A still-warm yorkshire pudding is placed in a bowl. It’s darker than I might like, but then my oven sometimes runs hotter than intended. I refuse to be judged for it. On top goes a dollop of thick, fridge-cold cream, bright white against the burnished brown. I lift the spoon from the tin to my side and hold it over the bowl to allow a slow, shimmering stream of golden syrup to join its pals. I pass each serving around the table to my family. There’s a gentle chorus of sighs as they go in and, from my wife, a breathless “Oh God”. Thank you, Nigella. You’ve gifted me my family’s admiration. I can ask for no more.
It is hard to describe this dessert as a recipe, although, of course, the yorkshire pudding demands one. It’s more of an idea and a bloody good one at that: normally you eat yorkshire puddings that way but you could, you know, try it this way. That gets to the heart of How To Eat, by Nigella Lawson. It was first published in 1998 and announced less a cookery writer than a beguiling sensibility. It does, of course, contain many recipes. A lot of them are original to Nigella – excuse the first name familiarity; to do otherwise would be like referring to Madonna as Ms Ciccone – but many come from other people, because she thinks they’re great. It’s a cookbook with a bibliography. Here are nods to Arabella Boxer and Darina Allen, to Jane Grigson, Marcella Hazan and Alastair Little.
How To Eat is both serious indulgence and joyous high camp. It contains not just dishes but whole meal plans: they include a “sweetly nostalgic lunch” (roast pork, roast potatoes, red cabbage) and a “gratifyingly kitsch lunch” (Coca-Cola braised ham and cherry pie); there’s an “extravagant but still elegant dinner” (oysters with hot sausages, chocolate raspberry pudding cake) and an “elegantly substantial traditional English lunch” (roast chicken and trifle). Then there are the essays and opinions, robustly held. When cooking and eating, you must “let your real likes and desires guide you”; brown bread is like “hessian”; freezers, if not used properly, can become “a culinary graveyard, a place where good food goes to die”. She does not disapprove of stock cubes. She loves the novels of Henry James. Béchamel is “unquestionably the most useful sauce”.
Nigella credits the idea for the book to her late husband, the journalist and broadcaster John Diamond. “I used to say things like: why are they putting grapes on that pavlova?” she recalls now. “John said, ‘You’re so confident about your opinions around food, you should write a book called How To Eat.’” She was not convinced. Over lunch with her literary agent she recalls talking about a grand novel she thought she might write. Only at the end did she mention the food book. “He told me to go home, not even take my coat off, write a proposal and fax it to him. That dates it.”
The book was signed to Chatto & Windus, a literary imprint known more for publishing the fiction of novelists such as Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, although it did occasionally publish cookbooks. As Gail Rebuck, head of parent company Random House (now Penguin Random House) says, “Nigella came to writing this book from a literary background.” Indeed, she did. While she had spent 12 years as restaurant critic for the Spectator, she had also been deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times, and written a general column for this newspaper. “Having her published by Chatto was a declaration of intent,” Rebuck says. Jonathan Burnham, who bought the book for Chatto (and lived with Nigella at university), agrees. “It was a little different,” he says. “The quality of the writing and the reflectiveness of it meant it fitted in.”
The manuscript took a while to emerge. “First I fell pregnant and the smell of food made me sick,” Nigella says. “And then John got ill.” She wrote the lengthy text in a mere six weeks. “It would have been shorter if I’d had more time,” she says. The result was less a “how to” manual, than a “why not?” manual, full of exuberant essays about the joys of eating alone or why you shouldn’t be afraid of making your own mayonnaise. Gloriously, a fish pie rendered bright yellow courtesy of saffron is described as “Blakean” because it reminds her of a sunburst in a William Blake painting. “I want two copies,” Yotam Ottolenghi once said. “One to reference in the kitchen and one to read in bed.”
The launch party was an outrageous affair. It was held at the newly opened London hotel One Aldwych, and, as the diary columns attested, was crammed with the chattering classes, chattering at each other: here was Martin Amis and Alan Yentob, Robin Day and Salman Rushdie. “The paparazzi descended on that party,” Rebuck says. “And it was clear that it was the beginning of something.” If the prose wasn’t so encouraging, if the deep, limpid pools of common sense so reassuring, it could all have been seriously bloody annoying. Instead it has sold more than 700,000 copies.
I flick through the book, both thrilled and dizzied by the eating possibilities, in equal measure. I’ve cooked from it before but am always struck by how much is in there. I often do her ham braised in Coca-Cola, which makes complete sense, for what is a cola other than a spiced sugar syrup? “When I do a recipe,” Nigella says, “I’m trying to tell you how to get something that tastes nice. I’m not giving cookery lessons.” She points out that she is completely untrained. “I have the same worries as the reader.” I end up choosing randomly: a lightly boozy Thai clam hotpot full of the hefty waft of basil and ginger. We suck happily at the shells. Another night I make bouncy, crisp prawn fritters and, to go with them, a coriander mayo with a spritz of lime.
It was published the same year as Delia Smith’s How To Cook, and the distinction between the titles probably served them both well. In 2018, to mark its 20th anniversary, a new edition of How To Eat was published as a Vintage classic. Nigella’s acknowledgments note that, by the time of its first publication, John Diamond was, courtesy of the cancer from which he would die far too young, already too unwell to taste any of the food. What he perhaps didn’t know was that, with one brilliantly insightful idea, he had set his life partner off on a path to a glittering career. We are all better fed and less uptight for it.
How To Eat: The Pleasures and Principles of Good Food by Nigella Lawson is published by Vintage, £14.99. Buy a copy for £13.64 at guardianbookshop.com
News bites
Breda Murphy was head chef at Lancashire’s Inn at Whitewell before opening her own restaurant and deli nearby. Now she’s launched a range of classic dishes for delivery nationwide. These are not meal kits, but freezer stackers and include a fish pie, beef bourguignon, and a chickpea, tomato and potato curry with fruit crumbles, sticky toffee pudding and more to follow. The singles box costs £55, for which you get a choice of three single portion mains, and three desserts plus a loaf cake. A tray of chocolate brownies costs £10. Visit bredamurphy.co.uk.
Recently, I’ve written about venerable cookbooks. Here’s a brand new one which made me laugh. No-Recipe Recipes is by Sam Sifton, a senior editor at the New York Times and founder of the New York Times Cooking food platform. It works on the premise that a reasonably competent cook knows what to do with the right ingredients and doesn’t always need their hand held. Hence it lists no volumes for those ingredients, and methods are a short paragraph each. It’s like being told what to do by a mate. I am rather taken by the sound of Instant Ramen Back-of-the-Fridge Style and Smothered Pork Chops.
Another one for those seeking a project: the great Calum Franklin of Holborn Dining Room has launched home pie kits. For £45 you get the raw ingredients for one his intricate creations, starting with the chicken and sh*take pie for four, plus all the instructions. The pie will change seasonally, and is available for delivery nationwide via restaurantkitsuk.com.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
