The mouse had clearly been dead a while. It was entombed in the entertaining section, its grey bootlace tail – it was a field mouse – bookmarking a picture of a party meatloaf. It wasn’t clear whether it had crawled into my mother’s Good Housekeeping to die, or whether the assorted canapes had crushed the life out of it. Either way, there would be no more devilled eggs.
And even worse, the whole cupboard of cookery books was doomed. Mrs Beeton’s intricate dinner party menus; the lurid 80s cakes of Jane Asher; Delia soundly holding a brown egg. All of them gnawed at and nested in, in the years since my mother had got ill and my father had begun to subsist on beans and Heinz tomato soup. Into the skip with them all.
So Nigella’s At My Table: A Celebration of Home Cooking (Chatto) is a symbolic purchase, my first since the great mouse disaster. That fits in well with the whole premise of the book, which tells, according to Nigella, “the story of home cooking… about who we are, where we’ve come from and the lives that we’ve lived”. It’s accompanied, of course, by a soft-focus, fairy-lighted BBC series. This paean to home cooking is staged in a discreetly expensive set, around which Nigella tiptoes, coyly, curating a shelf of cosmopolitan chilli powders, eating brownies on the stairs by night. A host of telegenic friends descend on her table, periodically, to share her wisdom and tray-baked chicken, beatifically overseen by a strangely ageless, never-changing host. Somewhere in a locked larder, we might suppose, she has a mouldering marzipan figurine, ageing in her stead.
The book itself, however, is a slightly different affair, an odder beast. There is a table in its opening pages, but its plates and pink chairs are empty, its cutlery unused. There’s something almost eerie about its stage set. For Lawson, the writer, is much more knowing, and darker, than the cartoon va-va-voom of the television series.
Nigella has been in our kitchens for almost 20 years. Her debut, How to Eat, was a product of the very early Blair era, those post-Granita years of Britpop and baked sea bass. I bought it when I first moved into a shared house: how proudly I carried in my basil plant, and the pan my mother had bought at Altrincham market. Now I would join the pasta-eating classes, and my life as a sophisticate would begin.Then I read How to Be a Domestic Goddess and joined the cupcake revolution, all cream frosting and retro housewifery. But how does Nigella fare in today’s clean, lean eating climate? These are more austere years: Theresa May planning her election strategy over chicken lasagne and boiled potatoes; Jeremy Corbyn posing with marrows.
On the face of it, At My Table is too rich all round for its own good. The book is lavish, a coffee-table luxury, heavy with photographs and calories. It starts with fried goods and ends with margaritas, and it’s true that its hipster comfort food might stick in the throat. Chilli cheese garlic bread must be made with sourdough; fried cheese toasties consist of ripe Brie, ripe black fig, Parma ham.
But cutting through all this cheese is a sharp edge of self-parody. Lawson is always listening in to her own lip-smacking language and making it part of the joke. An Indian meal might be accompanied by a “ruby mound of radicchio and a small bowl of Bollywood-pink, quick-pickled onions”; duck might enjoy a “Kaffe Fassett tapestry of cavolo nero”. Even the chicken has had an apprenticeship in romantic poetry: a stew with red grapes and marsala is “brimming with mellow fruitfulness”; white sauce has a Keatsian “muffling blandness” as opposed to the “bosky depth” of a fricassee. With desserts, we reach new heights with the “celestially airy, cloud-like kiss of a syllabub”, and there’s a good deal of tumbling – berries, pomegranate seeds, cocktail ice. This is such campy playfulness that we begin to forgive its excesses.
And there’s also a bleaker, deeper undertow. Lawson has said in interviews that when she started writing, she had her sister Thomasina in mind, who died aged 31: “I was continuing a conversation about food that we’d had daily when she was alive.” This is writing tempered by grief and loss, memorialising a lost sister, mother, husband. And here in the pages of At My Table is Thomasina, standing on a rickety chair to drip oil into a mayonnaise the anxious child Nigella is whisking. Chicken fricassee speaks of “my grandmother’s flat on a Monday evening”; Lawson’s maternal grandfather appears grinding black pepper over strawberries – “he insisted it made their berried freshness sing”. As in some magic realist novel, the spirits of the dead are summoned up through the smell of cooking, invited to eat with the family again. That empty table in the opening pages takes on a poignant meaning. Whose are those unused places?
The skip has been taken away, with the kitchen units, the battered baking trays, the walking frame, the Christmas cards and school reports and back copies of the Telegraph. There go all the cookery books, bleached, mouse-eaten. The nursing home has been found, the house rented. And here’s Nigella, looking just the same. Turning back to her, there’s still a sly joy, a self-conscious silliness, which lifts the spirits. At My Table has as its subtitle “a celebration of home cooking”, and there is something defiantly celebratory about it, a willed resistance to change and death. The celestial airiness of her syllabub comes to seem like a promise: even her chickpeas offer “comfort, uplift, aromatic zing and ease”. And look! Here, on p24, are devilled eggs, in proper 1950s style, just as Good Housekeeping decreed. “Pipe away,” urges Nigella, in “golden rosettes.”
I rest my eyes on their irrepressible yellow cheeriness. I reach for the piping bag.
• At My Table by Nigella Lawson is published by Chatto & Windus (£26). To order a copy for £22.10 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
The annual Observer/Anthony Burgess prize for arts journalism was established in 2012 to honour the writer’s distinguished career as a literary critic for the Observer from the early 1960s until his death in 1993. The prize for best arts essay in 2017 was awarded on Wednesday by this year’s judging panel chair, Liz Sich. A total of £4,000 in prize money was awarded and the winners will be commissioned to produce new writing about the arts for prize partner Free Word, the international centre for literature, literacy and free expression.
