make food writing more about being a writer. Autobiography, memoirs, creating a world - good writing is always dependent on language, structure, perception, hard graft and having something to say.
What I want, on reflection, is to continue this conversation and many others with Nigella. What I want for her is John's return to health, so that she can return to the normality of nurturing in the way that best feeds the extraordinary "mixed portfolio" of her work.