Christmas with Nigella - IT'S THE SPICE OF LIFE!

THE CELEBRITY CHEF OPENS UP ABOUT HER ANXIETY, GETTING FIT AND WHY THE SEASON IS SO IMPORTANT

- NATALIE WHITTLE

If you regularly watch Nigella Lawson on screen, whether adding the finishing touches to her mouth-watering mince pies or icing her impeccable looking Yule log, you’ll be familiar with her unflappable nature. When we catch up with her, we see it in full effect: she arrives well prepared with her own packed lunch, a flask of hot tea and some lemon sherbets “in case of a sugar low”.

When she’s quizzed on Christmas dinner advice, Nigella has all the answers. Dry turkey? Soak it overnight, she advises. Perfect potatoes? Add semolina and use goose fat. Fussy eaters? She ignores them… unless they’re staying for two weeks, of course!

But when we catch up on Zoom a few weeks later, we discover a more vulnerable side to Nigella.

The celebrity chef has had many losses to overcome – she was a young woman when her mother and younger sister both died of cancer. Later, she had to deal with the loss of her husband, British journalist John Diamond, to throat cancer when their children were aged seven and four.

Daughter Cosima, now 26, and son Bruno, 24, have both left home, and Nigella lives alone in West London.

Nigella’s reflective about those she’s lost – “they’re always in your head and in your bloodstream”, she says – but also looks to the future with passion and energy, and says that turning 60 this year has been a positive milestone in so many ways.

Nigella has begun her new decade by writing another book, Cook, Eat, Repeat, an enticing collection of recipes combined with essays about food, and has filmed a tie-in TV series for the BBC.