Amazon.co.uk
Those who love comfort food have cause to be grateful for Nigella Lawson's book
How to Be a Domestic Goddess. Cause, too, perhaps, to wonder that she isn't the size of a house, since baked comfort foods typically encompass large quantities of butter, cream, eggs, sugar, chocolate, nuts, cream cheese and all the other foodstuffs to which with dreary inevitability attaches the deadly word "sinful". But in Nigella Lawson's hands these dangerous, even feared, substances are transmuted alchemically into the healing balms of the goddess, who presides (perhaps a little ironically) over a harmonious kitchen realm.
The recipes are suitably divine, covering cakes, biscuits, pies, puddings, breads, with special sections on cooking for (and by) children and Christmas. Most are sweet, though there is a choice selection of savoury pies and puddings--Pizza Rustica, Steak and Kidney Pudding, Cornish Pasties. The sweet things range from the airy elegance of Pistachio Macaroons, through the luscious spiciness of Norwegian Cinnamon Buns, to the trailer-trashiness of Coca-Cola Cake.
Nigella Lawson's poise never falters, whether she is discussing serving mulled wine with mince pies ("Don't fight it") or a strange passion-fruit liqueur required for one of her trifles ("the most divinely camp liqueur you could ever come across"). She plays a kind of game with her readers, insisting constantly on her greed, but really invoking our own. What a fascinating book: hints of obsessiveness revealed behind the beautifully projected personality of a laid-back voluptuary.--Robin Davidson
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Amazon.com's Best of 2001
While the title
How to Be a Domestic Goddess may at first make a modern woman bristle, the book itself is just as likely to inspire the woman who brings home the bacon to start baking cakes. And what's wrong with that? "This isn't a dream," writes British cookery deity Nigella Lawson in her preface. "What's more, it isn't even a nightmare." Lawson--the author of
How to Eat, food editor of British
Vogue, and star of her own TV cooking show,
Nigella Bites--has been suspected of upholding the woman-laboring-in-the-kitchen paradigm, but there are lots of hard-working women out there who derive great satisfaction from cooking, even after a long day at the office. For those women, Lawson, who looks more Elizabeth Hurley than Martha Stewart, is the perfect guide to the wondrous world of baking.
"You know, I'm not a cook-to-impress kind of girl," Lawson says midway through the book, but she must admit there are few things more rewarding than putting a warm homemade pie or fragrant cake on the table--especially after preparing a home-cooked meal. How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking makes just such a reward possible, in fact positively enticing, with its delicious selection of easy-to-make cakes, pies, cookies, breads, even jams, presented in Lawson's chatty, pleasantly glib manner. Turns out, you don't have be a Pierre Hermé to make to-die-for chocolate confections; nor do you have to spend hours "faffing around" with hot pans and jars to have jam at teatime. You just need to try baking once, then again, and next thing you know, you'll be turning out cookies and desserts every chance you get. Many of the recipes are hand-me-downs or adaptations from other sources, be it a favorite cookbook or a restaurant in some far-off region, but all are imbued with Lawson's wit and distinctive touch. Profiteroles, My Way are "monumentally impressively better" than the original, thanks to burnt-sugar custard and toffee sauce. Her Coffee and Walnut Splodge Cookies are "American-style cookies; in other words just dropped onto the baking sheet free-form," and so on.
A sophisticated female alter ego of British mop-top Jamie Oliver, and considerably more sly and comedic than most American gourmets, Nigella is sure to convince more than a few up-and-coming hostesses that baking is indeed women's work. --Rebecca Wright
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