The way she talks about food is tremendous.
from Nigella Lawson
From the birthday ‘cake of dreams’ to giant cookies for lone-dwellers, five delicious treats, exclusively extracted from Lawson’s new book, Cook, Eat, Repeat
- ‘I didn’t think I’d be a mended person, but I am’: read Hadley Freeman’s interview with Nigella Lawson
I am very aware that the joy I celebrate in food is a privilege. I know I might seem soupy when I say that I see every mealtime, every mouthful, as a celebration of life, but (with lamentable exceptions) I do, or I try to. It’s such a waste otherwise.
The sad refrain from women ever since I can remember has been, “I shouldn’t be eating this, but … ”; and when I had a daughter, I vowed those words would never come from my lips. But even the words we don’t say out loud can run riot in our heads. It perhaps sounds improbable to be able to train yourself out of the cycle of reproachful self-indulgence and self-recrimination, but I’m living proof it can be done. I was brought up by a mother – the cook I have learned most from – whose exuberant output in the kitchen was set in painfully sharp relief, and indeed fostered, by an ever-expanding pattern of self-denial and self-punishment; not an uncommon syndrome. Diagnosed with terminal cancer two weeks before her death, she started eating – for the first time, she said giddily – without worry or guilt. How unbearably sad to allow yourself unmitigated pleasure in food only when you receive a terminal diagnosis.
And so I protect fiercely the deep enjoyment I get from food. This doesn’t mean I just carry on eating as much as I can and for as long as I can. When I eat chocolate, I linger over each square, deciding which I will let melt slowly in my mouth, which I’ll chomp on rapaciously, feeling how different the sensations are. At no time do I feel guilty, and at no time does it become mindless. For I am not talking about that egregious misnomer, comfort eating. For me that conjures up an unhappy search for mind-numbing obliteration: food as narcotic, not food as a celebration of life.
Of course, there’s a lot of snobbery bound up in the term, too. You name something your guilty pleasure if you feel that were you not to jump in with the word “guilty”, others might suspect you of seriously thinking a processed-cheese triangle is the choice food of the connoisseur. But it is truly impossible to enjoy the taste of something ironically; it is just a shame-induced distancing stance.
I have little time for purists who disdain the lowly tastes of others. Nor do I wish to ally myself with the defensive mockery of inverted snobs, who feel that those who love any sort of food they themselves find fancy are simply pretentious frauds. Eating is such an elemental pleasure: what a strangely puny act to want to police it. But perhaps it is because it is so personal that we genuinely cannot conceive of feeling differently, and so distrust those who do. I admit that I have had to train myself out of forcing forkfuls of food – “Just try it!” – into the mouths of those I’m eating with, even after numerous polite refusals; and I am somewhat abashed to say that I don’t mean my children here.
I can’t help but feel, you see, that to share a pleasure is to increase it. I relish eating alone and cooking for myself. But once I’m around others, I am greedy for them to find the happiness in food that I do.
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