''How to Eat'' is a 1998 book of

English cuisine English cuisine encompasses the cooking styles, traditions and recipes associated with England. It has distinctive attributes of its own, but also shares much with wider British cuisine, partly through the importation of ingredients and ideas ...

by the celebrity cook

Nigella Lawson Nigella Lucy Lawson (born 6 January 1960) is an English food writer and television cook. She attended Godolphin and Latymer School, London. After graduating from the University of Oxford, where she was a member of Lady Margaret Hall, Lawson ...

.Jones, Chris
Nigella Lawson: A sweet and sour life

BBC News BBC News is an operational business division of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) responsible for the gathering and broadcasting of news and current affairs in the UK and around the world. The department is the world's largest broadca ...

, 18 May 2001; retrieved 29 September 2007. It features culinary tips on preparation and saving time,Dolce, Jo
England's It Girl
''

Gourmet Gourmet (, ) is a cultural idea associated with the culinary arts of fine food and drink, or haute cuisine, which is characterized by refined, even elaborate preparations and presentations of aesthetically balanced meals of several contrasting, of ...

'', 2001; retrieved 31 January 2008. and sold 300,000 copies in Britain.Hirschberg, Lynn
Hot Dish
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', 18 November 2001; retrieved 29 September 2007. It was praised by critics as a valuable guide to cooking.

Book

The book is divided into themed chapters, such as cooking for "One or Two". Most of each chapter consists of recipes, but the chapters begin with a few pages of general advice on the theme, such as that while cooking for one may feel " onanistic", "it might be a good thing to consider yourself worth cooking for." The ingredients and quantities are tabulated in red boldface type. The recipe itself is given as a paragraph of instructions in light type. The techniques used are not rigidly traditional: in her recipe for

Ratatouille Ratatouille ( , ), oc, ratatolha , is a French Provençal dish of stewed vegetables which originated in Nice, and is sometimes referred to as ''ratatouille niçoise'' (). Recipes and cooking times differ widely, but common ingredients include ...

, introduced to Britain by

Elizabeth David Elizabeth David CBE (born Elizabeth Gwynne, 26 December 1913 – 22 May 1992) was a British cookery writer. In the mid-20th century she strongly influenced the revitalisation of home cookery in her native country and beyond with articles and bo ...

, Lawson admits that she is departing from David's prescriptions, but states that this does not seem to make much difference as she does not get a "soggy mush" by skipping the hour spent salting the

aubergine Eggplant ( US, Canada), aubergine ( UK, Ireland) or brinjal (Indian subcontinent, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa) is a plant species in the nightshade family Solanaceae. ''Solanum melongena'' is grown worldwide for its edible fruit. Mos ...

and

courgette The zucchini (; plural: zucchini or zucchinis), courgette (; plural: courgettes) or baby marrow (''Cucurbita pepo'') is a summer squash, a vining herbaceous plant whose fruit are harvested when their immature seeds and epicarp (rind) are stil ...

s, but she explains the David method in an aside, just in case anyone want to try it.

Reception

In her chapter ''Consuming Nigella'' in ''Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture'', Lise Shapiro Sanders observes that Lawson's early books including ''How to Eat'' and ''How to Be a Domestic Goddess'' (2001) "emphasize cooking and eating as sites of pleasure for women." Sanders explains that the pleasure is both "authentic" and "ironic, self-consciously reworking a mid-twentieth-century ideology of domestic femininity." In particular, baking gives Lawson "access to a fantasy of femininity that, instead of dooming women to lives of 'domestic drudgery', enables the performance of a 'weekend alter ego winning adoring glances and endless approbation from anyone who has the good fortune to eat in her kitchen'". Sanders notes Lawson's disclaimer in her preface that "I have nothing to declare but my greed (page xv)". She interprets Lawson as meaning to remind readers of "the joys of giving in to temptation". She notes from a passage by

Simon Hoggart Simon David Hoggart (26 May 1946 – 5 January 2014) was an English journalist and broadcaster. He wrote on politics for ''The Guardian'', and on wine for ''The Spectator''. Until 2006 he presented ''The News Quiz'' on BBC Radio 4. His journali ...

in ''

The Spectator ''The Spectator'' is a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world. It is owned by Frederick Barclay, who also owns ''The ...

'' (about ''Nigella Bites'') that Lawson "becomes an object of desire, ready-made for the consumption of the heterosexual male audience", complete with

double entendre A double entendre (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, of which one is typically obvious, whereas the other often conveys a message that would be too socially ...

s and sexually suggestive language, both of which Sanders calls trademarks of Lawson's style. ''

The Sunday Telegraph ''The Sunday Telegraph'' is a British broadsheet newspaper, founded in February 1961 and published by the Telegraph Media Group, a division of Press Holdings. It is the sister paper of ''The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', kn ...

'' called the book "the most valuable culinary guide published this decade." Tony Buchsbaum, writing in the ''January Magazine'', calls ''How to Eat'' "almost biblical, with countless recipes for just about anything one could name. It was all black ink on white pages, hardly the luxuriously art-directed volumes that would follow: How To Be a Domestic Goddess, Nigella Bites, Forever Summer..."

References

External links

List of recipes in ''How to Eat'' on nigella.com
{{English cuisine 1998 non-fiction books English cuisine Cookbooks Chatto & Windus books