How Nigella Lawson became a home cooking legend

Nigella Lawson never enjoyed being known as any kind of expert. She has often joked that greed is her only real qualification and that she has abysmal knife skills when compared to the multitude of other celebrity cooks. Only because she has been cooking for so long people refer to her as an expert, but she will always shy away from technical questions about cooking.

This is where the core appeal of Nigella and her cookbooks can be recognized. She appeals to people who don’t want to take cooking too seriously, and simply want to have fun making food that they can enjoy.

Nigella was never a professional chef, despite some people thinking she was. She was never even trained as a cook. Her first cookbook ‘How to Eat’ was simply made as an alternative to the very technical and intimidating cookbooks that many professional chefs were releasing into the market at that time.

The book was all about celebrating the pure pleasure of cooking and eating. It did not contain any photographs of perfectly plated dishes for people to compare themselves again. It was all about being fast, fun, and most importantly, approachable. She has said she was inspired to write the book after seeing her friend crying because a dessert she was making failed to set correctly.

While she is best known for her TV appearances, Nigella is an excellent writer. She was an experienced journalist before she started to pen cookbooks. Nigella was only in the midst of her mid-twenties at the time she became a professional restaurant critic. She later went freelance and ended up doing a bimonthly column in the New York Times.

Nigella Lawson is affectionately known by many as the queen of home cooking, and it’s not hard to see why.