Cooking is not about heaping in ingredient after ingredient after ingredient. “Generally I make sure that if I buy a certain stash of ingredients, I can cook many different dishes. I just have the home cook sensibility: not wanting to waste money or time. A chef needs to feel they’re being original. If I’ve loved a book that I’ve read, I want to share that as well. Q: How does being a home cook, rather than a professional chef, influence your approach to preparing food?Ī: “Cooking for me is in part an evangelical zeal that I want to share. So I will go back through the mists of time (to trace) how this recipe evolved.” Often I credit someone even if I’ve changed it enormously because I feel for the reader it’s very interesting to see the evolution of a recipe. I think it’s improper not to credit recipes. Q: Do you create the recipes in your books?Ī: “Well, they’re mine, and if they’re not I will always say. It was an education in itself, and an interesting one.” I did have to teach myself how to cook weighing and measuring. I come from a large family and my mother believed in child labour, so I’ve cooked since I was about six. I just cooked from when I was a child, always. I suppose I bring a kind of temporary impatience because it’s the way I live now.”Ī: “I’ve never learned to cook. Q: How would you describe your take on Italian cuisine?Ī: “I suppose what I bring to it is a slightly more contemporary, urban edge in the sense that I live a busy modern city life, whereas so many Italian recipes come from a time when women were expected to spend a long time in the kitchen. But this is the only time I’ve done a book with such a narrow focus geographically.” Because Italy has been such a big influence in my life, in my cooking life, there are actually more Italian recipes in my other books.

It’s the first that’s just Italian, or Italian-inspired. cooking show “The Taste,” spoke to Reuters about creating recipes and about how her most joyful moment in the kitchen is opening the fridge, seeing what is inside and trying to make something taste good from it, which she admits is “absolutely the antithesis of a cookery book.”Ī: “It sort of is, and isn’t. London-based Lawson, who is appearing in the U.S. “Somehow by speaking Italian, I came into the person I am,” the 53-year-old, Oxford-educated cook added. Her eighth cookbook, “Nigellissima,” focuses exclusively on 120 Italian-inspired recipes. “As a teenager, what drew me was the combination of familial warmth and glamour that was somehow both earthy and chic,” Lawson said about Italy, where she lived between high school and college.

British television chef Nigella Lawson, author of new cookbook called 'Nigellissima,' is shown in a handout photo taken in London, courtesy of Hugo Burnand.

Nigella bites cookbook