PW: In Feast, you mention that you despise sentimentality. Yet you celebrate traditional holiday feasts. You are emphatic that Christmas isn't Christmas for you without roast turkey and all the trimmings. How can we relate without sentimentality to meals that are so laden with sentiment?
Nigella Lawson: To me sentimentality is a cheap and unfeeling substitute for true emotion. I think food is very much about emotion, personally and historically. It takes in happiness and unhappiness. It doesn't always play the role of being nurturing and benign, which is how we tend to think of it. It reflects every aspect of our lives and our personalities.
Yes, you talk about food for funerals, about the role it really plays.
Food can comfort. But when you've just lost someone you love you don't want that to be the case. When my mother died some people came up to me and said, "You'll get over it." That felt like such an assault to me. You don't want to get over it and you don't ever get over it, really. It just becomes easier to accommodate. So food at that time plays a much more honest role.
You write that it reminds us that life goes on, that living is important.
Yet, I wouldn't have written about food if my mother and sister hadn't died because I would have had them to talk to. I'm not into the performance of cooking. It is a conversation for me. This sounds New Age and I am not at all, but cooking is a way of expressing your love for people.
Julia Child once said "Dining with one's friends and beloved family is certainly one of life's primal and most innocent delights, one that is both soul-satisfying and eternal."
Yes, in some cultures that is really apparent. Food is the underpinning of their whole cultural and social life. I think people in Britain and the United States may need a bit of help seeing this. I regard my books as a way of talking to people in a way that stirs up their own thoughts about food and cooking so that they bring their own memories to it.
You have a very fluid literary style. Do you think there is a correspondence between writing and cooking?
You will cook the way you live, but the very important difference is that when you cook you have to leave your head and let your body take over.
Why do you think you've become such a big star?
I think it's good for people to have someone remind them not to be afraid of their food. I'm not skinny. I have an old-fashioned figure, all bosom and bottom. I play when I cook. I simplify everything I can. One of the things that I love about cooking is that it is very forgiving. For lunch today, for example, I couldn't get the pork I needed for a certain recipe. I had new peas and new potatoes, so I braised them and made a sauce. I added a bit of fish, and it tasted wonderful.
I want people to people to feel I'm in the kitchen with them. I want to show people that you can be cooking and still can have an opinion about a book or about whether a law should be appealed. In real life, conversations are like that. You can be talking about something very serious one moment and the next moment asking your girlfriend where she got her lipstick. Food is a great connector. Other cultures understand this and so can we. It can be a small act that we can take to make ourselves feel better.
How do your son and daughter relate to your celebrity? Does it amuse them that you've become a glamorous figure?
Glamour really has to do with good lighting, doesn't it?
And maintaining just the right distance.
And my children see me as I am right now as I'm talking to you, in sweat pants and vest and no makeup.
