In the kitchen with Nigella Lawson

By Jessica Allen - Monday, February 18, 2013 at 2:25 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Anne-Marie Jackson

Bestselling author and TV personality Nigella Lawson visited the new Chatelaine test kitchen powered by GE this morning to talk about her new book, Nigellissima, a collection of 126 Italian-inspired recipes. We had a chance to speak with Lawson about food writing, the pressures of a non-Italian tackling Italian recipes and the virtues of vermouth.

Q: So before we talk about your new book, Nigellissima, I wanted to talk about your first book How To Eat (1998). I brought it along just in case you wanted to sign it afterwards.*

A: I will, and do you know what I love most of all? Seeing a really old, used, beloved copy. It always warms my heart.

Q: This book is actually the way I came at the discourse of food writing 16 years ago, and via you I was introduced to other food writers, namely Elizabeth David and Anne del Conte and so on. So I’m curious to know how you arrived to the subject.

A: Completely by mistake. It was a long time ago so I was relatively young and I always thought that I wanted to write a novel. And then one day my late husband John said to me, ‘You think everyone is as confident in their attitudes towards food as you are–you should write about it.’ This [How To Eat] isn’t really a recipe book–there are lots of recipes in it–but it’s a different sort of book. It’s about talking about food and why it matters. So I spoke to my agent and asked what he thought and he said let’s do it. And I said, ‘I don’t really know if I want to do a food book.’ And he said, ‘Before you write a great symphony just do a few chords. This will be it.’ Of course I wrote this book and realized I didn’t want to be a novelist. I’m not a novelist. I felt I found my voice through food. So it was just an accident. At the time I was journalist–not even a food journalist; I’d write about anything–but you see the thing is food is not to be left to the experts because we all eat. We eat everyday and food is such an important part of our lives, not just in terms of giving us all sustenance but emotionally it explains so much about us. So  I wanted to write about food in its context–sometimes historically and sometimes I suppose sociological, and sometimes just purely personal. So for me it’s just the biggest subject in the world and I love every aspect of it.

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Waiting for Nigella Lawson

By Jessica Allen - Sunday, February 17, 2013 at 2:07 PM - 0 Comments

Nigella Lawson will be in Toronto on Monday to promote her new cookbook, Nigellissima, in the Chatelaine test kitchen, just three floors down from the offices of Maclean’s. 

I, for one, am excited. For years her first book, How to Eat (1998), sat on my bedside table. To be honest, I rarely cooked recipes from it–heck, I rarely cooked at all–but it was so beautifully written that I couldn’t put it down. And she lead me to other food writers, including Elizabeth David and Anna del Conte. Food writing, Lawson taught me, was a genre all unto its own.

Eventually, I used her books to actually cook things: her recipes for chocolate Guinness cake, key lime pie and Madeira cake still make routine appearances in my limited baking repertoire.

Nigellisima, her 10th book, has 120 Italian-inspired recipes and are written with Lawson’s usual flare, which includes descriptors that are singularly hers in style: Radicchio is “beautifully bitter;” Marsala-soaked porcini mushrooms have “husky depth;” and her cinnamon almond cake is “meltingly damp and fragrantly redolent of marzipan.”

Bu why Italy, and why now? In fact, the germ for her latest book may predate her other literary offerings. Lawson, who started as a journalist (by 26, she was the deputy literary editor of the The Sunday Times), spent a year working in Florence during her gap year at university. Not only did she work as a chambermaid during her sojourn, but she also learned how to cook–and eat like a Florentine, and a life-long love affair with all things Italian was born.

When I speak with Lawson on Monday about her new book I’ll ask when to adhere to and break with Italian culinary traditions and find out how she manages–after all her books, TV shows, awards, apps and gastronomic entrepreneurial forays–to stay genuinely enthusiastic about food.

Stay tuned.

Even Nigella Lawson has bad days

By Elio Iannacci - Friday, November 5, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

www.lisparsonsphotography.co.uk

In Nigella Lawson’s new book, Kitchen: Recipes From the Heart of the Home, the preface to a beer-braised pork-knuckle recipe reveals a fierce side to the usually amiable British cooking show star. Lawson writes of the humiliation she felt when a German talk show interviewer introduced her with a joke about how the English have a reputation for being the worst cooks in the world. Instead of laughing at the condescending jab, Lawson decided to give her bully a serving of piping hot honesty and replied in a self-described “graceless” manner.

“I told him that as far as the world was concerned, German cooking didn’t accord much respect either,” she says on the phone from her home in London. The program’s live audience went dead silent. Still, Lawson, who has been communicating about food on TV and in magazines and books for more than two decades, refused to smile for the cameras. “I’d heard that bad quip over and over again,” she says. “I’m not one to lash out or confront, but it was a direct insult and a very outdated opinion.”

Lawson’s opinions—which have helped her amass a $25-million empire since writing her bestselling first book, How to Eat: Pleasures and Principles of Good Food, in 1998—have proven to be nothing to laugh at. Now 50, she’s the author of nine bestselling cookbooks. On top of her literary achievements, Lawson has starred in and co-produced nine world-syndicated television series, and has designed her own line of cookware to boot.

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Mel Gibson's hand puppet, Dave Carroll's broken guitar, and "Shannon Tweed Day" in Oshawa

By Lianne George - Thursday, July 16, 2009 at 9:30 AM - 1 Comment

Kim Jong Ill?
So much mystery attends North Korea, Asia’s only Communist dynasty, and so fraught are the geopolitics of the region, that the merest sign of health trouble for its Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, sets off international alarms. So it was this week when South Korea’s YTN television, citing Korean and Chinese intelligence sources, reported that the 67-year-old has pancreatic cancer and, at best, five years to live. In his recent appearances, Kim has looked gaunt, with thinning hair, a limp and an asymmetrical bent to his mouth, indications he’s not entirely recovered from a stroke last year. Renewed fear that Kim is not long for this world caused Seoul’s main stock index to plummet, so vexed are the markets by what his death could mean. Though he is said to have named his youngest son, the Swiss-educated Kim Jong Un, as his successor, there’s concern the installation of a weak leader still in his mid-20s will destabilize the regime and the region.

What’s wrong with being sexy?
Shannon Tweed, the Canadian adult-film star, has been denied recognition for such contributions to world cinema as Hard Vice and Indecent Behavior 3. But the acting mayor of Ottawa, Doug Thompson, issued a proclamation that this Wednesday would be “Shannon Tweed Day,” to celebrate the blond bombshell’s visit to the city where she lived in the 1970s. He soon rescinded the proclamation, however, admitting sheepishly that he “spoke to the media before the item had been fully vetted.” Tweed told the Ottawa Citizen that she had “no hard feelings” about the rejection, but bristled at a councilwoman’s suggestion that she is a porn actress: “I’ve done movies with love scenes,” said the star of Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death, “but I’ve never had real sex on camera.” Oshawa, which recently finished first in an online contest hosted by KISS, doesn’t care either way. Oshawa city councillor Robert Lutczyk, who headed up the spring contest effort, promised a “Shannon Tweed Day” in Oshawa if she and the band come through town this fall. “I’ll be there,” said Tweed. “I’ll be there.” Continue…