Her name may now be synonymous with culinary suggestiveness, a byword for butter-laden indulgence, but when her first cookery book, How To Eat, was published in 1998, Nigella Lawson thought it would be a “one-off”.
But “towards the end of writing it, I got the idea for my second book, How To Be A Domestic Goddess,” she said — intended as an “ironic title”. Lawson has since sold more than eight million cookery books worldwide.
Speaking to Times Radio, Lawson, 65, admitted that having been a journalist in her twenties and thirties, becoming deputy literary editor of The Sunday Times aged 26, she saw her move into cookery writing as a “late career change”.
At the Booker Prize ceremony in 1998
DAVE BENETT/GETTY IMAGES
“I was 38 — I thought I was old. That is quite alarming,” she said. “But look, I’m still here.”
Her first television cooking show, Nigella Bites, launched on Channel 4 in 1999, followed by more series including Nigella’s Christmas Kitchen and Simply Nigella, and judging roles on shows including Masterchef Australia and US cookery competition show The Taste. While she has not presented a UK series since Nigella’s Cook, Eat, Repeat in 2020 — in which she showcased her idiosyncratic pronunciation of microwave — she is keen to make another. “I would [like to], actually,” she said. “The way I film, things take a long time and I love that and I love my crew and I always enjoy it.”
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The daughter of former chancellor Nigel Lawson and socialite Vanessa Salmon, Lawson was married to the journalist John Diamond, who chronicled his throat cancer in his weekly column for this newspaper and died in 2001, aged 47. In 2003 she married the art collector Charles Saatchi; the couple divorced a decade later, with Lawson citing unreasonable behaviour.
While still based in London, Lawson, who has two adult children from her marriage to Diamond, now spends significant periods of time in Australia and is fronting a campaign for the country’s tourism industry which launches this week.
Lawson in Sydney in 2018
ANNA KUCERA/THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
“What is really fantastic now for me, at my age, is that I don’t have to stay home and look after people. I can work there. So I have perhaps six weeks a year of a different life. And I do feel a bit freer,” she said. “There is something about that big sky that settles me in my skin.”
Asked whether this feeling of freedom is due to a lack of scrutiny and attention compared with Britain, Lawson said: “No, I don’t find that different. But the Australians are so laid back that I’m not sure that they’re much given to making a fuss. And that’s relaxing.”
Widely considered the architect of televisual food porn, with a presenting style famously employing finger licking and eating from the fridge in a nightie, Lawson denied being deliberately coquettish on screen. “I know that I’m quite an intense person. I don’t see it as vampy. But obviously television is also an editor’s medium. And they have to cut out an awful lot of me spilling things and cutting myself,” she said, adding that “you kind of lose your innocence after the first series because [before that] you’ve got no idea how it’s going to be viewed or judged.”
Asked whether, in the light of recent scandals surrounding Masterchef in the UK, including allegations of sexual harassment against the now-former presenter Gregg Wallace, food television has become toxic, Lawson said: “I think the world generally is more toxic.” But, she claims, she largely ignores reviews and critics. “When I first started writing books, I was thinking, I’m not going to read everything, because if I believe the good things, I’d be a monster, and if I believe the bad things, I would be rendered immobile and incapable of anything. So I try not to.”
Listen to the full interview with Nigella Lawson on Times Radio on Thursday September 18 at 3.30pm.
Dining and Cooking