Nigella Lawson Is Still Proud to Be an Amateur

Nigella Lawson is pacing the top floor boardroom of her publisher's office. She is wearing platform trainers, so each step lands with a surprisingly ungainly clomp. She is talking about filming the Christmas episode of her new television series, about her habit of sitting in the same seat every time she gets into a car, about how many meetings must have happened in here—this dingy room lined with intimidating shelves of other people's bestselling books.

Lawson poses for photographs in front of a black screen hastily assembled by my photographer during the pacing/clomping. When I see the finished portraits, I wonder how she managed to smile so serenely at the camera, given that she was regaling us between shutter clicks with an animated description of her preferred way to eat breakfast on holiday.

"I do talk fast," Lawson later admits. This is not the languid spoon-licking Nigella of Middle England dad fantasies. She doesn't stay still for long, even when folded back into her chair, jacket off, now dressed entirely in black. She gives earnest and generous answers, explaining her ideas in that luxuriant, drawn-out way that only posh people who have never not been listened to can. She interrupts you, but she also interrupts herself when another more interesting thought than the one she had been vocalising crosses her mind. She isn't afraid of eye contact.

Last month, Lawson released her eleventh cookbook, At My Table, followed by a new BBC television series that premieres this week. Billed as a "celebration of home cooking," the book contains over 100 recipes—all of them new, but almost every one comfortingly familiar: chicken tray bake, butternut squash curry, another Victoria sponge.

"I felt that although it's a new book, it slightly connects to the past," Lawson says. "The thing with cooking is that you are—to use a very modern, if not cliché phrase—'in the moment' and yet you're drawing on so much that you've eaten and cooked in life. When I was at university, I did something on modern literary theory, and it was the notion that when you read a book, every other book you've read informs your reading of the next book. In the same way, even though a lot of people can cook a certain dish, we've all cooked different things in our past, so it means we approach it in a different way."

At My Table's "home cooking" subtitle is slightly redundant. Lawson's books and shows, from How to Eat, her 1998 debut of homely English dishes, to her most recent TV series, Simply Nigella, have always championed being an amateur in the kitchen. She is adamantly not a chef, declaring herself a domestic cook with no time for complicated marinades or fiddly chopping techniques. Her recipes come with conversational introductions, tips for substituting ingredients, and steps you can skip altogether if you just cba. (Does anyone actually salt their aubergines?)

"When I started, I felt that the world of cooking was so dominated by the professional chef, and home cooks were slightly disparaged," Lawson says. "I think it was a sexist thing, because more home cooks were women at that stage. I also suppose it was a capitalist thing because home cooks weren't being paid and chefs are. Now, of course, while there are still the cheffy books, if you look up all the books that have home cooking in the title, they're from chefs. So before it was, you can recreate this restaurant at home, now it's much more people trying to evoke home cooking."

She adds: "Some people's recipes I still look at and think, no, that looks too complicated for me."

Lawson's claim of possessing little culinary skill might sound like a humblebrag, but there is some truth to it. She wasn't meant to work in food. As the daughter of a Conservative cabinet minister, she graduated from Oxford to a job on the literary pages at The Sunday Times, at one point harbouring ambitions of publishing a novel. She went freelance and wrote about cooking, something she had always enjoyed but felt had fallen from "its place in the home." Her style of food writing was as expressive as can be expected from a former books editor, but also intimate. Like a Kensington-raised Laurie Colwin, she was friendly and funny, and described dishes in a way that made you not only want to eat them, but enjoy them with the same kind of unabashed pleasure.

It got Lawson a cookbook deal. How to Eat sold well and lead to a Channel 4 series, Nigella Bites, the following year. Ostensibly filmed in Lawson's airy Shepherd's Bush home, she delivered innuendoes over shots of perfectly cooked lamb and seductively drizzled chocolate. It was lauded as equal parts decor- and gastro-porn, and averaged 1.9 million viewers.

"I've never had a plan," Lawson insists, despite her decades-spanning career. "I've never had any form of strategy in life. I try not to think about the future. Obviously you worry, but the wonderful thing about being busy is that you often don't have time to think about the future."

Lawson's success hasn't been without criticism. Some of her more recent recipes stand accused of being too simplistic, most memorably in 2015, when an avocado on toast segment in her BBC series ignited the this-isn't-what-I-pay-my-license-fee-for wrath of Twitter. In At My Table, the recipe purists went after a toasted sandwich.

"Yes: Parma ham, fig, and er … brie," Lawson says. "In the book, I say it's not actually a recipe, I don't say, 'You must use this amount of this.' It's an idea. Recipes are a shorthand way of talking about food but if I have an enthusiasm, I quite like to share it. Criticism about being simple I don't completely understand. I would rather be criticised for being simple than being complicated—not that that's ever going to happen because I can't do complicated food."

Neither can many of us, which is probably why Lawson remains so popular. Her books stay in print, her last television series premiered to more than 2 million viewers, and she has a loyal following on Twitter, where she doles out motherly praise to iPhone pics of salted caramel and gets into discussions about chocolate cake.

I ask Lawson what she sees as the key to her enduring success. She pauses, gazing for a long time out of the window over the London rooftops.

"Without wanting to jinx anything … it's such an overused word but I would like to think that authenticity is something that is detectable on the page," she says finally. "I think people know they can trust me, that the recipes work. I would never put something in unless I love it and it has to work well. It's so important that recipes work but at the same time, I think I'm actually talking to readers because I write in a way that is like having a conversation. For me, as someone who loves cookery books, I need to know that it's a pleasure to read but that it's a very reliable manual. That's what I look for in books and I suspect everyone else does too."

Lawson is also one of the few public figures advocating for people to eat what they like. A woman who eats food—and has the audacity to gain lip-smacking pleasure from it—sadly seems to be no less shocking in 2017 than when Lawson declared herself "an eater" in the introduction to her first cookbook.

"Every generation has found a different way of telling women how little space they should be taking up," she says cooly. "I'd like to think things are changing."

Back in the early noughties, Lawson only had "Doctor" Gillian McKeith to contend with over this opinion. Now, there are a host of "clean eating" bloggers and Instagrammers promoting restrictive eating habits. Lawson appears to fire direct shots at the wellness trend in At My Table with a recipe for shoestring fries made in a Spiralizer—the vegetable-ribboning implement used by Deliciously Ella and her ilk to make carb-free "courgetti." In a recent piece for the Guardian, Lawson lamented that Instagram was turning people off un-photogenic but delicious brown food.

"What worries me when people have this tendency to demonise some foodstuffs and venerate others. I think, do they actually like eating? Because in a real eating life, there's room for everything. It's a bit like when people feel that sort of high culture/low culture thing. Because you can like all sorts of different things," she says, throwing her hands wide. "I feel a real appetite for whatever it is in life, governed by my mood or what's there at any time. You always make new discoveries and the idea of thinking I only want to eat that sort of food or I will never eat the other sort, that wouldn't suit me in any part of life."

A fraud trial that same year involving the couple's former personal assistants revealed that Lawson felt subjected to "intimate terrorism" during her marriage to Saatchi, and had at points turned to cocaine and cannabis. The think pieces and gossip mag speculation followed: how could a woman who appeared to have it all been suffering in secret?

It wasn't the first time that Lawson has been forced into the role of tragic heroine. Her sister and first husband, the journalist John Diamond, both died of cancer at a young age; the latter publicly documenting his illness in a Times column. Throughout her career, Lawson has been framed in the press either as a coquettish domestic goddess, ready to whip up a batch of suggestively iced cupcakes, or the victimised woman.

Neither collate with person in the swivel chair opposite me. I hope she means it when she says that she doesn't pay much attention to the things that are written about her.

"I feel I give my view, I can write my view. I've never been a bimbo or I don't think I've ever been reported as being one either, so I wouldn't want to start moaning on, given the way the world's going. When I write, I write what I'm thinking about food, as well as the food I'm eating. I think because of that, you always have a connection with readers and the connection you have with readers really does take up so much more room than anything else. That's the relationship that interests me, so the shorthand of describing someone in a column or something is irrelevant."

And the connection is real, even though Ruby Tandoh was probably right when she called Lawson a rich hobbyist cook; even though At My Table's patterned terracotta cover looks like some curtains my mum had in the 90s and it has no dividing chapters, which is a completely mad way to format a cookbook. Even though the world does not need another recipe for pork chops. Even though BBC 2 shows are for Tories.

Despite this, we all want to be at Nigella's table.