Nigella Lawson

Nigella Lawson is the daughter of former Conservative cabinet minister Nigel Lawson (now Lord Lawson) and the late Vanessa Salmon, socialite and heir to the Lyons Corner House empire, who died of liver cancer in 1985.

Lawson attended Godolphin and Latymer School and Westminster School before graduating from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a degree in Medieval and Modern Languages.

She took part in the third series of the BBC family-history documentary series Who Do You Think You Are?, in an edition first broadcast on 11 October 2006. She traced her mother's side of the family, the Salmon (originally Solomon) family (owners of J. Lyons and Co.) to Ashkenazi Jewish ancestors in the Netherlands and the Rhineland of Germany. One of these ancestors, Coenraad Sammes aka Joseph, had fled to England to escape a prison sentence following a conviction for theft. Nigella was disappointed not to have Sephardi ancestry in her family.

Career
Lawson wrote a restaurant column for the Spectator and a comment column for The Observer and became deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times in 1986. She became, among other things, a newspaper-reviewer on BBC1 Sunday-morning TV programme Breakfast with Frost. She has also co-hosted, with David Aaronovitch, Channel 4 books discussion programme Booked in the late 1990s, and was an occasional compere of BBC2's press review What the Papers Say, as well as appearing on BBC radio.

Following slots as a culinary sidekick on Nigel Slater's Real Food Show on Channel 4, she has fronted three eponymous TV cookery series broadcast in the UK on the channel. She has had two series of Nigella Bites in 1999-2001, plus a 2001 Christmas special, and Forever Summer with Nigella in 2002, both of which yielded accompanying recipe books. She hosted a daytime TV programme on ITV1 in 2005 titled Nigella, in which celebrity guests joined her in a studio kitchen. The show was not well received by critics and ended after a short run. Besides her own cookbooks, Nigella is featured in Off Duty: The World's Greatest Chefs Cook at Home (2005). A third series called Nigella Feasts, based on her book Feast, debuted on the USA's Food Network in Fall 2006.

Her first biography, Nigella Lawson by Gilly Smith, was published by Andre Deutsch in September 2005, but was remaindered within weeks of release. However, a paperback edition, subtitled "A Very British Dish", was due to be published in the summer of 2006.

More recently in late 2006, Nigella did a show on BBC Two called Nigella's Christmas Kitchen. Two of the episodes secured the second highest ratings for BBC Two, with the third episode becoming the top show on the week that it was aired.

According to UKTV Food Lawson has a personal fortune in excess of £1.7 million. She was voted author of the year at the 2001 British Book Awards. More than 2 million copies of her books have been sold worldwide. She also has a profitable line of kitchenware, called the "Living Kitchen" range available at numerous retailers.

Popular culture
Her style of presentation is often gently mocked by comedians and commentators, particularly in a regularly-occurring impersonation of her in the BBC television comedy series Dead Ringers, who perceive that she plays overtly upon her attractiveness and sexuality as a device to engage viewers of her cookery programmes, despite Lawson's repeated denials that she does so.
She has also been featured on BBC One TV impersonation-sketch show Big Impression, where Ronni Ancona has done impressions of her, which mock and embellish the fact that she uses slightly exotic foods. For example, in one sketch, a recipe requires Phoenix eggs. In her act, Ancona also lampooned Nigella's tendency to present her recipes with over-description.

Personal life
Lawson married journalist John Diamond, whom she met in 1986 when they were both writing for The Sunday Times. They had two children, Cosima and Bruno. Diamond died of throat cancer in 2001. Lawson married art-collector Charles Saatchi in September 2003, and came under some criticism when it was suggested she had started her affair with him before the death of Diamond.

Elizabeth David

Elizabeth David changed our attitudes to food, drawing on Mediterranean influences to enliven the British palate. Jill Norman, pays tribute.
I first met Elizabeth David in the mid Sixties, when as a new commissioning editor at Penguin Books, I was assigned the cookery titles. I went to her house in Chelsea to discuss the paperback edition of Summer Cooking. The tall, elegant woman who opened the door led the way to the kitchen - a comfortable room, cool and light, painted a restful pale blue. Around the walls were old English dressers and a French armoire; a chaise-longue stood in front of French windows. In the middle was a large, scrubbed table, covered with books and papers, a breadboard with an upside-down crock that served as a bread bin, and a bowl of lemons. Our first conversation, sitting at the table and working through the amendments she wanted to make to the book, set the pattern for later encounters.
Elizabeth David started writing in the winter of 1946, when she was in her early thirties. She'd spent the war years in Egypt working for the Ministry of Information, and on her return to a UK stricken by the postwar deprivations, she scribbled down her recollections of the food of the Mediterranean.
At the age of 19, she had been given her first cookery book, The Gentle Art of Cookery by Hilda Leyel, who wrote of her own love affair with the food of the Levant. It was a book that made her receptive to the spiced charcoal-grilled meats, oniony salads and scented sweetmeats of Egypt. "If I had been given a standard Mrs Beeton instead of Mrs Leyel's wonderful recipes," I recall her saying, "I would probably never have learned to cook."
It's lucky for us that she did because, when her first book, Mediterranean Food, appeared in 1950, it was completely different to anything that had gone before. Not only did it describe little-known ingredients and aromatic dishes, but its style was quite new. I, like so many others, was drawn to the grace of her writing and the ease with which she evoked markets and restaurants, or described the forms and textures of food. Cookery writing had previously centred on recipe formulae, but Elizabeth described "the bright vegetables, the basil, the lemons, the apricots, the rice with lamb and currants and pine nuts, the ripe green figs, the white ewe's milk cheeses of Greece, the thick aromatic Turkish coffee, the herb-scented kebabs, the honey and yoghurt for breakfast, the rose-petal jam..." (Mediterranean Food).
She read widely all her life, particularly travel and history, and always put food in context, using literary material to illustrate where dishes came from and what was good about them. She wrote extensively as a journalist, too, and the pieces on French markets she did for Vogue in the Fifties were the first examples of food-travel journalism as we know it today.
From the beginning, Elizabeth's books were perceived as important, serious and well-researched. In the postwar years, when people were beginning to travel again and middle class women found themselves doing their own cooking, her books were crucial in the shift towards the Mediterranean-influenced food that informs the way we eat today.
One of my roles, as commissioning editor, was to test some of Elizabeth's recipes and I particularly enjoyed her salads and vegetable dishes - a favourite was a Turkish dish from Summer Cooking (1955), of aubergines baked with garlic, allspice and tomatoes. These, more than anything, epitomise her legacy: the move to something new and exciting, away from the old English way of boiling veg to death.
Initially, readers had to imagine the pleasures of soupe au pistou, or Circassian chicken with its sauce of nuts, paprika and cayenne. Many of the ingredients she used simply weren't available in Britain, where rationing persisted until 1954. It was only after publication of her first book that Elizabeth realised the frustration she caused by writing of apricots and figs, olives and wild thyme. But the demand she created was instrumental in persuading suppliers to source these foods.
By the late Sixties, when Mediterranean Food was in its second edition, these ingredients were more widely available and her recipes were the height of fashion. Dinner parties were cooked from her books, and a number of enthusiasts even started restaurants, armed with little more than a few pans and Elizabeth's books, which also included Italian Food (1954) and French Provincial Cooking (1960).
Elizabeth's own cooking was unpretentious and honest, based on the best ingredients. She hated "food tormented into irrelevant shapes". She liked to discuss her work as it developed, and so eating in her kitchen, at what she called her 'picnic lunches', was always a delight. She usually provided small dishes of whatever she was working on - Spanish tortilla or pâté perhaps, and always homemade bread and a glass of wine. The piles of books and papers on the table were pushed aside to make room to eat.
Elizabeth wrote slowly and always by hand. When she was happy with a recipe, she would often sign and date copies and give them to friends, a reminder of a dish eaten at lunch a few days earlier. She wrote in the same way she cooked: simply, with respect for tradition, with passion and knowledge. Hers is the best kind of cookery writing; it encourages the reader to make discoveries and interpret dishes, instead of simply follow a set of instructions.
As a friend, she was generous, witty, irreverent and formidably intelligent. She loved conversation and to laugh, and hated fuss and pretension - in food and in life; authenticity and self-effacing authority are the characteristics of her books and we owe to her the roots of our enthusiasm for the flavours of "those blessed lands of sun and sea and olive trees".