Comforting brown food from the Domestic Goddess

Nigella Lawson is many things to many people: the perfect hostess, the TV star, the thinking man’s crumpet. To me she’s always embodied the joy of sharing food with friends and family. Her books and television shows burst with conviviality, with parties and suppers. Now we are in the middle of a pandemic that has all but taken that pleasure away, but luckily the Domestic Goddess has always had an uncanny knack for moving with the times. Cook, Eat, Repeat, Lawson’s 12th book, is a celebration of home cooking — a defence of repetition in the kitchen and on the dining table which couldn’t feel more apposite.

The book is structured around seven essays — significantly longer than traditional chapter introductions — on topics ranging from ‘What is a recipe?’ to ‘A loving defence of brown food’. There are several pages devoted simply to rhubarb. It’s easy to forget, given her fame, that Lawson made her name with just such long prose in her first book, and it is a treat to read her writing again without the usual constraints of cookbooks. She is expansive and discursive without being baggy. She tackles the big topics that have roiled the food world in recent years: authenticity, provenance and ownership; comfort and guilt. And she does all of this without either preaching or boring you.

Lawson has a precise way with words, and her descriptions are as evocative as they are unusual: she writes of a ‘conker-shiny, wine-dark stew’ and talks about black pudding’s ‘visceral mauve-grey glory’. Peas have a ‘hyper-green perkiness’ before cooking, and a ‘khaki drabness’ after, while the Italians turn their greens into an ‘olive oil-soused pond mulch’.