Kerry Parnell: Nigella’s just the recipe for these troubled times

Nigella Lawson inspired a generation of women as a cashmere-cardie-wearing cupcake queen. But she also taught us you can have your cake and eat it, even when you’re not winning at life.

Nigella is proof you should bake it till you make it. The British cookbook queen returns to Aussie screens today in Seven’s My Kitchen Rules and she’s just the recipe for these troubled times.

Nigella literally made a career out of cooking her way through tragedy and she still finds time to be one of the nicest people on Twitter, sharing baking advice to anyone who asks.

At her peak in the early 2000s, a whole generation of women was inspired by the cashmere-cardie-wearing cupcake queen.

Her first cookbook, How to Eat, shot her to fame in 1998, followed by How to be a Domestic Goddess, which kept her there, and her TV show, Nigella Bites, made her a mononymous megastar.

We all watched, mesmerised, as she drizzled chocolate into her mouth and raided the fridge in her dressing gown, for leftover brownies.

Nigella Lawson. Picture: Supplied

Two decades later, Nigella, 62, has aged, appropriately, like a fine wine or cheese and as I watch her larking about with Manu on MKR, it strikes me how she really is the ultimate embodiment of why we should live life for the moment and live it well.

Nigella previously shared how her relationship with food changed after the loss of her mother Vanessa in 1985.

“Diagnosed with terminal cancer two weeks before her death, she started eating –
for the first time, she said giddily – without worry or guilt,” she said.

“How unbearably sad to allow yourself unmitigated pleasure in food only when you receive a terminal diagnosis.”

Her sister Thomasina died from breast cancer eight years later, giving her the ultimate life perspective.

“My mother died at 48 and my sister died at 32, so to mind about getting older would be slightly odd,” she told New Idea.

MKR judge, Nigella Lawson and Manu Feidel . Picture: Supplied

At the same time as she was finding fame, journalist husband John Diamond died of throat cancer in 2001. Then, after marrying advertising guru Charles Saatchi in 2003, she went through an acrimonious public divorce |
in 2013, followed by a humiliating court case against her former assistants, during which they alleged she was a habitual drug-taker.

Truly, Nigella has been dished out way more than her fair share of suffering, but one of the ways she coped was through cooking – the ultimate mindfulness exercise that delivers a giant treat at the end of it.

Nigella Lawson. Picture: Jason Edwards

“Cooking is a metaphor for life,” she told the Observer.

“I firmly believe that although the ‘point’ of cooking lies in the end result, its meaning resides in the process. So, in life, you have to concentrate in the present, rather than fretting about the past or worrying about the future.”

I agree.

I came back to baking big-time during lockdown, almost intuitively, as my way of coping and living in the present.

Baking allayed the feeling of helplessness and fed us all as a bonus.

Since then, I’ve churned out a production-line of cakes for successive crises friends and family have been going through and as I type this, sadly, the baking has resumed.

Like Nigella, I learned you can have your cake and eat it, even when you’re not winning at life.