Nigella Lawson

“Like Jamie Oliver, she has simply encouraged people to cook,” Ms. Henry said. “She links good cooking with glamour.”

And, Ms. Henry added, many women embraced her.

“She definitely did make it acceptable — desirable even — for women to bake pies and cupcakes and waft around the kitchen,” Ms. Henry said. “I think for a lot of women that was very freeing. We were allowed to luxuriate in food, allowed to be greedy, allowed to be happy in the home.”

After 20 years, 12 cookbooks and hundreds of television episodes, the way forward seems as elusive to her as if she were just starting out. Asked how she comes up with book after book of recipes, she said: “Who knows? I never thought I’d be a food writer, so who knows what’s next? I always think I’ll never come up with another recipe, but something propels you forward.”

Fear is a constant companion and motivator. “I feel that people fall into two categories, goal-oriented or fear-driven,” she said. “I’m fear-driven. So it’s that terror of filling the empty page, or the director saying, ‘Action!’ But everything is frightening, isn’t it?”

She credits that fear with pushing her forward. “If I get bored, then I’d have to stop. Everything would go slack. And I suspect if I stop being frightened, that would be a bad thing, too.”

Later, though, she wished to retract that sentiment.

“I felt that I overstated the fear element,” she said. “I think I am driven by anxiety, I think that I’ve had to learn to accept that. But I also get so much pleasure in thinking about food in all its manifestations. I’d hate to make it look like it is all a bed of pain. Obviously it is something that makes me happy.”

But the ingredient that made “How To Eat” so alluring may be gone for good.

“When I wrote ‘How To Eat,’ I never really imagined it would be read,” she said. “I think there’s an innocence that you can’t go back to — a lack of self-consciousness. And it so easily could not have worked. I’m still slightly astonished that it did work.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/dining/nigella-lawson.html