Product Description

"[Nigella] brings you into her life and tells you how she thinks about food, how meals come together in her head . . . and how she cooks for family and friends. . . . A breakthrough . . . with hundreds of appealing and accessible recipes."
–Amanda Hesser, The New York Times

"Nigella Lawson serves up irony and sensuality with her comforting recipes . . . the Queen of Come-On Cooking."
–Los Angeles Times

"A chatty, sometimes cheeky, celebration of home-cooked meals."
–USA Today

"Nigella Lawson is, whisks down, Britain’s funniest and sexiest food writer, a raconteur who is delicious whether detailing every step on the way towards a heavenly roast chicken and root vegetable couscous or explaining why ‘cooking is not just about joining the dots’."
–Richard Story, Vogue magazine

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #165288 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-27
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.43" h x 7.74" w x 9.60" l, 2.66 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 496 pages

From Amazon.com
"Cooking is not about just joining the dots, following one recipe slavishly and then moving on to the next," says British food writer Nigella Lawson. "It's about developing an understanding of food, a sense of assurance in the kitchen, about the simple desire to make yourself something to eat." Lawson is not a chef, but "an eater." She writes as if she's conversing with you while beating eggs or mincing garlic in your kitchen. She explains how to make the basics, such as roast chicken, soup stock, various sauces, cake, and ice cream. She teaches you to cook more esoteric dishes, such as grouse, white truffles (mushrooms, not chocolate), and "ham in Coca-Cola." She gives advice for entertaining over the holidays, quick cooking ("the real way to make life easier for yourself: cooking in advance"), cooking for yourself ("you don't have to belong to the drearily narcissistic learn-to-love-yourself school of thought to grasp that it might be a good thing to consider yourself worth cooking for"), and weekend lunches for six to eight people. Don't expect any concessions to health recommendations in the recipes here--Lawson makes liberal and unapologetic use of egg yolks, cream, and butter. There are plenty of recipes, but the best parts of How to Eat are the well-crafted tidbits of wisdom, such as the following:

• "Cook in advance and, if the worse comes to the worst, you can ditch it. No one but you will know that it tasted disgusting, or failed to set, or curdled or whatever."
  

• On the proper English trifle: "When I say proper I mean proper: lots of sponge, lots of jam, lots of custard and lots of cream. This is not a timid construction ... you don't want to end up with a trifle so upmarket it's inappropriately, posturingly elegant. A degree of vulgarity is requisite."
  

• "Too many people cook only when they're giving a dinner party. And it's very hard to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour. How can you learn to feel at ease around food, relaxed about cooking, if every time you go into the kitchen it's to cook at competition level?"
  

--Joan Price

Review
"Her prose is as nourishing as her recipes — it should please mere readers, serious cooks and happy omnivores."
—Salman Rushdie

"I love Nigella Lawson's writing and I love her recipes."
—Delia Smith

"One of the best and most influential of British food writers — bound to become a staple cookbook for a whole generation."
—Ruth Rogers, The River Cafe Cook Book

"Cerebral and scintillating advice — peppered with wit."
—Sunday Times

"A gloriously sensual wander through the possibilities of food. The recipes read more like seduction than instruction."
—Independent

Daily Mail
‘The one book you have to buy this year.’