Three years ago, on her first visit to Australia, Nigella was having breakfast at Earth Food Store in Bondi, as she did every day, when she was approached by a good-looking young man.
“Blue-eyed and dark-haired,” she says. “He came up to me shyly and said, ‘I spoke to my father last night and apparently you are a cousin of mine’. “I phoned up my father in London and he said, ‘That must be from my great-aunt, Katie, who fell in love with an Australian and went to Perth.’ I knew nothing about her. Sadly, her husband was run over by a tram very early on, but she adopted that Aussie can-do attitude, raised her children single-handedly and moved to Melbourne. She was his great-great-grandmother! So it was quite nice.
“As life happens, you’re just going somewhere for breakfast and you meet a relative.” She grins. “He sent me an email the other day, saying, ‘I told you that you look really like my sister’, and sent a picture. And I do actually!”
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Nigella’s latest best-selling book, Kitchen, which accompanies her hit TV series, Nigella’s Kitchen, is subtitled Recipes From The Heart Of The Home. And for the woman who glories in the joys of food, cooking for other people is her way of nurturing.
“I’m a feeder,” Nigella admits. “I can’t help it. Someone only has to come to mend the boiler and they leave with something wrapped in tin foil!”
So it’s an irony that, at home, this instinct is rather thwarted. Her husband, Charles Saatchi, the multi-millionaire art collector, does not eat her food. Initially, he preferred to graze on cereal, biscuits and ice-cream, but three years ago, lost a lot of weight on a diet of his own devising — eating only nine eggs a day — which makes his wife’s cooking skills redundant.
“But I never said cooking should be done to please men,” she says, laughing. “I was once asked on Dutch television if it’s true that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” She laughs again. “I said, ‘Oh, no — one has to aim much lower!’ “
Nigella cooks lunch each day for women who work with her and supper for the children — Mimi (Cosima), 17, and Bruno, 14, from her first marriage to the late John Diamond, and her step-daughter Phoebe, 16.
“The number of things I can cook that all three like is pretty small. There’s always something they don’t like.”
The children do cook. “Mimi does a great spaghetti carbonara and Bruno likes a bit of a stir-fry. Mimi had a friend over and cooked from my Express book, which was sweet. But they don’t wash up!” She shrugs.
I tell her that she seems to be comfortable within herself. “Of course, I have moments of doubt,” she says. “All women have times thinking, ‘My God, I can’t go out, my hips are so big today!’ But there’s a range that we’re comfortable within and I don’t like it when I go above that.
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“I’ve no desire to go below it. If I lost 40lbs [18kg], I would age 10 years straightaway. That’s my excuse!” she jokes.
“But you know women find it very easy to persecute themselves over their weight and whenever I’ve said, ‘I ought to lose a bit of weight’, I can guarantee I’ll put it on. I love food and I love cooking, so therefore, I could never deprive myself.”
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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